Though I can’t take credit for the gorgeousness–that’s all Adrienne Adair and Lisa Albrecht.

But I can appreciate the gorgeousness.  And so can you!

Just come visit me over there and see all the fun new stuff, like:

•fantastic new buttons for your website or blog!

•audio recordings of me reading (…how long has it been since you were read-to?)

•a fun new author photo by Karen Walrond

•a new Q&A with me from Random House about my new book, Get Lucky

And tons of other stuff!  Come visit and explore!

And be sure to:

•sign up for updates (I don’t want to lose you!) at www.katherinecenter.com

•join the Facebook fan page (My personal FB page is about to get quiet, but the fan page is about to get loud!)

•follow me on Twitter

•tell everyone you’ve ever met about all the goodness going on at the new site!  We’re adding great new stuff all the time.

Many thanks!

Much love!!

Kite flying.

Swing sets.

Climbing backwards up the slide.

Picking every flower that dares to blossom.

And miniature fruit kebabs on toothpicks.

In another couple of months, it’ll be so hot that “outside” will be something we only want to see through the window.  But right now, the sun is out, the breeze is blowing, and every single minute seems like a miracle.

You’ll be there, right?  Even if you’re in New York, say, or Canada?  Git yourself down here and let’s kick this thing off right!

(And PS: You can pre-0rder books from Brazos and I’ll sign them beforehand so you don’t have to wait in line!)

Get Lucky comes out in less than a month!

(And if you live in Houston, save the date for Saturday, April 10, 5:30-7:30: A cocktail-hour book launch party at Brazos Bookstore!)

Here’s how it begins:

GET LUCKY: A Novel — Chapter 1

First:  I got fired.  For emailing a website with hundreds of pictures of breasts to every single person in our company.  Even the CEO and chairman of the board. Even the summer interns.

Looking back, I may have been ready to leave my job.  I’d like to give myself the benefit of the doubt.  Sometimes the crazy things I do are actually very sensible.  And sometimes, of course, they’re just crazy.

I knew the company had just lost a high-profile sexual harassment lawsuit for some very big money.  I knew we were now enforcing our zero-tolerance policy.  I knew somebody somewhere in the chain of command was looking to make an example.  But I didn’t think about all that at the time.  Here’s another thing I didn’t think about: I’d just nailed the ad campaign of a lifetime, and I was finally about to get promoted.

In my defense, it wasn’t like these people had never seen a breast before.  In fact, our whole agency had been awash in them for months.  We’d just finished a national campaign for a major bra
company, and I’d led the creative team.  I’d even come up with the concept—ads directing women to do all sorts of crazy things with their chests while wearing one of these bras.

“Dip ‘em,” one ad read, while our push-up-clad model leaned into a swimming pool, dunking her boobs in the water.  “Scoop ‘em,” read another, while she pushed her boobs up toward her chin with two enormous ice cream cones.  “Lauch ‘em,” ordered a third, as she arched her back up to the sky. And on and on: “Smack ‘em,” “Mug ‘em,” “Wash ‘em,” “Flush ‘em,” “Flash ‘em,” “Love ‘em,” “Lick ‘em,” “Leave ‘em.”

I’d spent innumerable hours with those boobs—weekends, nights—working my butt off to turn them into the most famous cleavage in America.  Which, by January, they’d become.  No small feat.

The model for the campaign was nineteen years old and profoundly anorexic with the most enormous augmented chest you can imagine.  I didn’t even know her name, actually. We just called her “the Tits.”  She was a petulant teen who spent all her time between shots wearing earbuds and drinking lattes and then asking people for gum.  The question “Do you have any gum?” will forever take me back to that summer.

She was a pretty girl, though the freckles, bumpy nose, and squinty eyes would have required retouching.  If we’d used her face.  In the end, we zoomed in so close that her face didn’t even come into the shots.  When it came to bras, who needed a face?

That’s really how I used to think.  I’m not exaggerating at all.

If I sound crass here, that’s because I was.  If I sound unlikable, that’s probably true, too.  I was, at this point in my life, after six years in advertising, a person who needed a serious spanking from the universe.

And don’t worry.  I was about to get it.

I was proud of the ads.  They were saturated with color, eye-catching, naughty, and delightful.  Everybody was ecstatic, and I was strutting around the office like a diva. The Boob Diva.  That was me.

But something was off. Being the Boob Diva wasn’t as great as I’d expected.  I’d been so underappreciated at that job for so long that when appreciation finally came, it felt false.  Maybe I’d built up too many expectations.  Maybe all the pep talks I’d given myself about my coworkers being idiots were finally kicking in.  Or maybe external validation is always a little disappointing, no matter what.

The books I’d been reading weren’t helping, either. I had a whole stack by my bed that chronicled the ways advertising was making us all miserable.  Who knows why I kept buying them?  It’s a chicken-egg question.  Did I hate my job because I was reading the books?  Or was I reading the books because I hated my job?  Either way, I couldn’t get around what they had to say:  That an economy based on buying stuff needed to keep us all dissatisfied and miserable, needed to keep us focused on what we didn’t have instead of what we did, and needed to convince us that things like happiness and peace and beauty could be bought.

Not the greatest water cooler chitchat.

Later, it would occur to me to wonder if advertising in general was screwing over the entire world or if my firm in particular was screwing over just me.  I certainly wasn’t paid enough.  Or recognized enough.  Or appreciated. But questions like that are a long time in the making.  First, I had to have a little thing we might call a breakdown. Or an epiphany.  Neither of which was my intention.

Here’s what happened, to the best of my recollection:  The night before our big final presentation, my sister happened to send me an email link with the subject line “Boob-a-palooza!”  Because I was too wired about the next day to go to bed, I clicked on it.  And there, I found miles and miles of mug shots of anonymous breasts belonging to real women. No faces, no bodies, just breasts.  Breasts au naturel. Breasts in the wild. Breasts as Mother Nature intended.

My sister just thought it was funny.  But I had a different reaction:  I could not stop scrolling through.  I’d seen a lot of breasts on TV and in movies and on magazine covers in my life.  Who hasn’t? But I’d never seen anything like these real things.  The variety was spellbinding.  High ones, low ones, flat ones, full ones.  Close together, far apart.  Lopsided.  Droopy.  Walleyed.  Googly-eyed.  Water balloons.  Bags of sand.  Jellyfish.  Cactuses.  Bananas, prunes, and pickles. And this was the eighteen-to-thirty-two-year-old category. These were boobs in their prime.

Under each photo there was a caption written by the owner of the breasts.  And each caption read something like this: “These are my breasts. They’re pretty droopy (or lopsided or small or dimpled or ugly or embarrassing or pickle-shaped).  Wish I could fix them.”  The comments ranged from vehement hatred to mild distaste, but nobody, absolutely nobody, said:  “Here are my boobs. Aren’t they great? I find them delightful, and hallelujah!”  Nobody.

I was slated to hit the office at nine the next morning in my stilettos to present the “Boob ‘em!” campaign to everybody who mattered.  But instead of getting to bed early, as I’d planned, I stayed up until three in the morning browsing the photos.  Something about the
realness of the pictures on the site underscored the fakeness of the boobs in our ads.  Something about the dignity of the real things made our hyped-up things seem ridiculous.  The whole campaign suddenly seemed brash and loud and stupid and just plain rude in a way that I couldn’t ignore.  How had I never thought about this before?  We were about to put a picture of a woman’s cleavage getting branded on every bus in America, for Pete’s sake.

I thought about all the normal women who had taken off their bras for the cameras.  I thought about the bravery of stepping forward with your own imperfections to help others feel better about theirs.  And all at once I felt ashamed of being part of the problem. I scanned the site until the images and the words bouncing in my brain became a cacophony of women’s dissatisfaction and despair, building louder and louder to a crescendo that I could not shush.  That is, until four a.m., when I clicked Forward on my sister’s email, selected the company-wide distribution list, and hit Send.

I sat back and nodded a little so-there nod.

Then, in the quiet that followed, I realized what I’d done, sat straight up, choked in a little breath of panic, and started looking for a way to unsend that email.  Knowing all the while that there wasn’t one.  That’s the truth about emails:  You can’t take them back.

In effect, I fired myself. Though the guy who actually did the firing—discreetly and several hours after our slam-dunk presentation—was a VP named J.J. who everybody called “Kid Dy-no-mite.”  Even though he wasn’t dynamite at all, just another ad guy at Marston & Minx.  A guy I’d started with six years earlier.  A guy who’d been promoted over me based on work we’d done together.  A guy I’d slept with back in the beginning until he called me a workaholic and broke things off.  Now he was married to a girl who wore pink Bermuda shorts when she brought him lunches in a picnic basket at the office.  But I guess I was even less dy-no-mite than he was, because I wasn’t married to anyone, nobody ever brought me lunches, and now I was out of a job.

J.J. said, “I’m sure you know that email was inappropriate.”

“Was it?” I said.

He gave a short sigh.  “People were pretty offended. Yeah.”

We were standing in the now-empty meeting room where our “Boob ‘em!” campaign would later win promotions for seven people on our team.  We were surrounded by enormous blowups of bra-clad breasts in every direction.  Breasts larger than our bodies, in full color.  Valleys of cleavage the size of La-Z-Boys.  The “Steer ‘em” ad showed boobs wrapped in barbed wire.  “Munch ‘em” showed them resting on a giant sub sandwich.  And “Whip ‘em” had a close-up of a whip just before impact.

“J.J.,” I said. “Look around.”

He looked around.

I said, “What does stuff like this do to real women?”

“Real women?” he said, cocking his head.  “Real women are overrated.”

Then he gave me a flirty smile, patted me on the shoulder, and told me the case was closed.  It was lunchtime.  He had a meeting. “Be graceful about it,” he advised as we headed out.  “And if you upload your own photo to that site,” he opened the door with one hand and pressed the small of my back with the other, “shoot me an email.”  Then he added, “You’d totally win that contest.”

“It’s not a contest,” I said.

“Everything’s a contest,” he told me, and then he walked away.

And I’m not really a big vacationer.  We go to visit family every summer, but we don’t usually take vacations just for fun.  I guess we have enough fun around our own house that we don’t usually go seeking it out.

But once the offer was out there, I got to thinking that my kids would probably really, really love it.   And so I just went ahead and said yes.

So, on Saturday, we drove up to Dallas.   And, after snagging a photo of my toes, I gave my kids our snapshot camera to take photos of the trip.  When I got the camera back, I had about a hundred pictures of the car floor, the kids’ sneakers, and the back of my head.  But mixed in among them were a few beauties:

And the kids did really, really love the trip.  And it made me so happy to see them so happy.  And taking a family vacation like that–just the four of us, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back with crayons–felt like another official stamp in the parent passport.  I really am a grown-up now. I’ve made it around to the other side of the circle.  Whatever I saw when I looked at the back of my mother’s head from the back seat of our station wagon, my kids now see when they look at me.  Whatever she meant to me then I now mean to someone else.  Which is a tremendous and terrifying honor, when I stop to think about it.  And also, more than anything, a blessing.

Except that here I am scanning his baby photos.  Which means at some point, he must have been four.

The same age my son is now.  And he must have played the same little-boy games and built forts and run around.  My dad at this age actually looks a lot like my son.  And the truth is, even though my dad has drawers full of family photos that he’s collected, I have not seen that many of them.  It never really occurred to me to look at childhood photos of my dad.  Because he never had a childhood.  Because he has always been 45 years old.

Like he is here:

Circa 1983.  My mom, my two sisters, my dad, and me.  I’m the supermodel in the sailor hat and braces.

I’ve seen this photo a thousand times.  It’s one of those favorites that make it into frames and holiday cards.  But it’s been a while since I looked at it.  And looking now, in this context, makes me see it differently.  I can’t help but feel so sympathetic to all these people–these younger versions of ourselves.  I know so much that they don’t know: All the things that are waiting for them, and what those things will mean, and how they will linger or be forgotten.  I know what will happen next to these people. And for that reason, more than anything else, the only thing my eyes can feel when they rest on this photo tonight is a fierce and inexplicable tenderness.

But I made it.  And it was so good in so many ways.

Something magical happens when you get so many amazing people in one place.  And watching my video up on the big screen at the opening of the conference was pretty magical for me, too.

I love like crazy the theme of Mom 2.o this year:  What You’re Doing Matters.  Partly because I wrote it (and felt so honored that the Mom 2.0 Girls chose it as a theme), and partly because I SO believe it. And seeing the art show, with all those ordinary mom moments from daily life in a place of honor up on a wall in a gallery — it was powerful stuff for me.

Here’s the art I contributed:

I Mod-Podged old dictionary pages on a canvas and then wrote the words with a paintbrush and black acrylic.  It’ll be sold at the Mom 2.o online art auction (proceeds go to Haiti), and I’ll post the link when I have it.

By the way, here’s the piece of art I meant to contribute to the Mom 2.0 art show:

But after I finished it, I was kinda looking at it, thinking, “Not bad!” — when I noticed that little upside-down bird above “brave.”  And, yep:  Turns out I painted the words on an upside-down canvas.  Oops.

But I also contributed some other art!  I painted on the women who came to the art show.  Anybody who wanted one got a word — or several — on her body.  Here’s the beautiful Laurie Smithwick‘s arm:

All to say, it was a heck of a weekend.  And that — really and truly — is not even the half of it.

And I am a champion worrier.   I can worry you under the table.  You don’t know what worrying is until you’ve met me.  If I could take my worrying to the Olympics, I’d bring home the gold, baby.  I’d have my own line of sneakers.

Though, sadly, of course, I cannot take my worrying to the olympics.  But I can take it–and my two stuffed-up children–into our bathroom with a box of tissues, run the shower, and call it a “sweat lodge.”  Which is what we did today.

And I can let that worry bring my blessings into sharp focus.  And I can give thanks for my little ones and their beautiful hands.  And I can promise myself, again and again, not to take even one single second for granted.

It’s my first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, in Czech.

It is indescribably bizarre to flip through a book that YOU wrote–and not be able to read a word.  Not even guess at what the words might sound like.

The title in Czech translates to “Everything Bad Is Good For Something.”  Which I love like crazy and I’m going to print up on a bumper sticker.

And one last thing: there’s an obese one-eye cat in the story named Dr. Blandon, and they put him on the back cover!  Which is just about as good as it gets.

This one’s mine.

It’s a heart I made for my daughter on a day when she was performing in an assembly at school, but I wasn’t allowed to be there.  (It was Grandparents’ Day!  Only room for grandparents!).  I so wanted to be there!  And I was far more nervous than she was at the prospect of her reciting a memorized paragraph in front of a giant auditorium.  But it made me feel better to make this and know that she had it with her.

She , of course, did great at the assembly.  As is so often the case with mothering, I worried over nothing.  But she still keeps this heart in her backpack, and  takes it with her to school every day.  And I’m so glad she has it.

And here it is!

Many thanks to Shutter Sisters for allowing me to use photos from the site.  And many thanks to the amazing photographers:  Karen Walrond, Jenny Lawson, Tracey Clark, Sarah Ji, Kristin Zecchinelli, Irene Nam, and Meredith Winn.

And here is the essay that I wrote for the video:

WHAT I WOULD TELL HER:  (If I knew what to say.)

You are a miracle.

And I have to love you this fiercely:  So that you can feel it even after you leave for school, or even while you are asleep, or even after your childhood becomes a memory.

You’ll forget all this when you grow up.  But it’s okay.

Being a mother means having your heart broken.

And it means loving and losing and falling apart and coming back together.

And it’s the best there is.  And also, sometimes, the worst.

Sometimes you won’t have anyone to talk to.

Sometimes you’ll wonder if you’ve forgotten who you are.

But you must remember this:  What you’re doing matters.

And you have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.

The truth is, being a woman is a gift.  Tenderness is a gift.  Intimacy is a gift.  And nurturing the good in this world is a nothing short of a privilege.

That’s why I have to love you this way.  So I can give what I have to you.  So that you can carry it in your body and pass it on.

I have watched you sleep.  I’ve kissed you a million times.  And I know something that you don’t, yet:

You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.

And my greatest hope for you, sweet child, is that I can teach you how to write a good one.

I’ve paced around its shores on trips to the ranch my whole life, and now we take our kids there and they do the same thing.  Its amazing to watch history repeat itself like that, and I’m happy to report that fossil-searching, stick-throwing, rock-skipping, shell-finding, mud-smearing, dam-building, and poking at things with sticks are all still going strong.

It’s been wet in Texas lately, and I found tons of animal tracks last time we were there.  Coyote, for example:

And racoon.  I love how much their paws look like hands.

And deer. I’m pretty sure.

And some crazily huge bird with stick-feet bigger than my son’s hands:

And somehow looking at those tracks got me thinking about all tracks I myself have left on this very beach–in Keds and cowgirl ropers and Adidas.  And then suddenly I was thinking about my grandparents, and all the years that have passed since they walked on this beach with us, and how much I miss them, and how much I would love it if they could come back, even just for an hour, and visit us and meet my kids.  It seems impossible to me that their lives didn’t overlap.  Especially when my daughter’s eyes are the exact  blue that my grandfather’s were, and my son’s eyes are the exact buttery brown of my grandmother’s.  How could they be connected so profoundly and never have even met?

But I guess that’s how it is with the past.  It really doesn’t leave enough behind.

My friend Laura has organized an art show during the conference that will try to honor the amazing things that women are doing online–and the way that having a public place that we can access from our private lives helps moms reach out and tell their stories.  And how women telling the truth about their lives can make us all better, wiser, more compassionate people–and make the world a better place.

Laura’s asked me to make a video essay about it that’ll play at the show.

This is the stuff of great conversations–hours spent over coffee chipping away at why it’s so powerful to hear other women’s stories and to tell your own.  For the video, I’ll have about 2 minutes.

But the images, from Shutter Sisters, are going to be gorgeous.  And I will certainly try like heck to do them justice.

I’ve been watching this new story unfold in little pieces in my head for a long time.  I know a lot already about where it’s going in a broad way (though the details are always one surprise after another).  But it’s pretty thrilling to see it all actually happen.  Does that make sense? It’s one thing to know a character goes for a walk.  But it’s another to actually write the scene and BE THERE.

Here are some photos of the writing I’ve been doing over the break.  Just for fun.

This is my process:  I type the story, then print it out and carry it in a binder like precious cargo wherever I go.  Then, as I re-read, it sparks other ideas in my head, and I write them all over the margins and on the backs of pages.

I edit things out and add things in at the same time.  Then, after a bit, I type all the changes in and print it out again fresh.  I love the pages when they are newly-printed and pristine.  But I love them even more when they are scrawled and scribbled all over.

Usually I’ll use plain-old vinyl binders in black or white. But, for this one, I gave in to my love of pretty office products and bought a flowery binder at Target.  At least, until the story gets too long to fit!