She's Come Undone (2 page)

At the time, I was enrolled in a master of fine arts writing program at Vermont College. (Today it's the Vermont College of Fine Arts.) I showed my work to my teacher, Gladys Swan, who said, “Well, muh dear, I think you have a few too many pots boiling on the stove for this to be a short story.” I asked her what she thought I should cut. “Maybe nothing,” she said. “Maybe you're trying to tell yourself you want to write a novel.” Had I known at that moment that I was about to embark on the nine-year roller-coaster ride that would result in
She's Come Undone,
I might have run screaming from the room. But ignorance served me well during that exchange. “A
novel
?” I said. “How do you write a
novel
?”

Gladys advised me to return to the wellspring. “The world is a very old place, and you're never going to tell a completely original story,” she said. “The reason the archetypal stories have withstood the test of time is because they illuminate the human condition. People
need
them to be told, over and over. If you want to write a modern novel, study ancient myth.”

I left my meeting with Gladys armed with a reading list that included Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
Heinrich Zimmer's
The King and the Corpse,
and Homer's mythopoetic masterpiece,
The Odyssey
. As unlikely as it sounds, the latter story eventually became the spine of
She's Come Undone
. I built Mary Ann a backstory and sent her off on a conflict-laden quest to find herself.

With my novel well on its way, I submitted an excerpt to
Northeast,
the Sunday magazine of the
Hartford Courant.
Faith Middleton, now of National Public Radio fame, was reading
Northeast
's “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. She notified me that she liked my story and was sending it on to editor Lary Bloom for his consideration. When Lary called to say that the story would be published, I was so elated that I picked up my son, now a toddler, and tossed him so far into the air that his head hit the kitchen ceiling. Luckily, it was one of those drop ceilings with the foam-backed pads, so Jared didn't hurt his head. It just disappeared for a second and then came back into view. “Keep in a Cool, Dry Place” was published on Easter Sunday of 1982. I got up early, drove to the convenience store, and purchased the
Hartford Courant
. Then I went back to my car, flipped to my work in print, and cried like an idiot. Shortly after that, while preparing a vocabulary lesson for my high school students, I looked up the definition of the word “dolorous.”
Marked by or exhibiting sorrow, grief, or pain,
the dictionary said. That was when Mary Ann became Dolores.

In all of literature, you will not find a character more unlike bold and valiant Odysseus than inhibited, caustic Dolores Price. And yet, they take parallel journeys. Odysseus must leave the safety and security of his beloved Ithaca, do battle in the Trojan War, and then find his way back home. Dolores must launch herself past the claustrophobic safety of her grandmother's Easterly, Rhode Island, home to honor her dead mother's wish that she go to college. On their respective journeys, both characters are banged up and bloodied. Both
do
their fair share of banging up and bloodying others. Both are aided along the way by oracles. “I'll give you what I learned from all this,” Dolores's friend Mr. Pucci tells her just before he dies from the ravages of HIV-AIDS. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.” Like Odysseus, a renovated Dolores returns home by story's end, sadder, wiser, and ready to test the life's lessons her journey has taught her about how, for the sake of herself and others, to live a more authentic life.

As the novel was nearing completion, I began to have fantasies
that it
might
be published, but I was in the dark about how the publishing industry worked. My parents had recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary, and for a gift I gave them a trip to New York City, booking them a room at the Edison Hotel, where they had stayed on their honeymoon. Before they left, I asked my mom and dad if they might bring me back the yellow pages of a phone book so that I could get some addresses of New York publishers. My sweet and timid mother went to the Edison's front desk and asked permission to tear out said yellow pages from the phone book in their room. My father later reported that the desk clerk had looked at her funny and said no. But my not-so-sweet-and-timid father took a different approach. He went back up to their room and tore out the pages anyway.

Figuring that publishers probably had slush piles, too, and that I might get lucky twice, I was busy stuffing and addressing manila envelopes the morning my wife came upstairs to my office and handed me a letter on Mary Kay–pink stationery. The letter was from a California-based literary agent, Linda Chester, who'd written to say that she had read another of my stories, “Astronauts,” which the
Missouri Review
had recently published. If I already had a literary agent, Linda said, I should consider hers a fan letter. (A
fan
letter? For
me
?) But if I was seeking representation and had anything longer—something of novel length, perhaps—then maybe we could talk.

Linda, by now my agent, had promised Judith Regan, an up-and-coming editor at Simon & Schuster, a “first look” at
Undone
once it was finished. My timing, however, was terrible. Judith took my completed draft with her to the hospital where she was about to deliver her daughter Lara by cesarean section. Judith later told me that after Lara's birth, she was feverish, in pain, and in no mood to read. She picked up my story anyway, planning to get through a polite twenty pages before sending it back with a “no thanks.” Instead, she stayed up all night reading it and, upon discharge from the hospital, hobbled into Simon & Schuster and told the publisher she wanted to purchase the novel.

Still on maternity leave, Judith invited me to Manhattan for a meeting at an Upper West Side restaurant. It was a scorching August day, I remember. I was so naïve about the way New York works, I had no idea how to hail a cab. Instead, I walked the forty or so blocks from Grand Central Station to the restaurant and arrived nervous as hell and sweating like a pig. Judith offered her hand for me to shake, and when I extended mine, I was mortified. That morning, I had cut my finger and covered it with the only first aid in the house—one of my son's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Band-Aids. But Judith must have forgiven me my faux pas. We became fast friends and have remained pals ever since.

Shortly before
Undone
's release, I gave a bound galley to my parents. My mother's reading was pretty much confined to
McCall's
and
Ladies' Home Journal,
and my dad's frequent boast was that he had not read a book since high school, and that he'd never finished any of
those
. But three weeks later, he called me to say that he had read Dolores's story from start to finish, and that he liked it. “But I was surprised you didn't kill her off at the end,” he said.

“Oh? Why is that?” I asked.

“Well, she could still be out there.”

Judith Regan's mother, Rita, had a similar misconception that Dolores was made of flesh and blood, not printer's ink on paper. “She wants to meet Dolores,” Judith informed me. I told Judith I'd like to meet her mother, too. “No, no,” Judith said. “My mother doesn't want to meet you. Just Dolores.”

She's Come Undone
was released in July of 1992. I was sent off on a six-city book tour—heady stuff for a high school English teacher, despite the fact that the sparse bookstore crowds sometimes included four or five employees hoping to help me save face. At each stop, I heard the same comments and questions from audience members who had read Dolores's story.
I had to keep flipping back to the book jacket photo to see if you were really a guy. . . . How could a man have written so effectively from a woman's viewpoint?
Truth be told, writing in the opposite gender hadn't seemed like such a big deal to me while the novel was in progress. I'd grown up in a neighborhood presided over by my older sisters and girl cousins, so there'd been nothing of the feminine mystique in
my
childhood. Moreover, I had had nine years' worth of feedback from my writers group, the female members of which were never shy about speaking up whenever I hit false notes, which I'd done often enough. But I had revised relentlessly. Besides, although I had
written
in Dolores's voice, what I had always
felt
was parental. Often when I picked up my Bic pen and invited my character to tell me a little more of her life story, I'd worry about the things she said, the things she did, the way the father of a not-quite-controllable daughter worries. But the consistency of those book tour questions and comments began to make me feel a little insecure—as if I'd broken some cardinal rule of which everyone but I had been aware. And so, after each reading when my escort would drop me back at my hotel, I'd take off my pants and check to make sure my male equipment was intact. Yup, still there. Relieved, I'd check my itinerary to see where my next tour stop would take me, crawl under the covers, and go to sleep.

When my tour reached California, Linda Chester's associate editor, Laurie Fox, took me to brunch at a lovely outdoor café. “What's that?” I said when she pulled a sheaf of legal-sized pages from her bag. Laurie said it was a book contract. The publisher wanted me to write a second novel and would pay me an advance to do so. “Isn't that a little ass-backwards?” I said. “Taking money for work I haven't done yet?” Laurie said that was an interesting way to look at it and poured me some more Chablis. Before brunch ended, I signed on the dotted line. By summer's end, I had taken a leave of absence from teaching and begun my second novel, which six years later would become
I Know This Much Is True,
a story about identical twin brothers, one of them schizophrenic.

With Dolores and company off my desk and out in the world,
reader mail began to trickle in. Telephone calls, too. When Oprah Winfrey called to tell me she had read and liked
Undone
—and that I owed her two nights' sleep—I kept pointing to the phone and mouthing to my wife, “Oprah! It's Oprah!” Chris has many talents, but lip-reading isn't one of them. “Hope?” she guessed. “Dope? The Pope?” I received this memorable call five years before Oprah launched her phenomenally popular TV book club and telephoned again to tell me that she'd selected
Undone
as the third title she was recommending to her millions of viewers. But Oprah's first call had nothing to do with her show. She had just wanted to tell me, reader to writer, that Dolores's story had spoken to her and that she was glad I'd written it. This, for me, has always been the cherry atop the sundae of all that came later.

Twenty years, two literary agents, and four novels later, I now have several plastic tubs overflowing with reader mail, much of it about
Undone
. I treasure all these letters, but my very favorite remains the one I received within the first year of the book's publication from a seriously mentally ill young man—a cutter who had repeatedly tried to relieve his pain through self-mutilation. Here's an excerpt from that letter:

 

I didn't write to bear my soul or anything, Mr. Lamb, but when I was an inpatient at the Institute of Living for two and a half years, I read a lot and thought a lot, and one of my ridiculous thoughts/fantasies was that if I were to have a literary character dinner party, I would invite, being 27 but still pathetically immature, [Salinger's] Holden Caulfield, [Hemingway's] Jake Barnes, [Kate Chopin's] Edna Pontellier, and [John Updike's] Rabbit Angstrom (the young one). What I wanted to tell you is that I'm extending an invitation to Dolores Price for that dinner party. . . . I wasn't fat as a kid like Dolores, but when I got to the I.O.L. and they hit me with Thorazine, etc., etc., suddenly (now) I weigh a hundred pounds more than I did
in college. And though I never tried to drown myself as Dolores did—I was a razor man—the scene with the [dead] whale was amazing. I felt like she was fighting for me. And when that circle bubbles up [just before her whale surfaces at the end], I felt happy for her and really lifted. Thanks for writing your book. Give my love to Dolores!

Shalom, David F.

P.S. Doesn't it piss you off when people buy a book by Millie the Dog or Rush Limbaugh when they could be making a friend for life if they just met Dolores Price. I don't know. Fuck 'em. I was sure it was going to be a best-seller.

 

David F's letter made me laugh and cry as Dolores herself had done while I was discovering her story, and so I did a little detective work and, against all odds even in those pre-HIPAA law days, I found out his last name and got ahold of his telephone number. I called him up to thank him for his brave and amazing letter, and to tell him that I thought he, too, should pursue writing. He sounded painfully shy, shocked to have heard back from me. When I said I hoped to meet him someday, he told me apologetically that, although he would like to meet me, too, he could never handle such an encounter. That initial exchange began a letter-writing friendship that exists to this day, twenty years later.

Five years after I received David's letter, Oprah did, of course, turn
Undone
into a
New York Times
and
USA Today
number one bestseller. A January 1997
Boston Globe
story about the novel's selection for Oprah's Book Club—the first by a male writer—best depicts the whirlwind of attention in the middle of which I suddenly found myself. Above a large photo of me seated before my high school students, one shoe untied, a look of befuddlement on my face, a headline asks, incredulously, WALLY
WHO?