Letter From Lisa Behind the Scenes Cause For Celebration Audio Alert Coming Up! On the Road Scottoline.com Fun

DON'T WEAR SUNBLOCK Commencement At West Chester University — December 13, 2003 Thank you to Dr. Adler, Mr. Dowdy, Professor Tripp, Grace Kelly, and Gail Handley, and all the great administrators and educators at West Chester University. Welcome new graduates, parents, and friends. I am thrilled and honored to accept this degree and to be here to speak with you today. Frankly, I have never given a commencement speech before and as much as I was honored to be asked, as well as to receive this degree, I was completely intimidated. I write suspense novels with Italian girls running around with guns, interrupted by the occasional car chase. Honestly, I didn't feel up to the task of writing a commencement address and I wanted to come up with something better than no more pencils, no more books. Although that does say it all, doesn't it? It always worked for me. I think back to sixth grade. But I digress. I didn't know what to write, so I did what most people do when they have to write something hard — I went to the Internet to find something I could cut and paste. By the way, this doesn't work for novels. Now, amazingly enough, you can log onto Google and type in graduation quotes and you get 7320 listings. I found one site that lost the most quoted graduation quote, so I guessed it was the best. It was by Tom Brokaw, who is smart enough to read the news and looks nice on TV, so I went with it. Here it is: You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world. My first thought is — that's a lot to ask. I mean, I graduated from college thirty years ago and I still haven't changed the world. And if I had, would still you have to? What's the plan here? Everybody graduates and starts changing the world, all willy—nilly? That seems like too much change, back and forth, all the time. Most people don't like change. I myself hate change. My idea of change is changing the channel. I've been divorced twice and it's killing me. Change sucks. And in truth, when you think about it, I'm not at all sure that the world needs changing. On the contrary, I like the world the way it is, in the main. And now that 202 South has changed, I'm thinking the world is pretty damn good, if not absolutely perfect. Look how easy you can get to the mall! And no more scary cattle chutes! How great is that for change? And if I were going to make a list of things that definitely need changing, the world would not be number one. Number One would be Trista and Ryan. I am totally over Trista and Ryan. Number Two would be Britney and Madonna. Everybody is over Britney and Madonna. The Number Three thing I would change is the Internal Revenue Code — but you'll find that out when you file your first 1040. For once, I disagree with Tom. You don't have to change the world. At least not today, okay? You graduates worked very, very hard to get here. You got great grades, you held down jobs, you braved 202 construction. You deserve a little rest. Chill. The most I would ask of you is that you don't drink and drive. Other than that, you're good. So Tom Brokaw is strike one. So I went back to Google and modified my search. Next to graduation quotes, I plugged in funny, because I like funny and you deserve to be entertained today. It's snowing. Here is the first entry in funny: The tassel is worth the hassle. Okay, that's not funny, that's just stupid. I mean it's embarrassing, it's so unfunny. It's ABC-must-see-TV unfunny. You can almost hear the laugh track. I kept looking, scrolling down the other unfunny quotes until I found this one. It's from Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back: Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. Actually, now that I say it out loud, it is funny. But I think I heard it on Dr. Phil last week. So I was on strike two. Finally, I went back to Google and stumbled upon that graduation speech that circulated a few years ago and was mistakenly attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. You may have heard it before - its title was Wear Sunblock. Now, in fact, it was a Chicago reporter who told new graduates to wear sunblock, not Kurt Vonnegut, because Kurt Vonnegut would never say something like that. Kurt Vonnegut is one of the finest American writers alive and also the man who said, "The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world." Which was a smart thing to say. Much smarter than wear sunblock. And true. I read the rest of the Wear Sunblock speech and the more I read, the more I disagreed with. Most of all, the wear sunblock part. If fact, if I were going to give you my own message, it would be that you should absolutely not wear sunblock. You're young. You're gorgeous. You should be having fun. You should run out into the sun, not only without sunblock, but without clothes. Find a beach where you can do this. Not Wildwood. It won't be anywhere in Jersey, I'm pretty sure. Then you should crank the music, run into the sun stark naked and burn yourself to a crisp. Get a really horrible sunburn. One sunburn won't kill you, not just one or even twenty, I bet. At least I'm pretty sure. That's what you should do. Avoid sunblock at all costs, and start living. Which leads me to what I wanted to tell you today, in an odd way. Because in writing this, I realized that my personal philosophy is found not with Tom Brokaw, Kurt Vonnegut, or even Yoda. I look to Emily Robison, Marty Maguire, and Natalie Maines, the three literary lions known as the Dixie Chicks. Because they say what you need is wide open spaces — you need room to make your big mistakes. And they are right. I stand before you now with some degree of success, and certainly that very lovely introduction made me sound almost reputable, but it wasn't some master plan or grand design that got me here. I'm not one of those people who had a goal and stuck to it, like Tom Brokaw. What I did to get here was to make some very big, fat, juicy, life-altering mistakes. So let me tell you the truth about me and my mistakes. In fact, we can make this into a mistakes-you-should-be-sure-to-avoid commencement address. You have to make your own original mistakes. Ready? Take notes. Here are some doozies. MISTAKE #1 — IGNORE YOUR SECRET DREAM AND CHOOSE THE SAFE PROFESSION Everybody has a secret dream. I'm not talking about Carmen Electra or George Clooney. I'm talking about a secret thing you would love to become. I was an English major and I loved books, so my secret dream was to write the Great American novel. But I never told anyone that or even let myself take it seriously. Instead, I quickly suppressed that crazy thought and went to law school. I became a lawyer, which I actually enjoyed, and got a job in a big Philadelphia law firm. I forgot about my secret writer dream, secretly. So sign up for the LSATS right now and take them. A lot of people make that mistake. It's a good mistake to make because it doesn't cost you that much. It could be your first big mistake. MISTAKE #2 — FALL IN LOVE EARLY AND OFTEN, THEN MARRY THE WRONG PERSON I fall in love too easily, and being Italian is no excuse after age forty. In my case, I married a man I fell in love with when he asked, because to answer no did not occur to me. This was a mistake you might want to avoid, although you can still undo it. If you like change A LOT. And to compound it, I made my third mistake, which was: MISTAKE #3 — GET PREGNANT AT THE WRONG TIME I got pregnant when my marriage was dissolving was not the smartest thing to do, even though the world's greatest kid was born. It wasn't a good mistake to make. I don't recommend this mistake AT ALL. It's not one you can undo, for example. In fact, it may be the one mistake you CANNOT undo. And in my case, then it turned out that I loved being home with my kid, which necessitated my quitting my job as a lawyer to raise her full time. The only problem was that I had no alimony, because of my fourth mistake, which was: MISTAKE # 4 — WHEN YOU GET YOUR FIRST DIVORCE, DON'T ASK FOR ALIMONY This is self-explanatory. My fifth mistake was: MISTAKE #5 — QUIT YOUR JOB WITHOUT HAVING ANOTHER, SO YOU HAVE TO LIVE ON YOUR CREDIT CARDS Since I had no alimony and had quit my job without having another, I had to live on credit cards. I had five credit cards with a credit limit of $10,000 each. And since I was broke, I decided I couldn't get much broker, so I remembered my Great American novel dream and thought I would try it. I gave myself up to $50,000 in credit to become a published writer. I wrote late at night or whenever my baby napped. She didn't nap enough. It took me six years of writing at night and living on credit cards. I was a broke single mother and I charged everything in sight. Actually, this was fun. I highly recommend living beyond your means. You can get away with it even if you pay less than the minimum balance, if you pay it at the same time each month. They think you are reliable, as far as crack addicts go. They will increase your credit limit, I bet. Let me tell you a quick story from those days. MacDonald's story. MISTAKE #6 — FINALLY FOLLOW YOUR DREAM, THEN GIVE UP AT THE FIRST SIGN OF FAILURE When my daughter was finally six and ready for school full time, I had completed two novels and three screenplays. By the way a subsidiary mistake is to try and write a screenplay, but I won't get into that here. My books and screenplays were rejected by most agents in the western hemisphere. I got one rejection from a New York book agent who said we have no time for new clients, and if they did. They wouldn't take you. That's New York for you. You don't need me to tell you it's cold outside, folks. In fact, I sent out a hundred copies of my first screenplay - and how many rejections do you think I got? Not a one. I didn't even get an answer. I was sure that's something was wrong with the US mail. So when I reached $37,500 in debt, I decided to give up. I went back to work as a law clerk, which is what I had been when I first graduated from law school. This is like being a shrimp on the legal food chain, but it was the only job I could get because I had been out of the workforce for so long and screwed up many life so badly. And then, one week into my job, I got a call from an agent saying that somebody wanted to publish one of my books. That was the good news. The bad news was my last mistake, which I learned along the way. That my secret dream of writing the great American novel was impossible. Tell you why. You know, if you look at the development of the contemporary American novel, there was a time when great writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Philip Roth were writing wonderful novels, and all of them wanted to write the Great American Novel. Philip Roth in fact wrote a novel titled The Great American Novel. I majored in the contemporary American novel and felt that if I were ever to become a writer, my secret dream was supposed to be to write The Great American Novel. But when I sat down to write — and by last week I had written eleven novels — I tried to listen to what was inside me, and to think about the stuff I'd read and stuff I wanted to write about and how I wanted to write it, and I realized that there is no such thing as the Great American novel. I think the term — and the wish — was very much a product of the times of Bellow and Cheever, and they were all really saying was that each man wanted to be the best author. The one author that all readers loved the most. The king of all Books. I think now this was simply an author's vanity, and perhaps even the vanity of men. My testosterone can beat up your testosterone. In any event, whatever the reason for the term, it was a fool's errand. Because to me, the best thing about the best fiction — any fiction, whether it's literary or crime fiction or airplane read — is that it contains a truth, and a voice. And in this country, there is no one single truth that its true for everybody. Just as there is no single voice that resonates for everybody. If America is about anything it is about diversity, and so the great American novels will contain a diversity of truths. And a chorus of voices. In fact, a babble of voice, of conversation, of noise, a clatter, a shouting, a ranting, a diatribe. The voices of black people and white people and gay and straight, of children and of poets. A great clamor of voices should rise up, a great mosaic of truths, and all of it shouting and begging and yelling at the top of its lungs, in the best raucous American fashion. We are a country of boo-birds, of cheerleaders, of people who clap too long and too loud. We root, root, root for the home team — we sing the most impossible national anthem in the world. We are all about voice in this country, giving the minority a voice, giving political speech a voice, giving the disenfranchised a voice. Short of shouting fire in the proverbial crowded theatre, we are voice unbounded, and if there are millions of great American novels, there are millions of great American voices. If you just listen. Hear it? So, you get the point. My career — my life — is, quite honestly, a series of mistakes. And yet I stand before you now, with a lovely introduction, an honorary degree, and a funny black hat. What does this teach us? Take risks in life. Screw up. Fall in love. BUT DON'T HAVE A BABY AT THE WRONG TIME. Taking risks is good, even if it leads to mistakes, even big fat juicy ones. Especially big fat juicy ones. You'll have time to set them right. Remember, there's always a third marriage. It was Mark Twain who said, Throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. And to that I would add: Find your own voice. You will need it whether you write a novel or not. You will need it always. Figure out who you are. Take a guess at what you want. Go and get it. Start right now. Well, after that beach vacation I mentioned. You know what to leave home. Good luck to all of you and congratulations!