Daring (28 page)

I began to suspect that the Blue Meanie was not an offsite copy editor but an in-house editor, smart and prickly with her own point of view. Over my chapter about women's life patterns she had scrawled, “All your women are wimps! You need some hotshot younger women.”

With a slightly devious plan in mind, I waited one day until the occupants of Dutton's editorial offices spilled out for what was the leisurely two-martini lunch, typical of those times. Cruising in and out of offices, I scanned for handwriting that matched the Blue Meanie's. There it was—at the desk of a junior editor. After lunch, playing dumb, I told Macrae that I needed to find a trailblazing young woman to flesh out my interviews. Would he have anybody like that on his staff?

That is how I met Laurie Colwin. I asked to interview her for the book. Peppery with a sharply angled face softened by a corona of dark curls, this was a woman in her early thirties who had many passions—for writing the great American novel, for cooking, for love. At nineteen she had made a jailbreak from her possessive family, dropped out of college, left the older man with whom she had been living, and found a job as an editorial assistant.

Where did this confidence come from? I asked.

It wasn't confidence, Colwin said. It was determining clearly what she
didn't
want to be. “I wasn't going to end up like the kids I knew in the suburbs.”

She sold her first short story to
The New Yorker
at twenty-five and ran off with another man, believing it was a blazing love, and hit the ground rather hard when it fell apart—a typical Catch-30 passage. Now thirty-two, she had fallen in love again. Her first novel was receiving good reviews. But for all her boldness and persistence in pursuing a singular career path, Colwin wrestled with the same conflict that bedeviled me and legions of other women who wanted to make something of ourselves. All along she wondered, “Why couldn't I have been the sort of person who just settles down and doesn't give anyone a moment's trouble, meaning, have a baby and the whole thing.” She kicked off a shoe as if in exasperation with herself. “I didn't want it! But I felt I
should
have.”

At her happiest, she disregarded “the shoulds” that I had written come from the imprint of one's peers. She had pursued her own dream. “In my most unhappy moments, I would say, ‘Well, it's clear you're just nuts and no one will ever have you.' But I was always very smart, cold, clear and uncomplicated about my own work. I love to write. I want to have everything. And I don't see why I can't.”

I saw in Laurie Colwin a harbinger of the New Woman. She built a devoted audience through her five novels, married an editor at thirty-eight, and found the courage to open her heart to the risk of intimacy. She had a baby after forty, which in the days before the reproductive revolution was considered just short of magic. Entering midlife, she found a way to balance mature love with creative success and family.

TOWARD THE END OF MY RESEARCH
in the second year, I flew to Los Angeles to interview a psychiatrist, Roger Gould, who had done a preliminary study of white, middle-class people, including women from ages sixteen to sixty. He invited me to talk at his home in Beverly Hills. Once I described my thesis to him and the broad research I was doing, he became keenly interested. He proposed that we collaborate on the book. I was startled. For more than ten years I had been an independent writer.

The psychiatrist was relentless. He insisted that I needed him because no one would take me seriously. “You're just a journalist,” he said with undisguised scorn. Those words were lifted right out of the mind chatter in my brain. The psychiatrist had no trouble locating my weak spot; he struck at the vulnerability all writers feel. But a voice inside me shouted,
No!

I politely dismissed the idea of collaborating. To soften this rejection, I foolishly agreed to allow Dr. Gould to read some of the case histories I was collecting. He sent me some of his interpretations.

In my third year of work, I ran out of money. The Alicia Patterson Foundation came to my rescue with a $10,000 fellowship to enable me to write the book. My obligation for the fellowship was to write for its free newsletter, the
APF Reporter
. In an article about several academic researchers, I quoted Dr. Gould.
New York
magazine reprinted my pro bono article. The psychiatrist then resumed his campaign to convince me to take him on as a collaborator. His threat rang in my ears:
No one will take you seriously—you're just a journalist.

I sensed what Erikson meant when he described each stage of adult development as marked by a crisis. “Crisis” connoted not a catastrophe, but rather,
an inner impulse toward change
, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential. Something important has changed in the way we think about the meaning of our participation in the external world. At such points either achievements are won or failures occur. It signals that we know ourselves better.

This was just what I was writing about: questions of how our values, goals, and aspirations are circumstances invigorated—or violated—by the present being of our lives. How do we balance family and social roles with our work, our purpose? Is there a rising fire of individual expression that we can no longer deny?

Yes! It was rising within me. If I had been ready to break free of Clay as my mentor, I should be ready to take the leap of faith and be my own author. My final conversation with Dr. Gould was a textbook example of a concept that we had discussed. As adults, we often replace the “inner dictator”—our leftover parents' voices—with a mate or boss or mentor we cast as “the strong one.”

“I believe I have outgrown the need for a strong one,” I heard myself calmly telling the psychiatrist. “You don't need me, either. We both have a clear point of view. We can both write our own books.” It was my personal declaration of independence. And it felt good.

Imagine the shock, then, when the psychiatrist sued me. His intention was to enjoin publication of my book—before I had even finished writing it! The claim was that I had plagiarized him in the newsletter article. The charge was patently absurd. I had quoted him in a pro bono newsletter with full attribution. Everyone at
New York
magazine, including the attorney, was appalled.

But I was dead broke. I couldn't afford an attorney to defend myself. A family market around the corner gave me an account to charge food and was lenient on being paid. Ella found an apartment across the street so she could sleep in when needed. She stretched my budget by making veggie burgers with salad for suppers for Maura and me. Mornings I powered up by holding my nose to drink a god-awful health potion with yeast, called Adele Davis's Milk Pep-Up. Evenings I was often cheered by my warmhearted neighbor, Muriel Bedrick. She would bring over a casserole or leftover cake from one of her three daughters' birthdays. A poet herself, Muriel read drafts of my book and found the perfect verse to illuminate each of the seven stages.

My accountant strongly advised that I offer the psychiatrist something to make his suit go away. Certain that my book would never make any money, I offered Dr. Gould 10 percent of my royalties. Dumb mistake? Yes, but what was the alternative? To be stopped two-thirds of the way through gestating a book was unthinkable. I had to deliver.

IT HAD BEEN A BRUTAL YEAR.
When summer 1975 came around, I needed solace. Clay appealed to me to share weekends with him again. Being together in the sweet rented house in Wainscott contented Maura and me, all three of us.

By August, Jack Macrae was coming out to work with me in all-day editing sessions. After five o'clock, Macrae and I would be fainting from the heat. Biking to the beach, we would climb up to the lifeguard's chair to find a breeze, survey the ocean, and talk of anything but the book.

When I finished the first full draft in mid-December of '75, I was shocked by its heft. Almost one thousand double-spaced pages. Macrae told me it needed to be cut by at least one-quarter. And this massive editing job had to be accomplished in three weeks to meet the production deadline. I had to hire a freelance editor, Carol Rinzler, to help me slash without burning. We worked every night from 8
P.M.
to 1
A.M.
Then I had to hire two typists to perform the equivalent of a twin-piano act as they banged out fifty pages of notes and sources for an on-time delivery.

Macrae invited me to the Four Seasons for a celebratory lunch. Over flutes of champagne, my publisher raised a burning question, one I had been evading for months.

“Well, what's the title?”

I had played with every variation on changes, transitions, stages, you name it. Sitting there, eyes closed, mind relaxed, a name for my baby leaped to mind at the last moment.

“Passages.”

Macrae looked puzzled. It was such an unfamiliar use of the word. “They'll think it means ‘excerpts.'”

With a confidence that surprised me, I said, “Until they read the book.”

MARCH
1976.
THE COUNTDOWN WAS ON.
Three months before
Passages
was to be published,
Time
magazine was sending its back-of-the-book editor to my apartment with a photographer. It would be my very first interview in a national publication. I suited up in my best jeans, boots, and a fitted shirt, had my hair styled as if it weren't, and set out coffee and cookies, naively imagining this would be a friendly conversation. When I opened my door, it was to a scornful man.

“I should have written this book,” he growled. I had struck a fatal blow to the ego of a high-status editor of what was then the most powerful newsmagazine in the country.
Passages
had taken three years to write and thirty-seven years to live; it was not, as his article would dismiss it, a “pop phenomenon.”

Clay called and with sweet conviction said, “I bleed for you, honey. I've never seen such a blatant example of male jealousy.”

One Sunday I got a call about a review appearing that day in the
Chicago Tribune Book World
. It slammed the book for “a shocking lack of research.” My head dropped to the kitchen counter. Fifty pages of footnotes laboriously dredged up from many hundreds of sources, typed and retyped countless times on copy paper with multiple carbons—all were ignored. Why? When publishers send out early review copies, they are labeled “uncorrected proofs” and do not include footnotes, bibliography, or index. Strict warnings are given that the reviewer must wait to get the final hardcover before writing an assessment. This critic had broken the embargo on publication date and ignored the accepted rules. What to do? Again, nothing. One can never argue with newspapers; they come out too often.

My first invitation to appear at a bookstore was in early May at a small Brentano's in Greenwich Village. I wore heels and stockings and a hot-pink cotton suit for the appearance. The sales manager gave me a chair by the window to sit in and sign books. I sat alone. I looked out the window. Nobody came. I felt like Rapunzel.

“Could I use your phone?” I asked the sales manager. I called my freelance editor, Carol Rinzler.

“I'm coming right down,” she said.

She showed up within twenty minutes, stepping into the store impeccably turned out in hat and gloves. “We have reservations at the Waverly Inn,” she announced, and swept me off so I could hold my head up high.

These early insults were discouraging, but friends kept surrounding me with cheerful messages and book parties. The party I remember best took Clay and me out to Sag Harbor. Our hosts were Robert Emmett Ginna and his wife, Margaret. They were both editors of taste and originality who found their way to this historic whaling town in Eastern Long Island along with a batch of
Life
magazine people. Sag Harbor and its environs were becoming a refuge for authors of the post–World War II generation such as Edgar Doctorow, Peter Matthiessen, and James Salter. I was thrilled to be in their company. Everyone asked what my next book would be. I hadn't the foggiest.

“So what
is
next?” Ginna pressed me.

“Now is what's next. I'm going to go out there and talk to everybody I can—on the street, in coffee shops, on the bus—and get them reading this book so I find out whether it speaks to them.”

WORD OF MOUTH WAS ELECTRIC.
For several weeks ahead of the official publication date, I spoke anywhere I was invited. I still had no experience with public speaking, but audiences grew. Dropping into the largest independent bookstore in Los Angeles, I was surprised to learn that a dozen customers had the book on order. I felt a tingle of excitement when I overheard two women at a bus stop talking about “Catch-30”; when I heard a hairstylist comparing notes with a manicurist about their “jailbreak marriages”; when I followed a political story to a plant opening and found two lunch-pail guys discussing “man-o-pause.”

The only thing these folks had in common was belonging to the boomer generation. The common denominator seemed to be their excitement about the possibilities of change. Instead of being confined by old roles and rules, they found validation for busting out and trying to be something more. The book was also being introduced in a period when our culture was already fiery with protest movements by women and minorities.
Passages
was not an angry book. It encouraged revolution, but revolution from within.

The book was often labeled “pop psychology,” which I took to mean it wasn't academic, it was accessible. Jack Macrae, my publisher, told me, “Great word of mouth is often touched off by books that have no precedent, like
Passages
. People like discovering a book on their own, better than having it shoved down their throats by promotion.”