The New Yorker's Mary Norris has taught me something about the power of imagining your own tombstone. It's not what I expected to learn when we sat down for this episode of Wavemaker Conversations: A Podcast for the Insanely Curious.
Norris, a copy editor at The New Yorker magazine for more than 30 years, is author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a New York Times bestseller just out in paperback.
"I prefer to be called a Prose Goddess," she tells me, "but I'll take Comma Queen."
Norris -- with her wonderful sense of humor -- helps make us feel more secure in our use of language. She demystifies fine points of grammar and punctuation. She liberates us to break rules that were never really rules to begin with.
Her journey -- from a teenager hired to check swimmers for foot-fungus at a public pool in Cleveland -- to published author -- is worth sharing.
Transgender Pronoun
It includes her experience of learning that one of her brothers was becoming her sister (a singer/songwriter known by many New Yorkers.)
"I was not a very supportive sibling at that point," Norris confesses, "because I was the only girl in the family. And I always felt that that was my only distinction."
Norris (beginning at 22:30 into our podcast) movingly describes how she and her transgender sibling repaired their relationship. And she weighs in, as a copy editor and a caring sister, on the appropriate pronoun for transgender men and women.
The Tombstone
Through all her years of copy editing, and well before -- even as a child -- Mary Norris dreamed of becoming a writer.
In the spring of 2012, at the age of 60, she almost abandoned the dream.
I was sitting in my office entertaining the thought that ... maybe that's what it will say on my tombstone: 'She Was A Good Copy Editor.' I was on ... the verge of reluctant acceptance. (But) I would not stop writing. I would never stop writing. I would always bounce back from a rejection. And, you know, that's how it finally happened.
Mary Norris is on a book tour now, promoting Between You & Me. It is a book about language, punctuated by her life story, with a lesson about how to realize one's dreams:
Imagine your tombstone today. If you don't like what it says, keep writing.