I Know This Much Is True (134 page)

We Wequonnoc-Italians celebrate wholeness—the roundness of things.

I was forty-one years old the year I lost my brother and found my fathers—the one who had died years before and the one who’d been there all along. In the years since, I have become a wealthy man, a little girl’s father, and the husband, once again, of the woman I I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 897

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always loved but thought I had lost for good. Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

I teach American history now, at the Wequonnoc School—a different kind of history than Mr. LoPresto used to teach. My students balk at tests, complain that I give too much work, and learn, I like to think, what I have learned: that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed. More than anyone, it was my maternal grandfather, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, who taught me that. I have come, finally, to a kind of gratitude for Papa’s legacy—that troublesome document by which he tried and failed so miserably to prove his “greatness” to “Italian youth.” God—life—can be both merciful
and
ironic, I have come to believe. Papa approached his true worth only when he rolled that rented Dictaphone equipment onto the porch, sent home the stenographer, and retreated to the backyard to face his failures. Until he had humbled himself. Papa, I treasure your gift.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.

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f

Who Is Wally Lamb?

Wally Lamb, recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship,
addressed the National Council on the Arts on November 2, 2001.

I didn’t start writing short stories until 1981, the year I was thirty, but I believe the seeds for my fiction writer’s life may have been planted way back in 1961, the year I was ten. JFK had just been inaugurated, Dion and the Belmonts were belting out “Runaround Sue,” and I was a public school student growing up in blue-collar Norwich, Connecticut. As such, I was required by my Italian-Catholic mother to attend catechism class at St. Patrick’s Parochial School each Wednesday, which was where I had a close encounter with Sister Mercy.

This was, of course, the baby boomer era, and so, after spending the long school day with thirty-four or thirty-five parochial school students, the last thing Sister Mercy wanted to do on Wednesday afternoons at 3:30 was welcome into her midst thirty-six or thirty-seven rowdy public school students. We were equally unhappy to be there and so there was acting out, answering back. Some of us were
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exiled to the cloakroom. Then, at 4:29 p.m. we would all thank God for His mercy and hold our collective breath.

The old school clock on the wall in Sister’s room was the type that measured time both visually and audibly. As the minute hand would prepare to move toward the magical moment of 4:30, it would first lunge back a bit, then thrust forward with a
ca-chunk
,
ca-chunk
.

“Class … dismissed!” Sister would announce and we would thunder toward the door and pound down the stairs as if the Good Humor man was waiting outside on the sidewalk with free samples.

Now, I was much too big a scaredy cat to be a troublemaker in Sister’s class; my m.o. for survival was to sit in back, say nothing, and try as best I could to blend into the wainscoting. But on the afternoon I became a fiction writer, I got a strange urge. I wanted Sister Mercy to like me. Or, if she couldn’t like me, then at least to be aware that I existed. And so, on that day, when the minute hand lurched first backward, then forward,
ca-chunk
,
ca-chunk
, and Sister intoned those liberating words, “Class … dismissed!” and my peers scrambled toward the exits, I hung back. Stood up. Approached, with trepidation, Sister’s big wooden desk.

She was already scowling and correcting her parochial students’

papers and so didn’t notice me at first as I stood facing her. Now, earlier that same day, in public school, two of my friends, Howard Goldberg and Johnny Jacobsen, had brought into our science class a papier-mâché volcano. And they had poured baking soda into the core of their creation and, with the help of vinegar, had made lava bubble up and spring forth and dribble down the sides. And this demonstration had impressed me and was still very much on my mind.

Sister looked up from the papers she was correcting. “Yes, what is it?”

“Sister, my grandfather moved to this country from Italy in 1890,” I said.

Which was true. He had. Pure, untainted non-fiction. But I could see from Sister’s clenched facial muscles that it didn’t impress her in the least.

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And so I continued. “And … and, before he came over here, while he was still in Italy, this volcano started erupting in his town early one morning and he was the only one up and so he ran around pounding on people’s doors and everyone woke up and ran to safety and … and he saved a bunch of people’s lives.”

Sister’s facial muscles relaxed a tad. She cocked her head and her gold rim glasses glinted a little from the light of a fluorescent lamp above our heads. But I could see that my marriage of fact to fiction had fallen just short of being quite enough. For a fiction writer-to-be, it was a moment of truth. A moment suspended in time. Sister waited. I waited. And then, finally, I said, “…And the Pope gave him a medal.”

Well, Sister smiled broadly. She reached down to her bottom right-hand desk drawer, drew out a holy picture, and gave it to me.

The following Wednesday afternoon, Sister knew my name, I had preferred seating up front, and, for the rest of that school year, whenever there was need for a note to pass from Sister to the office, you can probably guess who got to deliver it.

And so, at the tender age of ten, I learned of the rich rewards that can be yours if you take the truth and lie like hell about it.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I did not, after that experience with Sister Mercy, grow up to become a con artist or a pathological liar. I became a high school English teacher. And then a father. And, then at the age of thirty, a fiction writer. We had no money, my bride and I, and when the kids came along, my wife took a leave of absence from the elementary school where she taught and we went abruptly from two teachers’ salaries to one.

But I’d begun setting the alarm for 4:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings and dragging myself out of bed early and fooling around with fiction. See, I’d get these characters’ voices in my head, and I’d write down what they said and worry about them and root for them to be okay and wonder what was going to happen and not know what was going to happen until it came out of the pointy end of my Bic pen. As I worked on these short stories, I defied as best I could another voice, the voice of doubt, that kept saying to me, Stop I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 902

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kidding yourself. You’re never getting anything published. Get up from that desk. Go outside and mow the lawn.

But I let the lawn grow and toiled away on weekends and summer vacations and then, one day, ratcheted up my courage and submitted a story to
Northeast
magazine, the Sunday supplement of
The
Hartford Courant
. This story, my fourth or fifth, was a first-person tale of a hapless fat woman whose jerk of a husband had just left her.

Her name was Mary Ann at first and then she became Dolores. I liked Dolores, who was struggling to survive with self-deprecating humor, biting sarcasm, and Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Mallomars, M&Ms.

I put the story in a manila envelope and mailed it to
Northeast
.

For seven months, I heard only the sound of silence. Then one afternoon, long after my publishing fantasies had been reined back in, I got a phone call from the editor, Larry Bloom. He said he was going to publish my story. I hung up, grabbed my wife and danced her around the kitchen. Then I picked up our three-year-old son, Jared, and tossed him so high into the air that his head hit the ceiling. (But don’t worry: this was one of those suspended ceilings with the light-weight panels. He didn’t hurt his head; it just disappeared for a second or two in the rafters and then re-emerged.) The story, titled “Keep in a Cool, Dry Place,” was published in
Northeast
on Easter Sunday, 1984. I drove at dawn to the convenience store, bought three
Hartford Courant
s, and, for ten minutes, couldn’t bear to look. Then I did look, and sat there by myself in the strip mall parking lot, and cried like an idiot.

I was on my way.

Now fast-forward sixteen years to June of 1999. My son Jared has transformed from that airborne three-year-old into a 6’2” man of eighteen. These days, if I tried to toss Jared into the air, I’d need back surgery. He helps me heft my luggage out to the driveway where a purring limousine waits. By this time, I’ve been touched twice by the magic wand of the Oprah Book Club, and readers have responded favorably, and so I am about to go on the road — flying progressively west on a twelve-city book tour to support the trade I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 903

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paperback release of my second novel,
I Know This Much Is True
. A chauffeur opens the back door for me — a courtesy which embarrasses me a little, just as, when I walk through airports around the country and see my books in racks and storefront windows, I look away from them, grateful but chagrined.

Rock stars on tour bust up their hotel rooms. They get drunk or high, punch holes in walls, trash the furniture with their band-mates. But authors on tour are quieter, more solitary souls. Between appointments, we sit by ourselves in our rooms, nibbling like prairie dogs on room service sandwiches or ironing our clothes for the next reading or watching Judge Judy.

On my book tour, I met one elderly woman who informed me that writers like me, who let their characters use four-letter words, are degenerates who are ripping and tearing at the moral fiber of this great country; and, twelve or thirteen people back in the same signing line, I met another elderly woman who stood fidgeting with her pocketbook strap as she informed me that, in her humble opinion, I was “one of the best writers to ever shit behind a pair of shoes.”

In Berkeley, California, a middle-aged man told me, in tears, that his brother, a recent suicide, had suffered from schizophrenia and that my novel had been a life raft tossed to him at a time when he thought he might drown from guilt and despair.

Entering a Borders bookstore in Austin, Texas to autograph copies of my book, I passed none other than Monica Lewinsky, exiting after having autographed copies of hers.

In Lexington, Kentucky, I met, in the signing line, a bride of two hours who was still wearing her wedding dress. Her groom, she said, was waiting in the car.

And in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio, I had the most surreal experience of all: in the act of channel surfing, I came upon the quiz show
Jeopardy
at the exact moment my name surfaced: “He wrote the novel
She’s Come Undone
,” Alex Trebeck stated. And the three contestants stood there, lockjawed and mute, itching but unable to press their thumbs to their buzzers. And sitting on the edge of the I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 904

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bed in Room 714 of the Westin Hotel, I uttered in a timid and tentative voice,
Who is Wally Lamb?

I am, when I write fiction, people other than myself. To write a first-person novel is to go on a journey by sitting each day in the same place — to park yourself before the page and, simultaneously, to stow away in the suitcase of some other, imagined person’s life. To see the world from a foreign perspective. That’s how I became a woman in
She’s Come Undone
and the embittered twin brother of a paranoid schizophrenic in
I Know This Much Is True
. In the latter novel, I was also a turn-of-the-century Sicilian immigrant.

Although, at the time I was writing in the voice of Domenico Tempesta, the protagonist’s grandiose grandfather, I possessed no passport and had never traveled outside of the continental United States.

So I do not usually follow the standard rule espoused in creative writing classes: write what you know. My impulse, instead, is to write about what I don’t know so that I can live the life of “the other”

and move beyond the limitations — the benign prison — of my own life experiences and explore tales of other imperfect, unfinished people who launch themselves from the safety and security of home into the realm of the unsafe, the unknown, because they want something, need something, that home can’t give them. Characters, in short, who are on quests. Odysseys.

My odyssey as a fiction-writer almost ended a month or so into the writing of my second novel. It had taken me nearly nine years to write my first — to manage the balancing act of hands-on parenting, full-time high school teaching, and stolen pre-dawn weekend hours for fiction writing. I was exhausted, fearful that I was a one-shot wonder, and frustrated that I was always disappointing somebody. My kids and my wife and my ailing parents all needed me, and my students needed me, too, as did my characters, neglected for long stretches and stranded on some island I could never seem to get to.