Stories

I had written poems in the seventies, but the poetry dried up. When I tried to write words that went all the way across the page I got discouraged; “Who do you think you are?” I’d mutter, balling up the paper and tossing it into the wastebasket. “You’re not a writer. Writers are unusual people.”

Then one day somebody told me a story that stuck in my head. I wanted so badly to tell it. I was obsessed. For the first time, the story was more important than my ego, and after failing, I tried again, and then again. It was a mother-daughter story, and once I quit trying to write it in the voice of the woman whose story it was, and imagined me the mother, and the daughter one of my own daughters, it worked. The story got published in a literary magazine. I wrote another, it got published too. Now every time a good manuscript came my way at work it made me want to go home and write. Every time a bad manuscript came my way, it made me want to go home and write. Rich said, “Why don’t you stay home and do your own work? I’ll take care of us both.” That’s the kind of generous man he was. It was 1990.

I can’t remember which story I showed Chuck first, but thank god, he liked it. When my whole book was done I gave it to him. “Would you be my agent?” I asked. He told me later he had read it on his back steps, and his wife heard him laughing and came outside.

“I thought you were working,” she said.