Melody Beattie - Playing It by Heart: Taking Care of Yourself No Matter What

I suppose that many readers skip by the dedication page without a glance, unless the writer has informed them that their names will appear correctly spelled in print on that page. For a slightly (I sincerely hope and believe the word slightly applies here and for the most part it does, depending on which hour of the day you catch me) neurotic and still codependent author/writer such as myself, the dedication page looms in magnitude. Understanding to whom I am writing helps me clarify what I have to say; more important, how I am going to say what I have to say; and most important, gives me a reason to crawl across the hot coals of anxiety, fear, confusion, self-accusation, ego, moodiness, laziness, accusatory voices from the past, a habitual tendency to cling to distractions and other people's dramas, apathy, insecurity, general tight-lipped uncommunicativeness, and murky thinking that most writers have to force themselves across in order to write a book.

Many years ago at a county fair in Stillwater, Minnesota, I attended a pig race. Little pigs were let loose at the beginning of a track similar to a horse-racing track only smaller. The motivation to get these pigs to bolt through the starting gate, run fast, and compete with each other was a plate of Oreo cookies. The winner took all. Although the reasons the pigs ran were perhaps more complex and influenced by a multitude of forces, pigs are simple. They thought they were running because they wanted the cookies, and that was good enough for them. On a subtle but profound spiritual level, that's what defining my ultimate reader, the dedicatee, does for me.

Writing eleven books including this one and that many dedication pages has measurably thinned my list of nominees for that honor.

While searching for the key to unlock the writing of this book, I stumbled into the Fat Lady in the pages of J. D. Salinger's book Franny and Zooey. Franny was an actress, who didn't want to act anymore. She couldn't figure out why she should devote her life to what she now saw as an egotistical and meaningless career.

Her brother Zooey was trying to convince her that working in the arts really wasn't about herit was about her audience.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you, Zooey said.

Then Zooey reminded Franny of what their brother Seymour had taught them, while he was aliveSeymour had since committed suicidewhen all three of them, Zooey, Franny, and Seymour, performed together on a weekly radio show.

The lesson occurred one day when Seymour had told Zooey to shine his shoes before going on the radio show. Zooey became furious. He told Seymour that the people in the audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and he damn well wasn't going to shine his shoes for them because nobody could see his shoes anyway. Seymour told Zooey to shine his shoes for the Fat Lady.

Zooey didn't know exactly who the Fat Lady was but he pictured her as a woman sitting all day on her porch, swatting flies, with her radio blaring from morning to night. He figured she probably had cancer too. So he went ahead and shined his shoes for her that day and from then on.

Franny remembered the day Seymour had told her to be funny for the Fat Lady. Franny didn't know who the Fat Lady was either. She pictured her as a woman with thick legs, sitting in a wicker chair, listening to the radio while she recuperated from cancer.

But I'll tell you a terrible secretAre you listening to me? Zooey said. There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that ... secret yet? And don't you knowlisten to me, nowdon't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ... Ah, buddy ... It's Christ Himself.

The Fat Lady instantly became the key, the winning nominee, and my plate of Oreo cookies.

I dedicate this book to her.