High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [101]
Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Our book club would appreciate my sharing any materials from you. Would you send me:
Photos
Interviews/Statements
Biographical Data
Your comments on the book
Reviews
Career Plans/Goals [Apparently they are still expecting me to do something productive….]
Dear Mrs. Kingsolver, I am doing a paper for school, on why you should be considered a great American author. In this paper I must classify your writing as following an American tradition: Puritanism, Romanticism, Trancendentalism, Rationalism, Idealism, and Realism. I also must prove that you contribute something to American Literature….I would greatly appreciate having your opinion on this matter and any suggestions you might have. My paper is due in two weeks.
Best, of course, are the letters that go straight to your head, like this one:
Dear Barbara, I just finished reading The Bean Trees for the fourth time since I bought it through a book club. Please, please, please write more books!
I walked on air for days, imagining someone actually reading my book four times, scanning it for every alliteration and metaphor I’d buried in its pages. Then I considered the return address: South Padre Island, Texas. I’ve been to South Padre Island, Texas, and so I know. If you lived there, you would have no choice but to read whatever washed up on shore, or otherwise fell into your hands, four times at a dead minimum. My hunch bore out a few years later when I heard from the correspondent again:
Dear Barbara, I wrote you in 1988 to express admiration for your novel, The Bean Trees. Since then I understand you have two more books out….Things move slowly in South Texas. The bookstore filed Chapter 7 two months ago. In two years they managed to get me a copy of Holding the Line by Dwight D. Eisenhower (it was soporific)….I will send money order, personal cheque, bank card, jewels, or whatever is necessary. I’ll eat sand. [I immediately sent copies of everything I’d ever written.]
I’m grateful beyond words for reader mail, which keeps me going through the days when I can’t believe in myself, or literature in general. That is the blessing. And perhaps it’s also the curse, if the writing life is cursed, because readers tug on the writer’s solitude and complacency. One of the few pieces of advice I ever give other writers, if they ask for it, is to try to write with no one looking over your shoulder. It’s heaven, if you can do it. But inevitably they come, those ghosts and battle-elves peeking in through the study door left ajar, and even if they are not allowed a vote, they force the writer to answer all the disparate voices rattling inside her own psyche. The compliments must be accepted, and so, too, the thoughtful complaints. Once in a while a letter rocks my foundations, causing me to question once again the things I thought I knew about art and responsibility.
This was one of those:
I’ve decided you might like to hear [she wrote] about one woman’s response to Animal Dreams. I sailed through the book till I got to Hallie’s kidnapping. Then I stopped cold and skimmed ahead, reading only with my head, keeping my heart out of it, because I began to realize that if she was going to get killed I didn’t want to read the rest.
Like many women, and men, in America, I was abused as a child, and when I started censoring TV for my own small children, I decided to stop watching violent TV shows myself. It really made life better….Yes, there is violence all around us. I read the news and even sometimes watch it on TV. But that’s real. To invent violence that didn’t really happen, even for the noblest of motives, like, making everybody see how stupid war is, also puts it out there as entertainment. On a certain level, even people who are moved by the nobility and poignance of it all are also going to get off on it in a way that is absolutely counterproductive to the end of ending violence….
I replied to this letter with a brief, inadequate response, and