My life is a whirligig.  It is symptomatic of the plague of busy busy busy that has seized so many of us. Nonetheless, my daughter and I decided to write a two-woman story. Hers is hers, but mine is yours.  We chose the theme Peach Pie.  Here is what emerged from the multiple whirligigs of my childhood, my love for my mom and daughter, and my Now.

My mom died 15 years ago. She wasn’t afraid to die.  She told me so in her room in a little Finger Lakes, New York, hospital.  She’d been drifting in and out - peacefully drowsing when she was out, lucid and tender when she returned.

A few years earlier, we’d come out the other side of decades of conflict – caused in part by circumstances over which neither she nor I had control.  It was a joy to be with her in the peaceful room, to give her the small gifts of a shoulder rub, a fresh cup of tea, time for her to tell me the last remaining secrets she’d held a long time.

Hardcover Fiction
1. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Stieg Larsson, Knopf, $27.95 The stunning third and final novel in Larsson's best-selling Millennium Trilogy. (*11)
2. The Help
Kathryn Stockett, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, $24.95. This wonderful debut set in the rural South of the 1960s is a February 2009 Indie Next List Great Read. (78)
3. Star Island
Carl Hiaasen, Knopf, $26.95. Hiaasen's hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane. (2)

Jim Lynch is no stranger to the Northwest. He grew up in the Puget Sound and while his career as a professional journalist took him around the country, he returned seven years ago to the Northwest where his two recent and critically acclaimed novels are set. The books are lyrical meditations on the geography of Northwest and the people who inhabit a landscape that is pinched between the mountains and the sea on the edge of the continent. In his most recent novel, Border Songs, Lynch focuses on the imaginary line that separates America from its hockey and health care loving neighbor to the north. It’s an imaginary line that seems to be growing more hard and volatile in our age of immigrant insecurity and post 9/11 boogeymen.

You can't really know the poppy by its photo –  how the blossom holds the last of sunset, how the pollen is silky on your finger. You have walked along the shining river.  You are tired and a little lonely. When you discover the poppy glowing against its dark leaves, you stop.  A man walks by with his dog.  "Gorgeous time to walk," he says. The smoke from his cigarette drifts back.

I had breathed deep and imagined writing about life after Facebook, about all of it: the loneliness, the poppy, the sweetness in the stranger's voice, the harsh scent of his smoke.  I took myself off Facebook because my daughter had been exploring the privacy violations she and so many others found outrageous.  But there was more.  I can't think of a time in history when it has not been dangerous for one institution to hold huge amounts of information about so many.  Consolidation of data is consolidation of power.

DreamWorks was monstrous, misfit, and idealistic. The upstart studio was the progeny of three industry giants: director Steven Spielberg; record company mogul and billionaire David Geffen; and Disney animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg, the driving force behind the idea to make a new studio from scratch.

DreamWorks began building on a lofty foundation. At the Oct. 12, 1994 press conference announcing the partnership, Spielberg said, “Together with Jeffrey and David, I want to create a place driven by ideas and the people who have them.’’ The studio was to champion works based on merit, not commercialism. Like the founding of United Artists in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, it was to be an artistic haven amid Tinseltown’s money-grubbing rabble. It was to be different.