The Making of a Writer
In 1973, at the age of twenty-one, I left New York and went out to California to seek my fortune, having been accepted to the Stanford University Graduate Program. I had never seen a palm tree, or been farther west than Chicago, or heard of Stanford. I was a working-class girl who never expected to go to college, let alone become a writer. I was, however, a fanatical reader, and, in many ways, reading saved my life. My mother - educated, bohemian, divorced - was a great reader and her love of books was contagious. I can’t remember visiting another house during my childhood and adolescence in which there were books, other than Reader’s Digest Condensed Books - a little more like soup than literature. The bookshelves in the back of our tiny living room changed the route I might have taken: Instead of dropping out of high school, I finished early. After a series of jobs, one of which, at a book factory, lasted less than half a day, I registered at a local college. When I graduated, my brother, then living in San Francisco, suggested I come to California. That in itself was a dream.
It was my great good fortune to be given the Mirrelles Fellowship by Albert J. Guerard, arguably the greatest writing teacher in the country. Having taught at Harvard for twenty years, then at Stanford for another twenty, Guerard was a novelist, critic, and essayist who favored experimental work and had brought the Voice Project to Stanford, headed by the novelist John Hawkes. In Guerard’s theory of fiction, it was the writer’s voice - more than any other aspect of his or her work - that was the most important and defined style and substance. For Guerard, this “voice” was like a fingerprint: a unique, one of a kind, the core element that each fiction writer needed to find and nurture.
The early seventies were still the sixties at Stanford. We weren’t thinking so much about being published - there were no book tours, no media blitzes yet in existence. We were yearning to create something brand-new, a voice that sounded like no one else’s, a work of fiction that took chances, and in doing so, took the reader’s breath away. The counterculture was everywhere and the world of publishing, like the rest of the establishment, didn’t define what we did or how we approached our work. Now I realize how lucky we were, to be able to write for writing’s sake. Later the business of publishing and all that went along with it entered the picture, but there was a purity at the graduate program at Stanford, a sort of innocence I’m not certain would exist today. We were there to write. And to be in California, of course, with all that implied. People still went to Big Sur to get high and wander through the hills searching for waterfalls and monarch butterflies. Patty Hearst was abducted and the SLA died on live television. There were still stories of Kesey and the Pranksters’ exploits up in La Honda, where we went down the twisting roads. A horde of Western realists settled in Palo Alto, including Raymond Carver, at whose house we sometimes gathered despite the drinking and the fights. Students left the program because they feared earthquakes or fell in love with poets addicted to heroin. It was a long way from the working-class suburb where I grew up, not far from the city line.
In California, I reimagined the New York I had known, which to me had always seemed mythic and beautiful and doomed. I had grown up in a place and time of huge and stupid drug use, long before the threat of AIDS. Self-improvement, self-awareness, didn’t exist. In my neighborhood, anyone running was either on the track team or had the police chasing after him. We were city people trapped in the grid of the cut-rate paper-doll houses built for our fathers, returning World War II GIs. It was a combustible world, bordered on one side by outdated rules and regulations and on the other by the sudden freedoms of the sixties.
The idea of urban/suburban magic was brewing under my skin. I had always been a major reader, but a schizoid one, divided by the literature I sneaked from my mother’s bookcases - where I found The Catcher in the Rye one innocent day and had my mind, along with every expectation of what a novel should and could be, blown away - and the books my father had left behind when he took off. A box of science fiction and fantasy awaited me in the basement, where my brother raised rats and mice for sale to pet stores. I became enchanted by authors like Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. Added to that were the fairy tales and folktales told by my Russian grandmother, and the books about magic I had read as a child. My approach to fiction had been created by a mixture of the stories I loved: a new sort of fairy tale, gritty, mythic in scope and domestic and urban in setting. It was a world defined by pop songs, literature, true-love romances, and a certain gangster New York ethic.
In the literature I had read, girls, if they were anything at all, served as the chroniclers of the boys’ adventures and little more. Even at Stanford, our text, The Single Voice, contained the voices of only two women: Flannery O’Connor and Grace Paley. Reading Grace Paley’s stories as I was seriously thinking of becoming a writer myself was fortune indeed. Paley’s fictional attitude, her singular voice, her insistence that women’s lives were worth writing about and that domestic life and personal relationships were not only political but at the very center of what made the world work (or not work), were all pivotal to my fiction. Paley’s work allowed me to believe that I, too, could write with the boys. Property Of, begun so soon after the war in Vietnam, and in the midst of the feminist movement, reflects the turmoil of being young in a dangerous time, when political thought and personal psychology are shifting, when the very ground you stand upon seems unreliable.
The publication of Property Of was something of a fairy tale itself. Professor Guerard sent a copy of a story that included the main characters of the novel-to-be to his ex-student and friend Mark Mirsky, who published the pice in Fiction, City College’s literary magazine. After the publication, the preeminent editor Ted Solotaroff contacted me for a story, which to my surprise he accepted for publication in his legendary magazine, American Review. He then wrote again: Did I have a novel? I thought it over for about five minutes. Maybe four. Then I wrote back and said that I did. I began writing it that day.
I had read enough fairy tales to know that such a monumental, life-changing chance is offered only once; at least that’s how it went in the stories. If I didn’t accept the challenge, it might never come around again. Six months later, I had a manuscript. (I was also still a student, and working both in the blouse department of Bullocks Department Store in Palo Alto and as the secretary of the Stanford Sex Clinic.) Writing Property Of in the fevered heat of hurry and passion taught me how to write a novel. Perhaps it was more good fortune that I didn’t have time to think or obsess. I had told Solotaroff a date when the novel would be done, and so it would be. When people ask how i’ve managed to write so many novels since, I can only say that I have never written as fast or as furiously as I did while working on Property Of - and everything since as seemed comparatively leisurely.
Solotaroff worked with me for several months, refining the manuscript, and although he didn’t take the book, he did send me to an agent, Elaine Markson, who was my agent for more than thirty years. Elaine submitted the book to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a publishing house I had never heard of, just as I had never heard of Stanford, but it was the house everyone assured me was best. They were right.
My grandmother went with me for my first meeting and waited on a park bench in Union Square - filled with junkies back then - while I went up to meet with Aaron Asher. Asher was a great editor and I was a nervous wreck. Just being in the FSG offices - all those files! all those books! - was enough to set my head spinning. I was a girl with black eyeliner. He was Philip Roth’s editor. Luckily for me, Asher took the time to teach me quite a lot about how to write a novel.
The book itself, set on a shadowy, mythic Avenue, centers around a street gang named the Orphans and is told by a nameless narrator who is an outsider but rapidly becomes an insider when she falls in love with the charismatic, doomed leader, McKay. It’s a novel about war (gang war), about a woman’s place in that violent world, about erotic longing, but, most of all, it is about the quest for personal identity. In many ways, Property Of follows the path of a formal quest, but the heroes and villains are mutable. The heroes are flawed and the villains may not be who they first appear to be. The prose is a rhythm of urban music, with a rock backdrop, a punk edge, and a nod to the girl groups of the sixties, most especially the rebellious Shangri-Las with their mythic songs of heartbreak and sorrow. It’s a pop culture view of knights and their ladies, set in a world of drugs and betrayal.
The narrator speaks directly to the reader. Her obsession is both love and revolution. What cruelty is accomplished in the name of love? How does one move from being mere “property” to being free? Here again is a woman’s chronicle of male exploits, but it is also a chronicle of the fury that accompanies being a second-class citizen in the world. Property Of is in its nature a feminist exploration of a woman’s place both in the broader world and in the world of black leather and petty crime. All along our narrator is certain she is not like the women around her - the Property of the Orphans. She is somehow different, perhaps better, because she is more psychologically aware. Yet by the end of the novel, she is faced with the realization that if she stays in the world of the Orphans, she will become a part of it - no different, no better - and fated to join in the dance of doom.
Ultimately, Property Of is about a narrator who is telling us a story. Once upon a time, in a dark place, beautiful boys ruined their lives and girls went to sleep for a hundred years only to wake up as widows. Imagine streets slicked with ice, and snow that falls for weeks. Imagine love twisted. Imagine betrayal and loss. A long time ago, or maybe just yesterday, there were men who fought for their honor and women who believed in them, and this is the way their story began.