Puglovers Icon: Carolyn See

Carolyn See is one of those rare puglover icons who meet both our criteria: she was not successful until well after thirty and at seventy-five, she is still kicking ass with a love for margaritas and a long-time crush on Owen Wilson (beginning before he was the Butterscotch Stallion and had embarked on a tumultuous relationship with Princess Goldzinger herself, Kate Hudson). See has written several bestselling novels, three non-fiction books, numerous articles for publications like The Atlantic Monthly and Esquire, and a number of mysteries under the pseudonym Monica Highland. She is currently the book reviewer for the Friday morning edition of The Washington Post and has won both Guggenheim and Getty fellowships, as well as The Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Body of Work Award. Yet her first novel wasn't published until she was thirty-six, one which, in her own words, "sank like a stone.” See was in her late thirties and early forties when she started to make it as a writer, and in her fifties when she really made it. Plus, after two failed marriages before the age of 35, she wrote off the institution as a whole and lived as boyfriend/girlfriend with the erudite and illustrious John Espey (search him on the New Yorker’s website,www.newyorker.com, to find some of the best stuff that ever came out of those rarefied halls back when they were on 45th street) for thirty years until the time of his death in 2000. We here at thirtyboppers are totally down with bucking social expectations and choosing instead to live in sin, so to speak. Because sinning is usually a lot of fun.

For puglovers who feel like things just haven’t worked out for them (I have a law degree – why am I still in the mailroom?) or that it is too late to start pursuing their dreams without looking pathetic, the general philosophy that it is never too late to get it together that emerges in See’s work is both inspiring and comforting. As See says, “When I started to write I was relatively old, and lived in California. So I was the wrong sex, wrong age, wrong coast. Luckily I was too ignorant to know it.” And it’s a good thing she was because three of her books are absolute must-haves for thirtyboppers everywhere.
Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers is for those who secretly yearn to write. It’s for normal people who live normal lives but harbor desires to create something extraordinary; in the words of See herself, “this book is for the timid and forlorn and clueless . . . students just coming to this discipline, older people who wanted to write in their youth and never got around to it, folks who live in parts of the country where the idea of writing is about as strange as crossbreeding a tomato and a trout.” Written with great humor and warmth, thirtyboppers who always wanted to write but felt like because they didn’t get an MFA at Iowa or Irvine or didn’t intern at Harpers their junior year at Princeton, it just wasn’t in the cards for them will greatly appreciate this book which covers everything from creating a writing ritual to handling rejection to being your own publicist to not pissing people off when your first book comes out.

A novel actually about puglovers. Growing up working class in Los Angeles, twenty-nine year old Bob Hampton has artistic aspirations: he wants to paint. Buying into the mythology that great artists must migrate to Paris, the so-called art capital of the world, Bob arrives there only to find that it is a world closed off to people like him, people with cousins who live in trailers and mothers who live in dark studio apartments on Vermont. He returns to Los Angeles and begins to work as a handyman to pay for his art supplies while he figures out what the hell he is going to do with his life now that he thinks he’ll never get to be a real artist. His dreams crushed, he finds redemption in the people whom he encounters as a handyman (although initially he is about as capable of fixing things at Miss Ramona, which is to say, not at all) and finds a way to be a different sort of artist. A testament to the transcendent power of art, The Handyman is profound but not pretentious. Note: the first few pages are a bit confusing but will totally make sense once you finish the novel.

This book is Miss Ramona Narrow’s favorite book of all-time. Miss Ramona has read a lot, in large part because she endured a thirteen year awkward phase from the time she was seven until she was twenty which left her seeking solace in books while her friends dated cute boys, so hopefully that should count for something. Of course, it is debatable whether this awkward phase really ever ended, but whatever. All in all, she has read it cover to cover at least ten times. When Ramona is feeling sad, sometimes she will open up to a random page of Dreaming and read a bit. She always feels better afterwards.


Dreaming is See’s memoir that loosely focuses on the ways that alcoholism and drug addiction have pervaded the lives of almost everyone in her family. The general but unspoken thesis of the book is that the prevalence of alcohol and drug addiction in this country is in part due to the disappointment we feel when we find out that, for the vast majority of us, the myth of the American Dream is just that – a myth. We work hard, we do what we are supposed to do and then are left to ask “Is this it?” Or in the words of one of the most gifted song writers alive today, Isaac Brock, “Life handed us a paycheck and we said, ‘we worked harder than this’.” This is a classic puglover feeling when in self-pity mode.

Beginning with her troubled childhood in Los Angeles, the book introduces us to See’s fun-loving but hard-drinking father who abandons the family when See is ten, leaving her under the care of her half-crazed, mean-spirited, hard-drinking mother. In the face of grave adversity and huge obstacles, we journey with See as she works her way through college (despite getting pregnant at twenty by her Chinese-American boyfriend and having her daughter, Lisa, who herself is a hugely successful writer) and graduate school. Trading in her first husband for a second, See moves to Topanga Canyon and live a happy, hippy-ish existence, replete with crazy friends and marijuana-fueled (is that an oxymoron?) parties. When her second husband leaves, See must figure out how to take care of business herself, part of which is getting really serious about pursuing writing, even though she is now a heartbroken, broke single mother of two girls.

See does get it together. But what is so great is that getting it together for See does not mean giving up on fun or becoming “an adult” in the boring, serious sense of the word. She follows no one’s path but her own and finally decides to hang it up at forty, but for See, hanging it up means giving up acid and meeting the aforementioned John Espey, and it is at this point that her career really gets going. This is, in a nutshell, why Caroline See is an über puglover: through example, she shows us that our lives are what we make of them, that even given a crappy lot in life, you can take it, polish it, and have a damn good time.