1st BOOKS: Reading and Writing with Friends

Elizabeth Benedict is the author of five novels, including the bestseller Almost, and the National Book Award finalist, Slow Dancing, as well as The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. She is the editor of two anthologies, the just-published What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most (which I’m reading and loving), and Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. She taught creative writing for more than 20 years at Princeton, Iowa, Barnard, and elsewhere, and works as an editor and writing coach. -Meg

My grandmother never used to phone me, so when I heard her voice on the phone that night in 1985, I was startled. “I just read your book,” she said sharply. She said everything sharply. She meant my first novel, Slow Dancing, which had recently been published by Knopf and greeted with far more attention than I had expected, “And I don’t like it. When are you going to write a book your grandmother will like?”

I knew what she meant: the book was filled with sex – the pre-marital kind – and references to it, beginning with the opening line. To her, it was “about” sex, but to me it was about two women best friends, finding their ways professionally and romantically in the plenty-of-sex pre-AIDS 1970s and ‘80s. They were women who cared about doing fulfilling work and having fulfilling sex, until men worthy of greater investments came along and made them rethink their blustery attitudes. This is all pretty standard fare for the 21^st century, but back in 1985, it had an edge, a boldness, that made people take notice.

I was on to something: Sex! Careers! Friendship! I was famous for twelve or fifteen minutes back then, but my success was no match for what happened ten years later to Candace Bushnell. When she wrote a book about these matters, Sex and the City, she had the good sense to add money, clothes and New York’s obsession with status to the mix (my characters defended immigrants, and I doubt they thought for ten seconds about their “wardrobes”), and earned quite a few more dollars than I did. I only dwell on this alternate Mondays.

In the decades that have passed, I’ve published many books, and hundreds of articles and essays. But it’s only in the last week that my grandmother’s phone call has come back to me, as I talk in public about my new book, What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, an anthology I edited. I asked 30 well-known women, nearly all of them writers, to choose a favorite gift from their mothers – most wrote about an object – and use it as a lens through which to explore their relationships with their mothers.

Rita Dove wrote about a box of nail polish. Joyce Carol Oates remembered the quilts her mother made that comforted her when her husband died. Caroline Leavitt told the history of an important family photograph. Roxana Robinson told the story her horse Babe. And I wrote about the scarf my mother gave me shortly before she died. Once she died, I became obsessed with it, though I never spoke to anyone about it – because I didn’t have the words for the mixture of grief and confusion it created. Years later, still thinking about it, I wondered if other women had a gift from their mothers that meant as much to them. My book came from that question.

I could call this the first book that I know for certain my grandmother would like, if she were still alive. But more seriously, it’s also the first book in which I’ve written candidly about my feelings for my mother, who died in 2004 after many years of dementia. She was a sweet, kindly woman of many gifts, especially for painting and sculpture, but had been beaten down by life, by a long, bad marriage to my father, and a bad divorce, which left her with nothing, and resulted in decades of worry. She worked, as a secretary, but did not have a cushion of any kind. Without Medicare and Social Security, and Medicaid, when she had to move to a nursing home, she would have had nothing.

I grew up precocious, as many kids do in Manhattan, and from an early age, I was independent and found a woman who lived in our building whom I decided I wanted for my mother. Unlike my mother, she was bold, glamorous and had a big personality. It certainly helped that she was from Los Angeles and had worked as a model. She didn’t seem intimidated by any of her husbands – and she seemed to travel through the world as though she were a movie star instead of a depressed, downtrodden mother.

Of course I loved my mother, and felt sorry for her, and wanted her life to be better, but I did not want to identify with her. I wanted to keep my distance. I wanted to be another sort of woman, another sort of wife. When it came to whether or not I’d become a mother, I spent many years trying, many years wondering if I wanted to. My husband and I eventually signed up with an adoption agency. But by the time they called with a child for us, I understood that my marriage was rocky and that I would have to leave it. I didn’t want a child as much as many of my friends did, those who adopted in unhappy marriages, adopted solo, or gave birth with donor sperm. I didn’t have an overwhelming need to connect with a child because I hadn’t had all that great a connection with my mother.

All during these years, I was writing novels that delved deeply into the feelings of my characters. But the mothers in my novels had no relation to my own mother, except in a later one, where the main character’s mother has a walk-on part as a mom losing her memory, which seemed generic enough to mask the more complicated truth.

My mother didn’t appear in my fiction because I had no way to describe – or do I mean to disguise? – the distance I felt from her. When certain popular books or magazine articles about mothers came to my attention, I didn’t read them. I no more identified with the community of women and their mothers than I identified with Queen Noor of Jordan – an American woman about my age who had grown up in the U.S. and then married a Middle-Eastern king. Sure, we had come from the same place – but we ended up on different planets. When I looked around at my closest women friends, almost every one had a tragic mother story, one more heartbreaking than the next. I was comfortable with women who’d had damaged mothers, mothers who had never been quite all there for them.

During the years my mother lived in an assisted living facility and later a nursing home, where I visited her often, the distance between us wore away, slowly, and belatedly. After she died, I became attached to the scarf she had given me, bought in the assisted living facility, from a vendor who had come for the holidays. My attachment to the scarf, and to the way it came to symbolize my new closeness to my mother, led me to wonder if other women had such a gift from their mothers, a gift that encapsulated the relationship, that opened to the door to its history and complexity.

Dozens of well-known women writers knew what I was talking about, and contributed an essay to the new anthology. But I didn’t write the essay I knew I wanted to contribute until I received all the others. I was too busy editing to take time out to write – and, more important, I knew I had to back myself into a corner to write candidly, to delve as deeply into my real feelings as many fictional characters I’d created have delved into theirs.

I gave myself a weekend. I stayed in a bedroom alone with my computer and piles of all the other essays. I laid in a supply of food. And though I didn’t drink any alcohol or take a mood-altering drug, I wrote in something of a drunken trance about the scarf, about my history with my mother, and how and where the two intersected. I was in my fifties, both my parents were gone, and there was nothing holding me back from telling the story. I’d asked 30 other women to tell their stories. It was only fair that I tell mine. And it was certainly time.

Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that everything serious is difficult, and that everything is serious. The reward for doing the difficult work is often that we feel lighter afterwards, and that we can revel in the accomplishment, the lightness, and the light for a good while, before we are compelled to move on. – Elizabeth

I’m delighted today to host Caroline Paul, whose Lost Cat is just out from Bloomsbury. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, calls it “Hilarious and moving” and says, “Even non–cat lovers will find this an engaging read, charmingly illustrated by Paul’s partner, [Wendy] MacNaughton, as Paul easily makes her strong emotions for her pets accessible and universal.” Caroline is also the author of East Wind, Rain and Fighting Fire, and we met years ago, at a mutual friend’s launch party. It’s always lovely to meet over books. Enjoy her post, and please find her Lost Cat … on your local bookstore shelves! – Meg

I wrote my first book, at least initially, as therapy. You’re not supposed to do it this way, and I tell that now to anyone who asks. A memoir is not therapy, I say. Find the story, blablabla. Nevertheless, Fighting Fire came out of a need to vent, add meaning, understand, like any good therapy session. So now you know: writers are hypocrites.

I’d had a sheltered upbringing in privileged White America; then, at the age of 26, I became a San Francisco firefighter. Suddenly my days were filled with heroin addicts, AIDS victims, suicides, car accidents, and of course, fires. Big fires. My first dead body was a murder victim, beaten with a bat. My first fire was arson. I did CPR on an infant. A flashover in a nearby room blew me and my crew out of a hallway. It was as if I was living in a Russian novel, where every page someone dies. Hopes are dashed by a single misstep. Violence, mayhem, and bad luck are constantly converging. Someone is always cursing God.

So I wrote it down. I wanted to remember the adventures, but more I wanted to understand my own feelings as I bore witness to strange, terrible and intimate moments. It was an easy book to write, is the way I remember it. It was easy because, compared to being the 15th women in a department of 1500 men, or running headlong into a burning building, well, maybe most things are easy. But it was also easy because I had no idea what I was doing. I wrote long, flowery sentences. I started at the beginning, not in the middle. I compensated for poor dialogue by … more poor dialogue. Luckily it’s hard to go too wrong if you’re writing about fire, death, destruction, and rescuing animals. Mostly, though, it’s hard to go wrong if you have a kick-ass editor, and I did. Elaine Pfefferblit of Crown streamlined my sentences, cohered my thoughts, and tightened my narrative. If writing a book to publication is a fire, she was the best on my crew, crawling ahead of me in the pitch black, the nozzle tucked under armpit, heading to the seat of the inferno. She kicked all the therapy out of that manuscript, and wrestled it into a story.

It was a great experience – big tour, lots of media, money made. Writing wasn’t my real career – I was still a firefighter, after all – so the stakes didn’t feel high. Slowly, though, I became painfully aware of how many books are published each year. I was besieged by people asking me how to get an agent, how to sell a manuscript, what to write. My stomach buckled at their hope and their desperation. I saw that I had just been lucky. I had approached writing a book as if fighting a fire, with a combination of bravado and denial. Flinching, I remembered how I thought I had so much to say. Every adverb was a jewel! Every adjective, vital! Every long, convoluted sentence, a necessary path to truth! Just in time for the second book, and my retirement from the fire department, I realized I had nothing to say. I wanted my starry-eyed ignorance back. But I’d seen the proverbial charred bodies, the mangled limbs. I couldn’t return to innocence. Second books are a bitch, for this reason. Write them, though, and get them published, because only then can you begin to believe you are a real writer.

My third book, Lost Cat, A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, came out from Bloomsbury yesterday. My perspective has changed one more time. I wrote it understanding that I do indeed have something to say; not as much as I once thought, but not as little either. I’m not starry-eyed. But I’m joyful in a different way – steadier, more appreciative. I’m proud of this book, and the journey it took to get here (countless other bad manuscripts, rejected books, trashed pages. Trust me, countless.) And it all started with a naivete I no longer have, but which I encourage in others who are writing first books. Be starry eyed. Throw bejeweled and overwrought sentences on the page (but edit them out later.) Write your heart out. Start from there, and you’ll persevere, because that spark remains lit, from book to book to book, a righteousness that ignores all stats and factoids about publishing and insists I have something to say, and I’m going to write it down. – Caroline