Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
“Good always comes from bad,” Nieman mused. “Like when you had to move out of your house for a year and had time to spend
at the beach.”
“Don’t remind me of that year. Okay, so we’re set. You’ll definitely do it if I will.”
“Sworn. Progress is being made. We had to be brainwashed and bored five days a week. Our children will suffer for four. Perhaps
their children will only have to go Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”
“Eat your croissant. They’re really fine today. I heard they had a new chef. Someone Augustine brought in from Quebec.”
Nieman broke off a piece of croissant, put it into his mouth, lifted his eyebrows in delight, and began to chew. A wide shaft
of sunlight came down through the clear glass windows and cut a line across the marble table.
“It’s all good,” Freddy said.
“You bet it is,” Nieman answered. “You bet your life it is.”
NORA JANE
A LIFE IN STORIES
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Your first book wasn’t published until you were in your forties. How and when did you decide to become a writer?
I always thought I was a writer. I didn’t begin to write seriously and professionally until I was in my forties because I
was busy being alive.
Your novels and stories are largely populated by an ongoing cast of characters—individuals and families whose lives intersect
and occasionally collide. Is this something you’ve planned?
I have planned my oeuvre the same way I have planned my life. On a day-by-day and obsession-by-obsession basis.
What writers have influenced you the most over the years? What writers working today do you admire?
My strongest influences are the British and American poets of the last four hundred years and the Greek poets and playwrights
and all the British and American literature that I have devoured over the years. It is all a jumble. I adore William Shakespeare
and William Faulkner and anyone who writes beautifully about anything they know well and feel passionately about. There are
many writers mentioned in my books, here and there, scattered about. I put them there as homage. I am still being influenced
every day by everything I read. Freeman Dyson is a favorite and John Fowles and many more too numerous to mention.
Nora Jane suffers—and also benefits—from her passionate nature. Do you think that passion is the overwhelming force that drives
people to their destinies?
No. People are driven by two emotions: fear and excitement. If you aren’t paralyzed by fear, you run toward excitement. Nora
Jane had a chaotic childhood. What she wants is an ordered life and things she can depend upon. So I gave her the most wonderful
and dependable man I could create, and she is wise enough to love him. All young people are driven by passionate desires,
but Nora Jane outgrew that insanity more quickly than most young women do.
How do food and literature provide comfort to Nora Jane and company?
The same way they provide comfort to all people everywhere. Cave dwellers sitting around a fire eating scorched meat and telling
stories are no different from Nieman Gluuk reading Rilke and taking children to a four-star restaurant.
Most of your fiction has a southern setting. Nora Jane, however, takes place primarily in Northern California. How does setting
affect your writing?
I set the Nora Jane stories in Northern California because at the time I was writing many of them I was visiting a friend
in San Francisco for long periods of time and had become fascinated with that world, its bridges and earthquakes and Asian
peoples and food and ideas. I would stand for long minutes reading the posters tacked up to telephone poles in Berkeley, dazzled
by the range of ideas that were floating around and being taken seriously by many people.
Your first story about Nora Jane was published in 1981. Fault Lines was written more than twenty years later. What special
qualities does Nora Jane have that compelled you to return to her and her family over the years?
I always keep wondering where my characters are and what they are doing. I never get finished with wanting to know what happened
next, so I keep on writing about them to find out. I am not only interested in Nora Jane. I’m interested in Freddy and Tammili
and Lydia and Little Freddy and Nieman and Stella and Scarlett, and now I’m wondering what Donovan and Mitzi will be up to
next. By the time this book is published, the Gluuk twins will be a year old. I hope Nieman isn’t trying to teach them Latin
yet.
1. Ellen Gilchrist has said that books by Freeman Dyson, a physicist and writer, have influenced her. How is Gilchrist’s interest
in the scientific world reflected in her fiction?
2. When we first meet Nora Jane, she is smart, headstrong, and willful, with a keen instinct for survival. She doesn’t have
much money, but her circumstances are altered when she marries Freddy Harwood. Does having money change Nora Jane?
3. Freddy and Nieman have been friends for life, through thick and thin. What do you think draws them together?
4. Many of the romantic relationships in
Nora Jane
have unlikely challenging beginnings. Discuss.
5. Although Freddy Harwood’s family and friends are not devout in a religious sense, they turn to an Episcopalian nun, a Buddhist
monk, and Freddy’s Jewish community for help when he is diagnosed with cancer. How do prayer and meditation help him and his
family? Do you believe that seeking spiritual connection can be helpful in times of need?
6. By the end of
Nora Jane
, Tammili and Lydia are unaware that their father could be someone other than Freddy. Do you think they should be told as
teenagers or should have known earlier, or do you think it’s acceptable for Nora Jane and Freddy to withhold that information
from them indefinitely? Why or why not?
7. Many different mother-child relationships are depicted in
Nora Jane
. Discuss the differences in the relationships between Nora Jane and her mother, Freddy and Mrs. Harwood, and Mitzi and Carla
Ozburt. Which relationship most closely mirrors the relationship between you and your mother? Does Nora Jane have any weaknesses
as a mother?
8. Stella Light-Gluuk and Nora Jane have very different lives: Stella is a working mother with a brilliant future in science,
and Nora Jane has chosen to stay at home with her children. Are they content with the choices they’ve made? Why or why not?
9. How do you think hopes and dreams shape or define the characters of
Nora Jane
?
Great and startling books have taught and changed me, have made me wish for nobility and dream of changing the world. They
have solaced me when I was young and in love, made me laugh at myself for needing solace, and helped me grow old without noticing
I had. To choose eleven out of the hundreds of books that have had their way with me is difficult, but I will try. To be on
the list, the book will have to be one that shook me awake and taught me something I would not have learned in any other way,
or else a book so beautiful and seductive that when I finished it I immediately went back to page one and started reading
it again. I read the first two books on this list at least three times before I moved on to other fields.
The World As I See It
by Albert Einstein
A collection of brilliant, gentle essays by one of the great minds of the past century. The writing is so perfect one can
only quote it: “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men,
living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
I began reading this book on a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands. A fellow poet had given it to me, saying it was poetry
made into prose, the thing Ernest Hemingway felt we should strive to create. William Faulkner also made poetry into prose,
and later I would discover that Marquez had studied Faulkner when the former was learning to write. The opening line is famous
among writers. We all wish we could write one this good: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano
Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
The Territorial Imperative
by Robert Ardrey
First published in 1966, this dazzling book about the science of anthropology taught me my place in the universe. On the same
boat where I discovered Marquez, a friend handed me this book and changed the way I understood the world. It was full of humbling,
exciting ideas. “We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels but in reality we are risen apes,” as Ardrey’s contemporary
Desmond Morris would later put it. Risen apes who could create written language and walk on the moon and transplant hearts
and write the Constitution of the United States of America.
The Curve of Binding Energy
by John McPhee
I had tried for years to comprehend nuclear power, and finally McPhee, by his magical ability to make the complex understandable,
taught it to me. Still, I have to learn it over and over again. The knowledge is too terrible to carry in the front of my
brain. People are in denial about the radioactive materials we’ve created and can’t get rid of. If you read only one of the
books on this list, let it be this one.
The Riverside Shakespeare
These thirty-nine plays have been my most important writing teachers. They remind me that the greatest author who ever lived
wrote bad plays to begin with and then got better and better until he wrote
Hamlet and Macbeth
and
King Lear
and
Romeo and Juliet
. For eighteen years, a group of friends have come over on Sunday afternoons to read the plays aloud. No matter how many times
we read one of the great plays, I always feel I have never understood it before. There is no way to grasp the genius of Shakespeare.
I am content that it exists in the world and that I have copies of the plays and friends to share them with.
North Toward Home
by Willie Morris
This is the story of Morris’s rise to power as the youngest editor of
Harper’s
magazine and of how he left the South behind and shook off the racism he had learned as a child. There is no bitterness in
Morris’s writing. His book was very important to young people in the South when it was published in 1967. It taught me that
it was all right to be a traitor to my family and my culture and to go out on the street and march for civil rights. It was
a terrifying adventure, and Morris’s book was the bible I carried with me as I marched.
Collected Poems
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Since I was thirteen years old and was taught a poem called “God’s World,” I have read and loved Millay’s poetry. She was
a devotee of Shakespeare, and his influence is everywhere in her work. I know all her sonnets by heart, since I read them
so assiduously when I was young and always in love with whoever wouldn’t love me back. Now that I am older and have read Shakespeare,
I hear the echoes between his poetry and lines I loved in Millay. She didn’t copy him. She was deeply influenced by him, which
is a glorious thing for a reader to discover, like knowing that two friends knew each other in another world.
The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion
(called the Snopes trilogy), and
Go Down, Moses
, a book of stories, by William Faulkner I think these four books are the heart of Faulkner’s work. Eudora Welty told me to
read these books. It was the best advice she ever gave me.
ALSO BY
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Collected Stories
“Every story is crisp, biting, and deceptively simple…. Ellen Gilchrist deserves to be celebrated among the first rank of
American writers.”
— Joan Mellen,
Baltimore Sun
“Collected Stories
is cause for celebration…. Gilchrist is such a persuasive writer that we feel a kinship with her characters’ messy, interesting
lives.”
—Nancy Pate,
Orlando Sentinel
“Gilchrist’s stories are compulsively readable, often memorable, and particularly well suited to an omnibus collection…. Collectively,
these stories offer a rare combination of page-turning entertainment with provocative insights on the nature and challenge
of happiness.”
— Scott Leibs,
San Diego Union-Tribune
“The varied stories in this collection demonstrate Gilchrist’s nearly limitless range…. Each is still as charged and crackling
with its own centrifugal emotion as the day it was written.”
— Tommy Hays,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ALSO BY
ELLEN GILCHRIST
The Cabal
and Other Stories
“Difficult to resist…. It’s a comedy of manners, tarted up for the twenty-first century… For entertainment with a bite, you
can’t go wrong with
The Cabal
.”
—Vicky Uhland,
Rocky Mountain News
Flights of Angels
Stories
“Readers will find the penetrating intellect, deep compassion, and dark sense of humor that mark Gilchrist’s best work and
place it among the best writing coming out of the South — or anywhere else, for that matter — today.”
—Ron Carter,
Richmond Times-Dispatch
I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy
and Other Stories
“Gilchrist levels her keen gaze and wickedly funny wisdom on the relationships we all stumble through — with parents and children,
friends and lovers, strangers and those we hold most dear. Her insights will, at times, move you deeply.”