You’ll notice the three books I’m recommending this month are funny. Yes, I need funny right now. And I’m guessing you do too.

Morning Page is Kate’s first novel targeting adults. She is the author of 11 highly acclaimed books for children.She has worked as a writer, illustrator, television producer, photo editor, and ice cream scooper.  She also is the event producer for the Martha Vineyard-based writers festival Islanders Write. Kate lives between Martha’s Vineyard and New York City.

Kate’s father is the award-winning illustrator, cartoonist, and writer Jules Feiffer. And her mother, Judy Feiffer, was a writer, photographer, and book editor who helped foster two best-selling memoirs, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings by then novice author, Maya Angelou and Mommy Dearest by Christine Crawford. And Kate’s sister, Hallie Feiffer, is a playwright. So, a very talented family indeed.

Below is an edited, abbreviated version of our Q&A. You can listen to our entire chat here on Elena Meets the Author. Or you can tune into this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Elena: Hello Kate, welcome to the show.

Elena, it’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. You do such amazing research on these shows, and I’m just delighted to be here.

Elena: I listened to Morning Pages before I read it, and I couldn’t stop laughing, especially when the inappropriate, eccentric octogenarian mother was talking, who dare I say, reminded me of my own TMI mother. I never realized there was only one narrator for all the different characters. She deserves an Oscar for your Audible if such a thing exists.

In one interview, you describe your book as a coming-of-age story for the sandwich generation.

Yes. I think there’s something like 50 percent of women in their forties and fifties who are caring for children and aging parents. We tend to be the caretakers. We are dealing with all sorts of stuff while trying to tend to our own needs and often our own needs get lost in the shuffle.

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Who doesn’t see their ex and immediately cross the street? Well maybe Gwyneth. But the rest of us conscious uncouplers understand, you can’t really have polite superficial conversation with someone you used to share toothpaste with, whose skin you knew better than your own, whose likes and dislikes were once second nature to you, someone who used to be your forever man and is now just him.

Don’t get me wrong, we get along fine when we’re prepared, when our three adored children, the ties that bind, are present –

like at Christmas, weddings, graduations. But those accidental sightings when I am on my own, not a mother, just me, Elena, enjoying springtime in London, I walk the other way. I am sure Peter feels exactly the same. We have both moved on, time heals, I’m even getting married soon.

Two weeks later it’s our youngest Julia’s graduation from Duke University in North Carolina, one of those events where Peter and I get an A* for getting along.

We aren’t faking it either. We really do get along. If we hadn’t had the soul-wrenching heartbreak of divorce, we’d probably still be friends, old friends. We get each other.  I met Peter when I was sixteen, and he was twenty so he’s not just my ex-husband, he’s also someone who knew me in my formative years, and vice versa. I remember his gold Honda Accord with the amazing sound system, and he remembers my stick shift Fiat that I never learned to drive. There were plenty of happy years until we reached our sell-by date, when we just weren’t working anymore.

Peter and I met up at the hotel in Durham with a polite peck on the cheek. Kate and Thomas hadn’t arrived from London yet. So, the two of us walked with Julia to the first of many graduation parties that weekend. Julia runs off to chat to her friends. Peter and I meet the other parents and I am aware that to many we seem like we might be there together, actually, and not just circumstantially.

At some point I notice that my ex is standing alone. My first thought is to approach him and include him in a conversation I am having with an acquaintance. Peter was always the guy in the corner at a party. Back then I would find him and bring him into the group. But then I realise, this is not my job anymore. He can take care of himself.

The next day, at lunch, just the five of us, Peter says,

Elena, do you remember that trip to California where we stopped in to to visit your ageing grandmother and she just stared silently at me with those big eyes, terrified me.”

I’m not big on reminiscing. It doesn’t get you anywhere. Either it makes you sad remembering a happy distant faraway time you miss, never to be re-experienced, or it makes you sad remembering a sad equivalent. Nostalgia is a temptress to be avoided, which is pretty easy, except when you’re at a college graduation and your ex revels in trying to get you to talk about the past.

Yes,” I reply quickly, “we were in the dining room in Woodside.”

Julia has just graduated, a marvellous outdoor, in-person procession with the warm Carolina sun beaming down on us. Julia has shoved her cap and gown into a paper bag and is sipping a much-needed Bloody Mary, hair of the “graduation party” dog.

No, I think it was in her bedroom,” Peter corrects me.

I hate this even more. My ex correcting me about memories of my family. Anyway, I know I’m right. I can visualise the scene perfectly—but I don’t want to go there. Our recollections differ about an event that took place over thirty years ago. As our three kids look on, I wonder if this is even the time or the place.

Julia, how’s that Bloody Mary? Think I’ll have one too,” I say.

Later at the lunch, while Peter is talking to one of our other children, Julia confides to me that her friend Anav told her he had warned his parents,

Oh, you should know Julia’s parents are divorced.”

I am fully aware,” Anav’s mother had replied. “Elena called him her ‘ex-husband’ three times at the dinner last night and three times on the ride to the graduation this morning.”

I never know what to call him, “ I say defensively to Julia.

How about Peter?”

Stretch didn’t come to the graduation—only so many tickets allowed. Despite how much my kids like Stretch, I  know that they prefer the nuclear five of us. It’s not wishful thinking anymore, just a group they know in their bones, in their DNA. As Julia said to me,

We rarely get together, just the five of us.”

We are a forever family, even if their father is not my forever man.  I have always thought that Peter and I made amazing children,

that we were meant to be together for that very reason.  I agree with Gwyneth when she says,

I know my ex-husband was meant to be the father of my children, and I know my current husband is meant to be the person I grow very old with. Conscious uncoupling lets us recognise those two different loves can coexist and nourish each other.

Stay tuned for the next instalment:  Getting Married – Round Two.

May, 2021

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I’ve always loved the Junior part because my 90 year-old  uncle was anything but little. At 6’4″ he towered over me and my two sisters Diana and Alexandra.

I think he kept the junior in deference to his father, my grandfather. This was typical of Bill, modest and respectful to the end.

While memorial services are invariably sad, I was inspired by the tributes paid to my uncle. He was a man with a big impact and a low profile, a humble person graced with  good old-fashioned values of service and kindness.

Bill was my late father John’s older brother by two years. (Bill with my father below. Bill is on the right in the first image and on the left in the second)

Bill was a great man by any measure. A hugely successful venture capitalist and pioneer, Bill was Amgen’s founding shareholder in 1980, its first chairman and treasurer, and most of all, said the $124 billion biopharmaceutical company in a letter when my uncle died,

(Bill) was a visionary whose idea it was to launch the biotech company that would become Amgen. Without Bowes, there would be no Amgen.”

Amgen makes  serious drugs for the sickest of patients. One drug Neupogen fights infection in patients undergoing cancer chemotherapy, another deals with severe arthritis, another osteoporosis. Below is a statue of my uncle outside Amgen’s California headquarters.

Bill spent much of his time in his later years giving money away, quietly, thoughtfully and generously via what he called “my little foundation”, otherwise known as the The William K Bowes Jr Foundation, a $400mm philanthropic organisation largely run by the one-man band that was my uncle. Up until a few months ago Bill worked five days a week,  largely reading grant submissions.

Giving money away is harder than making it, Bill said. He wanted to give where he could make a difference.

His main focuses were medical research (UCSF amongst other places), education,  religious harmony (United Religions Initiative) and music. Here is a tribute to Bill produced by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In the tribute, Bill says:

Music is pretty fundamental. It’s good for the soul and anything I can do to push that along is just as good as science to me. (The conservatory) takes young people and develops them. It’s venture capital in a different sense.”

At the service I was struck most by  how modest my uncle remained throughout his life. Always a quiet man, (I would usually ramble nervously when I visited him, unaccustomed to the silence. He would interject softly with a succinct, wise word or phrase)

Bill avoided the spotlight. Often he didn’t attend awards ceremonies where he was being honoured, and yet he always made time for family. Whenever I’d visit SF, my uncle would invariably ask,

When are we going to see you?

Family mattered, helping others mattered, treating people with respect mattered, being in the spotlight did not.

Bill had a small office consisting of one long-time assistant who had worked for him for over thirty years. He surprised callers by frequently answering his own phone, or greeting guests at the main front door to his office complex. His  favourite lunchtime meal was the split pea soup from  SF Soup or the street tacos at Rubio’s. Nothing fancy.

I visited his office earlier this week. Upon hearing my surname, the security man  in the lobby of the skyscraper where my uncle worked offered his condolences.

Your uncle was a kind man. Every day that he came in he greeted me with a handshake and a ‘Good Morning John’.

I immediately shook John’s hand and vowed to take time to say hi and smile at those people in my neighbourhood who I see every day.

The stories of my uncle’s impeccable values flooded the service. When he and my father were flying back to Harvard Business School in the 1950’s their prop plane crashed in a field and caught fire. Bill calmly stayed on board until all the other passengers had safely disembarked.

Ute, Bill’s beloved wife of fifty-plus years,  has a restaurant called Ferry Plaza Seafood. Whenever Bill visited he waited patiently at the back of the line to order his lunch. Jumping the queue was not part of his vocabulary. (Ute and my sister Diana below)

Bill and Ute had no household staff. The only man I saw working in their apartment was a masseur who had been jobless on the streets until my aunt and uncle persuaded him to get a job. He did. He trained as a masseur and then had a weekly slot at their apartment on Russian Hill.

William Ketchum Bowes Jr was a giant among men. He will be greatly missed.

February 2017

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