The Fix, Upworthy, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and other places. She has worked as a copy editor in national magazines—primarily women’s—for twenty years, including Vanity Fair, GQ, People, and Good Housekeeping.
Carney applied the "Page 99 Test" to My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, her first book, with the following results:
As much as I hoped to be the exception to the rule, I was shocked to open my book, My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, to page 99 and find that it meets the criteria:Visit Laura Carney's website."What?" I wrote back. He sent me a GIF from Point Break of Keanu Reeves saying this to Patrick Swayze, just before he rides a wave likely to kill him. "I thought you watched it?" Dave said.This scene took place in my first year of checking off my late father's bucket list. I had just successfully checked off "surf in the Pacific Ocean," and had plopped on Venice Beach, exhausted. I texted my brother the good news. On page 98, I shared the phrase he responded with in his text back "Vaya con dias."
I looked up the phrase.
It means "go with God."
Why I think this sums up my entire book:
My brother was the one to find my dad's list. He intuited that he should give it to me. He'd had it in a box for 13 years, since our dad was killed by a distracted driver. We were both young when this happened. A central conflict for me as I checked off my dad's list was whether I was doing the right thing. These were his dreams, not mine. Was it wrong that I was receiving lessons meant for him? What if I ended up unstable financially or in my career as my father often seemed to be to my teenage eyes? As I watched my status change—one I'd been attached to previously, as my job at a national women's magazine struck me as important—I often found myself studying my peers, my friends, cousins, stepbrothers and brother. I worried that I was falling behind. That they were acting like typical 40-somethings while I had regressed to age 25.
Earlier in this chapter, I describe meeting President Jimmy Carter (another list item) and listening to his Sunday school lesson, which encompassed the principles of Phillippians 2:13: "...for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." I don't give the actual Bible verse in the book, but it's an odd coincidence that just two days before hearing that Sunday school lesson, I climbed Stone Mountain with my husband, reciting my favorite Bible verse towards the top (Phillippians 3:14): "I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Both passages emphasize the very thing my brother says at the end of that chapter: "go with God."
He was saying it somewhat facetiously, because he's funny. When Keanu Reeves says that to Patrick Swayze in Point Break, he's saying goodbye, because there is no way Patrick Swayze will survive the wave he's about to surf. But at the same time, Reeves's character respects Swayze's chutzpah. Is life worth living if you're not doing what you love? That's a question Swayze often asks in the movie.
The word 'goodbye' itself stems from the phrase "God be with you." And what is My Father's List if not a book about how to say goodbye? It's by recognizing that our loved ones continue to travel with us. Jimmy Carter said so. Keanu Reeves, too. And in that moment on page 99, so did my brother. The main blessing I needed to continue on.
--Marshal Zeringue
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