Why isn't that house for sale? I thought. I looked over at the attractive gray house with black shutters that featured an honest-to-god picket fence and dormer windows. She wrote a very good book: Praying for Sheetrock." "By the way," she confided breathily, as we drove up a steep driveway to look at yet another nondescript brick house, "we have an author across the street. Our real-estate agent Peggy acted nonchalant while sizing me up with unerring accuracy. As I researched Atlanta on what was still called the "World Wide Web," I had a single insight: There's some sort of highway called the Perimeter, and my people live inside it. A former teen counselor, I now spent my days at the park, sipping coffee and staring blankly at the swing set like a Tom Perotta character in Little Children. When my husband Glen suggested we move to Atlanta from New York City in 1992, I was the sleep-deprived mother of an adorable toddler. Melissa Fay Greene does it well, but I know just how hard she worked to get it right. My friend's account in No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is nothing but flattering, yet the experience has made me think about how we writers portray those we're close to in print. It still feels strange, having the private me become public. So when she first told me, "You're in the book, you know," I felt more startled than excited. The thing is, I didn't see myself in any of those stories. I looked forward to Melissa regaling a larger audience with all the terrific stories of family life she'd told me as we walked around our neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. Melissa is an accomplished journalist and author of many award-winning books, like Praying for Sheetrock (1991) and Last Man Out (2003).īut with No Biking, a far more personal tale of her own journey as an adoptive mother and parent to nine children, I hoped readers would see what a great mom she is, too. When Melissa Fay Greene began work on her memoir No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, I was thrilled the world would soon get to know my friend better.
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady On Joining the Nonfiction Universe of Melissa Fay Greeneĭon't miss "Adoption, Light and Dark," a review of Greene's book.
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