Morningstar by Ann Hood

Author:Ann Hood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

BEFORE SKIP GAVE me that boxed set of Steinbeck, no one had ever given me a book as a gift. But the gift was even bigger than he’d imagined. When I read the first line of The Grapes of Wrath—“To the red country and part of the gray of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth”—some writerly thing broke loose in me. “Spread a page with shining,” Steinbeck once advised writers, and I could see that shine as I read. I understood it. I had read big, fat novels before, losing myself in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Those sweeping stories, tragedies and triumphs spanning years and years, had captivated me for their otherness. But The Grapes of Wrath was so American, and the Joads so familiar somehow, and the language so lyrical, and the setting so real, that by reading it I saw what writers could do. And it dazzled me.

For years I had asked English teachers and guidance counselors how to become a writer. No one could tell me. John Steinbeck could though. Write like this, he seemed to be saying. Tell our story. Tell your story. Steinbeck intentionally wrote The Grapes of Wrath in five layers, intending to “rip the reader’s nerves to rags by making him participate in its actuality.” By writing the novel this way, Steinbeck ensured it would have an impact on all kinds of readers, and that impact might be personal, historical, sociological, or political. Grace Paley said: “No story is ever one story, it’s always at least two. The one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath.” I understood this somehow when I read The Grapes of Wrath, those layers slowly revealing themselves to me, showing me how a novel can have such breadth and touch anyone.

I only wish my brother had lived to see my first novel in a bookstore window. But he died on June 30, 1982, in his bathtub in Pittsburgh, when he slipped and fell, drowning in less than an inch of water. My first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, was published five years later. For years I had been writing a dreadful first novel called The Betrayal of Sam Pepper, about a woman in her mid-twenties living in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and feuding with a neighbor who has betrayed her boyfriend—in other words, a woman very much like me. How I toiled over that mess, staying up late at night to revise the pages I’d written in hotels on layovers as a TWA flight attendant. Some chapters sounded very much like imitation Hemingway, some like imitation Fitzgerald—

which is exactly what they were. The plot meandered and grew preposterous, the dialogue was stilted, characters appeared and then vanished from the story, forgotten. Hundreds of handwritten pages.

The summer that my brother died, I moved home to be with my parents, until one day in August my mother told me to leave, to “go and live your life.

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