Leslie Gould

About Leslie Gould

Welcome!

"Don't you just love words?" a college English professor asked me years ago. She was referring to the sounds, the cadence, and the beat of good writing. I agreed. But what I love most about literature is the emotions words recreate. My fiction is about those emotions--the feelings that flow from our relationships with our families, our friends, and our God.

I hope you'll enjoy reading my novels, Scrap Everything, Garden of Dreams and Beyond the Blue, as much as I treasured sorting and capturing the emotions and words to write them. Please send me an e-mail. I would love to hear from you.

Fun Video

This hilarious video is for all writers and anyone else who can't stop procrastinating:

(Good job ladies. You all rock!)

A Thousand Splendid Suns

We’ve been battling the flu at our house, yes, the dreaded H1N1 virus. The good thing about being a writer is that I never have to miss a day of work. (The bad thing? I never have to miss a day of work.) On several days during the last two weeks I’ve found myself hanging out with my youngest, watching reality TV shows, and writing on my laptop. Amazingly, I've met my word count goal for those days. (I’ve reminded my youngest that the older kids were only allowed to watch PPS when they were home sick…not that we had cable back then. Oh, the benefits of being the caboose.)

I’ve also done a little bit of reading, including devouring A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini in one day. I could not put the novel down, even as I was stirring chicken noodle soup for dinner. Like The Kite Runner, Hosseini's first novel, this too is an amazing story. The structure is clean and defined and Hosseini develops the characters scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter. This story, also like The Kite Runner, covers decades and provides a survey of the history of modern day Afghanistan.

Women are the subject of A Thousand Splendid Suns, and when I finished the last sentence I had two conflicting thoughts. The first: How can the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan make a lasting difference? The second: How can it not make a lasting difference? Please let there be hope for these women…for these children…for these men.

If you haven’t read A Thousand Splendid Suns I recommend it. Hosseini is a master storyteller. (And thank you to our friend Diana for loaning it to me. Peter enjoyed it too. He read it first and then handed it to me the second he was done.)

Heartbreaking Stories

There are two heartbreaking adoption stories in the news today. Sixteen people in Vietnam are on trial for allegedly selling more than 250 babies for foreign adoption. Read the whole story.

There is still a moratorium on adoption between Vietnam and the U.S. because of this sort of thing. It’s absolutely gutting for the Vietnamese families—and for the American families too. What a horribly heavy burden to wonder if the child you adopted in good faith was stolen.

The other story is out of China where parents are coming forward, telling stories of their babies taken, sometimes by government officials. Often the parents didn’t realize what the officials were doing was illegal and felt they had no choice.

There’s a telling quote included in this article by Ina Hut, who recently resigned from the Netherlands’ largest adoption agency. She says: “In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing, because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market, and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money.”

Greed corrupts--and is especially tragic when children are involved.

How it was handled in the movie

I went and saw "The Time Traveler's Wife" with my oldest daughter on Saturday night. (Hubby and youngest daughter went to the OSU football game along with two of her uncles. Way fun.)

Anyway, I was waiting to see if "fake" and "pretend" would be included in the dialogue when the subject of adoption came up. They weren't. Instead Clare said she didn't want to adopt, she wanted to do something "normal."

"Normal" is a little better than "pretend" and "fake." But does that mean that adoption is abnormal? Hardly. I think "ordinary" would have been a better word--but then birthing a baby, although common, hardly feels "ordinary" when you're doing it.

(And I can also vouch that adopting doesn't feel "fake," "pretend," or "abnormal.")

Did you know that Brad Pitt produced the film? I thought that was interesting, being the "serial adopter" that he is (speaking of terms that I detest!).

Okay, that's probably enough of my negativity toward adoption references. I think I'll stick with the positive comments from now on.

A Cool Adoption Quote

Following is one of my favorite responses concerning adoption. (I'm trying to balance out my collection of negative quotes...)

Here it is:

"As mysterious and magical as it is to have a baby you gave birth to, I have that exact same thing with Daisy," says Ryan. "I feel like we made some agreement, long ago and far away, to meet in the way we did."
Meg Ryan, on adopting her daughter

FAKE? PRETENDING? Say what?

Here's another entry from my collection of "comments about adoption." This one is from The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the novel. The construction is amazing and so is the writing. But there is this little interaction on page 350 that jabbed me--hard. I'm still thinking "Ouch!" Yes, it’s fiction. Yes, it's a character's reaction. Still, it bugs me.

Here it is:

“Let’s adopt.” I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, months. It seems like a brilliant escape route: we will have a baby. It will be healthy. Clare will be healthy. We will be happy. It is the obvious answer.

Clare says, “But that would be fake. It would be pretending.”

(Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife, p. 350)

Commencement

I walked in the PSU summer commencement on Saturday. Yeah. Makes getting that MFA in Creative Writing feel that much more real.

Peter, the kids, my nephew Aaron, and my brother Kelvin all went to watch. Peter got a photo of me walking across the stage. All that's visible is my forehead and the top of my glasses. Here it is:

None of them actually saw me graduate, but they all cheered when they heard my name. Here's a group photo taken after the ceremony:

And a family photo:

I think the kids were proud. I told them I can't wait to sit through all of their graduations... Speaking of, Kelvin has sat through all three of my commencements--high school, college, and now grad school. He is one brother extraordinaire.

It was a very fun experience and in all of the to-walk-or-not-to-walk, I'm glad I did. The rest of the weekend was great too--lots of time with family and friends.

Commencement

I walked in the PSU summer commencement on Saturday. Yeah. Makes getting that MFA in Creative Writing feel that much more real.

Peter, the kids, my nephew Aaron, and my brother Kelvin all went to watch. Peter got a photo of me walking across the stage. All that's visible is my forehead and the top of my glasses. Here it is:

None of them actually saw me graduate, but they all cheered when they heard my name. Here's a group photo taken after the ceremony:

And a family photo:

I think the kids were proud. I told them I can't wait to sit through all of their graduations... Speaking of, Kelvin has sat through all three of my commencements--high school, college, and now grad school. He is one brother extraordinaire.

It was a very fun experience and in all of the to-walk-or-not-to-walk, I'm glad I did. The rest of the weekend was great too--lots of time with family and friends.

Addressing Adoption

I’ve started a collection of stupid things I read concerning adoption. I came across a doozy today in an article that appeared in Parade Magazine about Brad Pitt. Since when are children in the same family listed separately, the bio kids first and then the adopted kids? Isn’t it traditional to list children from oldest to youngest?

Here’s the paragraph:

“Pitt was a big star before he met actress Angelina Jolie on the set of 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But as a couple, they are an international phenomenon—photographed, admired, besieged. Their daughter Shiloh was born in 2006. Last year they had twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox. They also have three adopted children: Maddox, 8, Pax, 5, and Zahara, 4.” (“Inside the Private World of Brad Pitt,” by Dotson Rader, Parade Magazine, August 9, 2009, p. 4.)

Does this sort of thing bother you? Have you read other statements or comments that minimize the positions of adopted people? If so, please share. I’d like to explore this further.

Recommendation

One of the best books that I've read recently is The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss. I heard Gloss read a passage from the novel in May at PSU, and the scene she chose brought tears to my eyes. The novel is about a young woman breaking horses in 1917 in Eastern Oregon. Gloss's voice is pitch-perfect throughout the story. It reminded me of my grandfather's tone when he told old stories about being a cowboy on the high desert--all matter of fact with no drama. You had to really listen because his voice didn't change, even when someone got shot. But his stories were so good you couldn't help but listen. (My grandfather was 17 in 1917--probably another reason I really enjoyed the novel.) Ultimately The Hearts of Horses is a story about finding one's self within a community--and finding love along the way. It's a beautiful story.