Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

When You Lie About your Age, The Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror

by Carol Leifer

published March 10, 2009 (hardcover) by Villard

My books are pristine. It took me an entire decade of interviewing authors before I asked one of them to sign their book for me. And that was John Gray. On his third book tour to Portland, I finally brought his first book — Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus — and after our interview, I shyly asked him to sign it. It was a first edition, and I had read it for our earlier interview without cracking the spine. John looked at the book and then at me and said, roughly in these words, “I wish I had one of these.” He’d given them all away, not knowing what a hit the book would be. And he graciously signed it to me.

So what happened today had more than just a little impact.

Carol Leifer’s book When You Lie About Your Age, The Terrorists Win arrives. The jacket is smooth, and the book feels good in my hands. I bring it with me to the doctor’s office, reading the first two chapters in the waiting room, then, when I am in the inner sanctum, I place the book horizontally on top of my enormous purple lizard tote, along with my phone on silent. And I climb up on the table. My doctor switches on the small space heater, and, unbeknownst to me, turns it facing my stuff, just six inches away.

When I finally climb down, I see that Carol’s book is warped, and the fake lizard tote feels like it has been baked in the sun.I turn down the doctor’s offer to replace the wavy book. I can’t restore the wonderful tactile pleasure – and the writing is hitting my tender spots in a provocative way – so, I decide to treat this book differently. It will go everywhere with me, I decide.

I need this book like a plant needs water.

Her first chapter is about her dad, and how funny he was, and how she misses him. If you’ve been reading these blogs, you know father-stuff is dangerous territory for me. My mom and stepfather cut my real dad out of my life – forever – when I was six – and eighteen months earlier, my stepfather had begun raping me. But, Carol Leifer made me laugh, and – living through her relationship with her father – I experience her childhood wonder at his jokes whose punch-lines cause the adults to roar. Her dad doted on her, and when she made it to the big-time, opening the show for Jay Leno – and the critics panned her, her dad tore the critics apart. I wonder what that must feel like – to be on stage, and see your dad in the audience.

She really misses her dad now – in that naïve little girl way that he’d always be around. “So, I’m finding acceptance of my father’s death is, ironically, the hardest thing to accept.” Reading her words, I feel a shift aligning myself with her, as children and as adult women grieving the loss of our fathers.

When my sons were eight and ten, I hired a detective to find my real dad. The detective learned that my dad had died the year before. Age 54. Heart attack. Years later, psychics James van Praagh and John Edward both tell me that my dad died of a broken heart – and that he is around me all the time. Carol’s dad believes, she says, that when you’re gone, you’re gone. But she hopes he’s wrong, and that when she gets there, she’ll meet him to the left of the information booth.

The second chapter is called “40 Things I Know at 50, (Because 50 is the New 40)” Number 8: When someone says, ”To make a long story short,” they’re already too late.

Laughter is refreshing. Healing. Carol Leifer’s book is going with me in the big purple tote, waving all the way.