Advice
by Ted Kooser

We go out of our way to get home,
getting lost in a rack of old clothing,
fainting in stairwells,
our pulses fluttering like moths.
We will always be
leaving our loves like old stoves
in abandoned apartments. Early in life
there are signals of how it will be—
we throw up the window one spring
and the window weights break from their ropes
and fall deep in the wall.

"Advice" from Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser, © 1985. Aired by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist Zadie Smith (books by this author), born in London (1975). She was raised in a working-class neighborhood in North West London by her Jamaican mother and British father. She dreamed of tap dancing with Gene Kelly or Vincent Minnelli, and she read constantly. She said: "If the sun was out, I stayed in; if there was a barbecue, I was in the library; while the rest of my generation embraced the sociality of Ecstacy, I was encased in marijuana, the drug of the solitary. [...] By the time I arrived at college I had been in no countries, had no jobs, participated in no political groups, had no lovers. In short, I was perfectly equipped to write the kind of fiction I did write: saturated by other books; touched by the world, but only vicariously."

During college, she wrote a handful of short stories, but they always ended up too long, and she didn't like the idea of writing a novella. So she decided to expand one into a full novel. She said: "I wanted to write a book about a man who gets through the century in a good way. He lives a good life by accident." She wrote about 100 pages of the book and decided to send it off to a publisher; a friend suggested she find herself an agent first, and before long, she had a huge advance for the novel — reportedly $400,000. She graduated from college and published White Teeth in 2000. It was a sensation: a best-seller, a critical success, and an award-winner. Smith was just 24 years old. One of the few negative reviews of it was written anonymously by Smith herself, who wrote in the literary magazine Butterfly: "This kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford, et al.), she would just stay still and shut up. White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing 10-year-old."

She has published six novels since then, including her most recent, Grand Union Stories (2018).

It's the birthday of the poet Sylvia Plath (books by this author), born in Boston, Massachusetts (1932). She was a straight-A student, got into Smith on a scholarship, and won all the prizes for writing contests.

She went to England on a Fulbright scholarship, and it was there that she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes. They had two children and separated in 1962. Plath died by suicide in 1963.

Many people learned about Plath only after her death, reading her poems in obituaries and news stories. In the next couple of years, her poems appeared regularly in magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. In 1965, a collection of poems called Ariel was published posthumously and received major reviews in all the big papers and magazines. In Britain, Ariel sold 15,000 copies in its first 10 months, and Plath's popularity continued to rise. The Bell Jar was finally published in the United States and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for six months.

Sylvia Plath wrote: "Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

Today is the birthday of the 26th president of the United States: Theodore Roosevelt Jr.(books by this author), born in New York City on this date in 1858. He was born into privilege, but he was a sickly child and suffered from asthma, so he spent much of his time indoors. When his doctors discovered he had a weak heart, they advised him to live a quiet life and take some kind of a desk job that wouldn't prove too strenuous or stressful. But he dreamed of becoming a naturalist and an adventurer, and by the time he was a teenager, he had developed a program of rigorous exercise, including boxing and lifting weights.

He worked hard at Harvard and went on to study law at Columbia, but he grew impatient and left his studies in favor of politics, where he enjoyed many early successes. But on Valentine's Day, 1884, both his mother and his wife, Alice, died. Devastated, Roosevelt left behind the world of politics — and his baby daughter — to become a cattle rancher in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory. It would be two years before he returned to the New York political scene.

His political bent was progressive: he fought monopolies, reformed the workplace, regulated industry, and championed immigrants and the middle class. He supported desegregation and women's suffrage. He was serving as vice president under William McKinley when McKinley was assassinated in 1901. At age 42, Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to become president of the United States. He served two terms — from 1901 to 1909.

He read voraciously, and quickly; it's said he read an entire book every day before breakfast.

One of Roosevelt's lasting legacies is the conservation movement. During his presidency, he provided protection for almost 230 million acres of land, creating 150 national forests and five national parks.

Roosevelt wrote some three dozen books himself; his first, History of the Naval War of 1812 (1882) was published not long after he graduated from Harvard. Within two years, the book had sold three editions and was being used as a textbook in some college classrooms. Within five years, it was required reading in the U.S. Navy.

His last book, published just after his death in 1919, was a bound collection of warm and witty fatherly advice in the form of 20 years' worth of letters to his children.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®