Going Overboard
The Misadventures of a Military Wife
by Sarah Smiley
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0451218515
Publisher: NAL Trade
Sarah Smiley is the author of Shore Duty, a syndicated newspaper column that reaches more than 2 million weekly. She has been a military dependent for 29 years, first as the daughter of a Navy pilot, and now as the wife of a military flight instructor. Sarah has been featured in various publications including The New York Times, Chicken Soup for the Military Wife's Soul, USAA Magazine, and U.25.
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Q: Is Sarah Smiley your real name because it's a perfect pseudonym?
SS: Yes, Sarah Smiley is in fact my real name. I was "Sarah Rutherford" before getting married, and because that’s a mouthful, in school I was simply "Sarah R" or "Sarah Ruther." It’s nice to finally have a name with the proverbial ring to it, and one that actually fits in the blocks on government forms. But there is that little hassle of making a dentist appointment and the receptionist thinking it’s a prank call. Some day I’d like to get my doctorate just so I can be Dr. Smiley and tell everyone I’m a dentist.
Q: Why a military column?
SS: The obvious answer is that I’m a military wife and daughter, and I’ve been a Navy dependent for all but six weeks of my life. I honestly don’t know any other lifestyle.
The idea for the column, however, came from a desire to portray the reality of military family life. Too often the media holds military spouses to some idealized standard. We’re supposed to belt out the Star-Spangled Banner as we wave goodbye to our spouse. We’re supposed to wear red, white and blue sweatshirts. And tsk-tsk if we don’t have a "Go Navy" sticker on our car or a flag with a goat on it hanging from the garage. This is how military families are typically represented. It’s what I call the Strong-Military-Wife syndrome.
So what’s wrong with portraying military families in a 1950’s Everything’s-A-Okay kind of way? Because when your husband is leaving for six months you don’t feel like singing. But that’s what society expects and it’s what they want to see. So when a spouse gets home and cries and curses the day her husband joined the military, she feels like a failure. What I’m doing is showing military spouses that we all have feelings of being sad, scared, angry and resentful. Feeling these things is natural and just as much a part of military life as red, white and blue bunting. We can be scared---even angry---and still be patriotic and strong. That’s the idea I hope Shore Duty brings to the American military family. Because I never want a wife to think she’s "the only one."
Q: When did the idea for the book first hit you?
SS: I’ve been "writing" [Going Overboard] in my mind for several years now. It will be a memoir, so I’ve unintentionally practiced a lot of the material on friends at BUNCO parties and supper club as I recount my harried days and life as a military wife. Some of my close friends will read the book and recognize some of my best tales, such as when I took my son to a Ronald McDonald concert and sat on a folding table that broke beneath me. Or the time I locked myself out of my house wearing nothing but a cowgirl pajama shirt and pink flip-flops.
But the book is also about the drama of living like a single mother when your spouse is deployed overseas in a war. It’s about forming friendships with the other wives and making a quasi-family for yourself thousands and thousands of miles away from your real home. And I think that’s something the civilian world would like to get a glimpse of. It’s a side of the military that’s seldom told.
Q: Tell me how you first heard of Erma Bombeck? I love the fact that you hadn't heard of her before people started saying you wrote like her.
SS: When my work first started appearing, editors were comparing me to this lady named "Erma," whom, believe it or not, I had never heard of. (I majored in elementary education. Enough said.) So I really didn’t give it much thought. Then one day a publisher said, "We think of you as a young Erma Bombeck. Can you live up to that?" I wasn’t a fool and I wanted the job, so I said, "Absolutely! Yes, of course!" Then I hung up the phone and said to my husband, "Who is Erma Bombeck?" In the weeks that followed, I learned everything I could about Erma. I read her books, studied her life, found her columns, and, of course, fell in love with her voice. Now I consider it quite an honor to be compared to Erma.
But I will say this: I’m somewhat relieved I didn’t know of Erma when I first began and when people started using her name in conjunction with my work. Because then I might have felt inside someone’s shadow. I’m happy I was able to develop my own voice and style first.
Q: Your husband is a Navy flight instructor. Is that like being married to Tom Cruise from Top Gun?
SS: Let me get over my laughter before I answer. I wish it was like being married to Tom Cruise in Top Gun! Unfortunately, the real military isn’t quite as glamorous. For instance, those green flight suits women traditionally think of as "hot," are in fact stifling and therefore smell like an icky combination of sweat and jet fuel. When my husband returns from an assignment, I make him leave his "boat clothes" in isolation in a zippered bag in the garage until they can be detoxified (with a heavy can of Lysol). And those big black boots Cruise and Val Kilmer strut around in? In real life they leave inch-wide scuff marks on the kitchen linoleum.
Interestingly, however, my husband is often told he looks like Tom Cruise. To which I’ve been known to say, "Nah, don’t you think he looks more like Dustin Hoffman?" And, of course, now he has a difficult time living down the nickname "Tootsie.
Q: What does your family think of your writing?
SS: Depends on the week and what my column was about. My husband suffers quite a bit of teasing as a result of my public wisecracks. But he takes it in stride. He knows if I wasn’t writing this stuff down, I’d be telling it at parties anyway.
My children have grown used to me suddenly pulling off the side of the road to jot down a column idea, and when I go racing to the computer repeating some sentence aloud over and over again, they know I’m about to work on my book and can’t be bothered or else I’ll lose my train of thought.
My dad, however, who is a retired Navy pilot, is glad I started all this after he left the military and when I was no longer "his" dependent.
Excerpted from Going Overboard © Copyright 2008 by Sarah Smiley. Reprinted with permission by NAL Trade. All rights reserved.
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