Jennifer duBois: When One Falls In Love With a Book

     Really loving a book—especially one that not everyone else in the world has read—comes with a very particular blend of emotions. There’s the feeling of private elation, as though the book’s been written for you personally. There’s that impulse to babble to everyone about how much you loved the book. And there’s the sense of gratitude that, out of the vast universe of books, this particular book happened to find you. All of these feelings are heightened, I think, when one falls in love with a book that has, in one way or another, only recently emerged and become available to you—either through a translation or an exhumation or a re-release. Over the past decade, I’ve read three books of this sort that have particularly stayed with me: Embers by Sandor Marai, Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, and There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

     Desperate Characters, originally published in 1970, was re-released in 1999 after many years out of print. It’s a prickly and perfect little book, written with economy and grace and wryness and an astonishing command of our sympathies. Fox skewers the solipsism of her characters—Sophie and Otto Bentwood, fragile inhabitants of late-60s New York—without ever abandoning her empathy for them, and she’s a master of strange and chilling and small domestic symbolism (the plot mostly revolves around Sophie waiting to find out if she’s contracted rabies from the bite of a stray cat). Sophie and Otto’s lives provide the perfect canvass to delineate, with wrenching clarity, the changing social and political landscape of the time. Desperate Characters is that very rare thing—a social novella, no less wise and prophetic for being so slim.  

     Embers was written in Hungarian in 1949, fell out of print forever, and was translated into English in 2000, eleven years after Marai committed suicide. It’s an enchanting and haunting novella, told mostly as an elegant monologue—and extended accusation— delivered by an aging general to an old friend he’s invited over for dinner. The fact of the general’s direct address invites us to feel implicated in the events he describes—and I think in a strange way this device manages to subvert the possible artificial coyness of withholding the revelation of what’s occurred. By telling us what’s happened as though we already know, we sort of feel as though we do. This book feels like a fairy tale in the very best way, and its emergence from obscurity (and Hungarian) adds to this mythic feel. 

      There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby is a collection of stories that were selected and translated into English by Anna Summers and Keith Gessen and published in 2009. Though widely known in Russia, this collection was Petrushevskaya’s first English translation from a major American house. The stories are deeply strange and spare and utterly singular; they grapple with the inexplicable; they careen from dreaminess to nighmarishness, and from the literal to the metaphorical, and back again. They straddle realism and surrealism in a way that is both disturbing and gorgeous; one is always left wondering, deliciously, what kind of story one has just read. 

     All three of these books would be lovely and thrilling no matter what—at any time, and in any language. But the fact that they’ve only recently become accessible to me, as a reasonably young reader of English, makes them—at least to me—even more intoxicating and compelling. 

Jennifer duBois: How should one proceed when the cause is lost?

Not long ago, I was asked in a radio interview what I might do if confronted with the situation my character, Irina, finds herself in A Partial History of Lost Causes. Given a diagnosis of impending Huntington’s disease--the fatal neurological disease that she’d watched slowly kill her father—Irina runs away from her life. She leaves her boyfriend and mother and job and friends, and she goes to Russia to ask Aleksandr Bezetov (a chess champion turned dissident, loosely based on Garry Kasparov) a pretty abstract question: how should one proceed when the cause is lost? In the book, the tenuousness of Irina’s links to her life—most importantly, her relationships—allows her to go on this strange last adventure. Might I do something similar, the interviewer asked, if I were in Irina’s shoes? How might I look for meaning? I said that I’d have to run away to Russia to find Garry Kasparov, of course, but that was not at all true. The question made me contemplate Irina’s profound and distinctive isolation, and the ways in which this feature of her character enables the book’s plot. And the experience of promoting Partial History has reminded me (as if I could ever forget), how very different I am from Irina on this score—and how the existence of the book itself, and Irina in particular, feels to me to be a very communal effort.



The truth is, I think I would probably do the opposite of what Irina does if I was in her situation: I imagine I would cling to my fiancé and my mother and my friends; I would tediously invest in my relationships; and though I’m sure I’d share a huge portion of Irina’s self-pity and fear, her philosophical concerns (even for a former philosophy major like myself) might, at the end of the day, turn out to be pretty low on my list of priorities. This would probably be a typical response; after all, millions of people confront the exact same diagnosis as Irina without doing anything so dramatic and self-indulgent as she does. But I wanted to write a story about someone who does do something dramatic and who is propelled by the abstract, and that meant writing a character like Irina: isolated in the extreme, at least at the book’s beginning, and unable to invest (or so she thinks) in much of anything—even though she recognizes, on some level, that her problem is really everyone’s problem (namely, mortality).

It’s been interesting, then, for me to read from the point of view of such a remote person to bookstore crowds composed overwhelmingly of my relatives and teachers and friends and friends of friends and parents and cousins and in-laws of friends, many of whom contributed to the book in ways known and unknown to them: the Iowa classmate who gave me brilliant line edits and the fourth grade teacher who let me write stories with spelling words instead of taking spelling tests; the Stanford colleague who directly solved a second chapter problem and the great college friend/ghost publicist who tirelessly promoted the book to everyone, everywhere; the hugely talented high school buddy who took my author photo and the inspiring history teacher who pushed me to deal with my public speaking fear; the tireless Alzheimer’s home health aide, who gave Irina her pragmatism; my widowed mother and widowed aunt, who gave Irina her resilience.

In A Partial History of Lost Causes, Irina’s isolation grants her a freedom to do things that—at least narratively, and at least to my mind—are more interesting than the things that most normal, reasonably socialized people might do in her place. So I’m glad that Irina is a solitary person. But I’m also glad that I’m not. Because standing behind Irina—even though she doesn’t know it—is an entire army of people I’ve learned from and loved. And they have made both of us possible.

C. J. Noonan: What a Newly Published Author Learns

“Evocative” is a powerful word in a book review. The critic implies mystery, depth of feeling, swell of remembrance, emotion rising. Readers assume fascination, excitement, complexity, sensation. As a new author, I value the adjective. It guided my writing.

“An evocative first novel from C.J. Noonan begins in the rough, early 20^th century Sierra Nevada outpost of Truckee, California. It chronicles the tumultuous growing-up years of five children during the California woman’s rights movement and closes with the startling understandings of a good woman’s life, lived long.” These words are used to describe my novel, The House on Harrigan’s Hill.

A novel contains memoir and imagination. My novel’s characters, called “animated, no wooden, lifeless personalities…” from one reader’s brief Amazon review, are based on my grandmother’s early life. The events happened, told to me many times by my grandmother. Settings in the book come from places I know well in Sacramento, the Sierra Nevada, and Truckee. Beloved objects in the story decorate my home today. But these are all carefully chosen from among many events, scenes, and furnishings to add insight and to interpret the particular characters, landscape, and actions of the story. The novel is a doppelganger; two sides of a coin; or as the protagonist says things “remembered … one way and Tiny had a completely different memory.”

First time novelists are urged to block out a careful sequence of action that builds to a climax and resolves the conflicts in a denouement. They are told to spend time making character outlines. And some writers do. I used a more chaotic method. I just wrote and new ideas rolled out of my mind as the sequences developed. I moved sections around and rewrote as a new angle came to mind. I spent time thinking about what was going on in the character’s head to make them act a certain way. I recalled that the real “Mama,” my great grandmother, was a fountain of poems, lines from Shakespeare, and sayings from the Bible, so I molded that character to include those traits. They make her unique, which she was.

At workshops, on the internet, and from friends the advice was “get a reader.” The college writing professor friend who read the novel through many drafts helped beyond compare. She refers to me as one of her successful “mentees.” How lucky I was!

The Bay Area Writing Project’s emphasis on reading a draft and accepting the expert advice from colleagues was invaluable. I remember Jim Gray (first Writing Project director and friend) who promoted teachers as writers. From his words of wisdom I learned that a writing group is a must. The five pairs of eyes in my group, reading the same chapter I’d struggled over for weeks, suddenly provided a solution to a perplexing, seemingly irresolvable problem. That’s essential for every novelist, and especially a first timer.

The House on Harrigan’s Hill took four and a half years to write, rewrite, and rewrite again. Yes, I took vacations, worked on senate and presidential elections, wrote short stories and weekly posts to my education blog, attended the many plays offered in the Bay Area, and generally lived my life. But the novel was in my imagination day and night.

It was frustrating that agents and publishers did not immediately see a sure winner in the novel set in early 20^th century California, filled with quirky, quixotic characters living during social and economic upheaval high in the Sierra, with a climax at the time of the election for the Woman Suffrage Amendment that gave California women the right to vote.

The House on Harrigan’s Hill was published by Sea-Hill Press. It’s available at Kepler’s and Books, Inc (Mountain View) as well as Amazon. Word of thanks to the Los Gatos Library, first to put it on the shelf. And thanks to friends and relations who have spread the word about a new author and a wonderful book. They speak the magic word: “Evocative!”

-Claire

Meg Waite Clayton: In Praise of Writing Friends … and Publishing and Bookselling Ones, Too

The history of my writing starts with a purse. Like the character of Linda in my second novel, The Wednesday Sisters, my first writing teacher—at a college extension class—dumped hers out over the table and told us to write for five minutes about anything that spilled out. She swore we wouldn’t have to read (just as Linda does in The Wednesday Sisters when she’s pushing the sisters to write at the picnic table in the park). Then she called on me to read first.

Which is the good news. If she hadn’t, I’d have ducked out before she could. It had taken all the nerve I had just to get to that class, to admit that, yes, I dreamed of writing novels.

To make a long story short from that point, I’m just going to say it: Ten Years. That’s how long it took me from dumped purse to first novel on bookstore shelves. The thing that kept me going: writing friends. Like the Wednesday Sisters in the book, none of my early writing friends was published when we started out, but we now count - as of the publication of The Four Ms. Bradwells yesterday - seven books between the four of us, and an eighth under contract. We’re a stubborn bunch—which, if you’ve read any of the guest posts I’ve been honored to host on 1st Books—seems to be what it takes. So it seems fitting that the first Four Ms. Bradwells sighting was by my best writer-pal, Brenda Rickman Vantrease.

It took me another five years to get a second novel published after my first, The Language of Light, sold "modestly." (I'm absolutely thrilled, though, that Ballantine will be releasing it in paperback for the first time this June.) In the interim, I learned the hard way that while just being published is lovely, book sales are important, too. I have come to see that booksellers are the front line in helping new voices find audiences, and I do my best to support the booksellers who support writers. Selling books is as much a labor of love as writing them is.

And so is publishing. I know the publishing world can seem impersonal. Believe me, I know what a form rejection looks like. But I also know that most people in publishing stay there because they love books, and work really, really hard. I feel incredibly lucky to have a wonderful team helping me negotiate the turbulent waves of these changing publishing days.

Which leaves me with readers.

C.S. Lewis once said, "We read to know that we are not alone." It's a funny thing to think that a solo activity connects us in ways that little else does. But I know reading has made me feel understood, and helped me understand myself in ways that nothing else does. I hope that my writing will make you feel understood, too. And I appreciate all the precious time you commit to reading. Without readers, there would be no books. - Meg

P.S. If you're leaving here to take a look at The Four Ms. Bradwells - thank you! And will you take a look at The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen as well? It came out yesterday, too, and is a wonderful novel. Thanks!