The Crazy Week

By Cornelia

Tomorrow is the official launch date for my second novel, The Crazy School. Somehow it seems fitting, in honor of this, that my phone line and DSL should go down. This happened early Sunday morning. It took me two separate hours on my cellphone to finally track down an actual person at AT&T to find out WHY I have no phone and no DSL, considering I just paid them $300 last week.

Mostly, it took this long because the people of Berkeley feel that cellphone towers will distort the harmonic convergence or something, so that the only place my cellphone doesn't work is at my house.

On the bright side, this is the first time I've been able to AFFORD a cellphone since my last one was stolen off the passenger seat of my former Porsche in 2001.

With my recent advance check, I bought myself an iPhone and a laptop. Maybe if I write about fifty more books, I will be able to replace the Porsche.

Here is my new motto now that I have a cellphone:

AMISH NO MORE!!!

Even if it doesn't actually work at my house.

Right now, I'm sitting in my sister Freya's kitchen, since she has a working cable connection.

Here is what AT&T told me about why the phone lines don't work at my house:

"WE DON'T KNOW!! BUT IT WILL WORK

AGAIN ON TUESDAY BY EIGHT P.M.!!"

I hate to point out the obvious, but it is now Wednesday morning.

Ahem.

Meanwhile, here is what my neighbor Steve told me is the actual problem, according to the AT&T repair dude he flagged down on the street near our mutual driveway:

Squirrels. And rain.

I think that's also who runs AT&T's customer service department.

AT ANY RATE....

My official book launch for The Crazy School is tomorrow. And the launch party will be at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California.

If you live in the Bay Area, please come out and hang with me and my mom and my sister for the event--it will be at seven o'clock this Friday evening, with a follow up at Diesel Books on College Avenue in Oakland, Sunday at 3 p.m. Full details are on my website at corneliaread.com (if you would like a signed copy of the book and DON'T live in the Bay Area, I've provided contact info for the stores through which you can order a copy for me to sign there).

The nicest thing about this book coming out has been the responses from former students at the REAL Crazy School, a supposedly "therapeutic" place called DeSisto in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

I think that campus was the closest I have ever come to facing down pure evil, in the form of a man named A. Michael DeSisto, the school's founder.

The real-life school was at long last shut down by the state of Massachusetts a couple of years ago, after Michael's death. One of the reasons they finally decided to revoke the school's license was that when a female student swallowed razor blades, the staff waited ninety minutes before they called an ambulance, in the hopes they'd be able to cover it up.

That sounds like a typical morning, there, to me.

Here is the official jacket-copy description of The Crazy School:

Madeline Dare has at last escaped rust-belt Syracuse, New York for the lush Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts. After her husband's job offer falls through, Maddie signs on as a teacher at the Santangelo Academy, a boarding school for disturbed teenagers.

Behind the academny's ornate gates, she discovers a disorienting world in which students and teachers alike must submit to the founder's bizarre therapeutic regimen. But when Maddie questions his methods, she's appalled to find her fellow teachers more likely to turn on one another than stand up for themselves, much less the students in their care.

A chilling event confirms Maddie's worst suspicions, leading her to suspect an even darker secret, one that lies at the academy's very heart. Cut off from the outside world, Maddie must join forces with a small band of the school's most violently rebellious students--kids who, despite their troubled grip on reality, may well prove to be her only chance of survival.

I've often said that what drives me to write an entire novel is finding a topic that REALLY pisses me off. The DeSisto School pissed me off more than just about anything I've ever run across, with the possible exception of the Holocaust and Bruno Bettelheim. Which is saying something.

Here is the lead photo of Michael DeSisto from a 1980 People magazine profile of him, though I have to say it looks more like a commemorative poster from a NAMBLA convention.

I guess nobody had heard of pedophiles in 1980. Or something.

Here's a little sample of what I wrote about his alter-ego, David Santangelo:

Fuck Freud.

Fuck Jung.

Fuck Werner Erhard, and his little dog too.

Santangelo was just the latest charlatan to wrap himself in their
snake-oily mantle of overpriced navel-gazing hooey....

The shithead. The fat greasy weasel. The smug nasty pompous low-rent-lumpen Tennessee-Williams-Big-Daddy suckbag of a potentate.

O, the mendacity!

The book is dedicated to all the kids who were students there. I hope they enjoy reading it, or at least think parts of it are funny.

The last chapter is my favorite. As I pledged in these pages during the first year of Naked Authors, the final word of the novel is "Fuck."

Since one of the many rules of the DeSisto campus was that pretty much the ONLY word we were not allowed to say was fuck, this seemed deeply appropriate. Also, it made me laugh.

And just in case there's an afterlife, here's a message for A. Michael DeSisto, wherever he may be: