The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay

“You must feel so proud of yourself, to have written a book and had it published,” a reader said last week.  I paused, fork in hand, not sure how to respond.  As the  speaker at an annual library fundraiser, I was surrounded that day by women who love books, avid readers all.  So I was touched by this woman’s well-intentioned words. Good books nourish our souls.  To write one is, perhaps, to offer a kind of sustenance.  But for me, pride is not an emotion that has ever been associated with being an author.

And publishing a book has not felt like an achievement so much as yet another life challenge to be met.  It’s been quite a lesson in, among other things: how to be vulnerable (some of those Amazon reviewers can be cruel), how to let go (there is something on every page that I’d rewrite if I could), how to overcome fear (I am a nervous public speaker, and author appearances are part of the gig), becoming comfortable with  self-promotion (if I don’t sell my book, no one else will), and getting comfortable, too, with admitting how much I don’t know (just because I’ve written about motherhood and mid-life does not mean I am wise about these things).

Publishing a book has also been an incredibly rewarding and humbling experience, thanks to the many readers who have taken the time to respond to my story with heartfelt letters, invitations, and profoundly honest  reflections about their own lives. I feel honored to be the recipient of these stories and  grateful for so many new connections and opportunities.  Without question, my life has been enriched, tenfold, by the readers who have written back.

But pride? Not really, not even for a minute.

Yesterday afternoon, however, standing in my kitchen and holding a brand new, about-to-be-published, hardcover book in my hands, I just about burst with pride.  Here is a publishing story that strengthens my faith in the power of words, the goodness of people, and even the embattled publishing industry itself.

Early in 2003, I got a call from my ex-husband’s twin sister.  Her college room mate had been writing short stories for years, she explained, while raising her two children, but had never tried to publish any of her work. Now Beverly was battling pancreatic cancer and her odds did not look good. Jenny thought that some words of encouragement from an editor might cheer her friend, and she was wondering if I’d be willing to take a look at a manuscript.

I’ve read more manuscripts by friends, and friends of friends, over the years than I can count.  But in all those hours of reading and composing carefully worded letters in response, I don’t think I did myself, or many of those writers, any real favors.  I never “discovered” a great new voice, and I delivered a lot of news that people didn’t want to hear.  Sometimes, that news felt so much like personal rejection that relationships I treasured became frayed, or unraveled altogether.  And so, at some point  when my children were small and it was all I could do to meet my own work deadlines anyway, I decided that the only way to stem the tide and prevent any more friendships from cooling, was to create a simple, across-the-board policy of “no.”  It seemed easier, and kinder, to  say that I had retired from reading unpublished manuscripts altogether, than to spend any more time doing volunteer work that seemed, more often than not, to result in hurt feelings and dashed dreams.

But this request was different. Even an amicable divorce divides a family. In my own case–married too young and divorced within five years–the split was polite, swift, and complete.  I’d always loved my husband’s sister.  I hadn’t spoken to her in years.  And so, when she broke our long silence to ask a favor, I was happy, relieved even, to oblige.  Here was a way to clear the air between us at long last, to catch up on the news of her life, to do a small kindness and to be of some use.

Jenny chose a couple of her friend’s stories and mailed them to me.  By the time I had read the first one, about two young sisters gathering flowers and a mother dying in childbirth, I was in tears.  I also knew:  Here was a real writer.  I read through the rest of the pages in one sitting, marveling at the language, deeply moved by the lives of these two sisters. And for once, I knew exactly what to say to the author.  “Keep writing.” And, “Your stories should absolutely be published.”

A few months later, I heard from Jenny again.  Beverly had died, she told me, but the letter I’d written her had brightened her last weeks.  It had also given her the determination to keep working for as long as she possibly could, writing and revising the stories that she would leave behind, the stories that a stranger had read and deemed “publishable.”

A year or so and several emails and phone calls later, Beverly’s stories returned to me, this time as a complete manuscript, lovingly assembled after her death by her husband Jay and her writing teacher, Jenifer Levin.  Would I read them again, in their entirety?  Might I have some ideas about what to do next?

The stories held up. More than that, they were full of life and detail.  Completely realized, fleshed out and expanded in the months before Beverly died, they contained a whole vanished world, populated by people as real and quirky as any characters I’d ever met.  I loved them. And yet this time there was no letter to write or author to call, no writer to encourage, just a dedicated husband who, in the wake of his wife’s death, wanted to share her literary gifts with the world and carry forward her dream of one day publishing a book.

For weeks the manuscript sat on my desk, as I began packing up our suburban house for a move.  Distracted by the dissembling of my own carefully crafted world of home and garden and friends and neighbors, busy disposing of many of our possessions and packing the rest into storage boxes, I felt the weight of this unfinished, unspoken commitment — a commitment to a woman I’d never met but to whom I now felt intimately connected.  How to help?  I made a call or two, had a copy of Beverly’s manuscript sent to my own agent, and was discouraged to hear exactly what I’d already suspected:  getting a first book of fiction published is hard enough these days.  But without an author to promote it, or the promise of future work and a long career ahead?  Not a chance.

The week before we moved to New Hampshire, I drove into Boston to participate on a literature panel. A group of authors and editors had been charged that day with judging just over a hundred manuscripts and dispensing grant money to a handful of the most promising writers.  Over lunch, I mentioned to Howard Frank Mosher that I had a manuscript at home that struck me as eminently stronger than any of the work we’d spent the morning underwriting.  His response surprised me.  “I would really love to read that manuscript,” he said.

And so it was that this extraordinary writer and energetic champion of writers became Beverly’s next great  fan.  Howard not only read the manuscript, he took it upon himself to write an eloquent introduction to it, a critical response that could pave the way with publishers reluctant to take a flier on a novel-in-stories by a deceased, unknown, unpublished writer.

There are quite a few of us now, midwives to this book that is about to be born at last. Beverly’s family believed all along that her voice would not be silenced by death.  And one by one, those of us who were touched by that singular voice have joined their quiet, determined effort.  An agent friend from my New York publishing days read the manuscript and then wholeheartedly took up the cause.  It took a while, but eventually she found an editor who saw the vision and expanded on it.  And next week, thanks to the efforts of a small group of committed believers, The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, by Beverly Jensen will be published by Viking Press.  Beverly will speak at no library luncheons. She will not have the pleasure of hearing from her readers, nor regret an ill-chosen phrase on a page, nor feel the burden of having to earn out her advance or produce a second book.  But I hope that, wherever she is, she is watching, and that she does feel proud.  Proud of her legacy, proud that her work has already inspired such  enthusiasm and  dedication, and proud of her circle of fans and friends, each of whom did his or her own small part to bring her wonderful book into print at last.  It is a group that I am so very proud to be a part of.

Looking back now, to that summer morning seven years ago, when I took a call from my former sister-in-law and agreed to read a few short stories, I am reminded all over again of my favorite quote, the words by Clarissa Pinkola Estes that I do my best to live by:  “You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion. . . Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.”  Small kindnesses ripple outward, sometimes far, far beyond the limits of our own limited knowledge and understanding.  Sometimes, just be saying “yes,” we do set extraordinary events into motion.  Beverly’s book will arrive in the stores next Thursday, graced with advance praise from the likes of Stephen King, Elizabeth Strout, and Howard Frank Mosher.  But the words I like best come from an advance reader on Amazon, a woman from California who received an uncorrected bound galley and wrote in her online review:  “These characters are not archetypes, they are people.  They don’t represent any idea or theory; they are themselves.  Things happen as they do simply because life is wild and unpredictable.”

So it is.