So first, HUGE apologies for no post yesterday (Wednesday–I’ve been writing this post ALL DAY. This is a LONG post, you guys). Those of you who follow me on FB might have seen my post about it there, but in a nutshell, our internet is out; our modem is fucked, and we should have a new one on Friday. In the meantime, we’re hotspotting our phones, but between the numerous resets and the long hold time with AT&T and then the very long phone call with even more resets and the AT&T lady doing a number of mysterious things to our box remotely in an attempt to fix it…it took over two hours, and that was my work time, and then I was just grumpy and beat and it was past time for dinner and such.
So I’m posting this now, and still hoping/planning to have the beginning of the new story for you later. AND!
Tomorrow night I’ll be picking a winner for the October Weeks giveaway, so there’s still time to enter! Remember, October is a Downside reader just like you, and I love to support my readers and I hope you do, as well!
I still have critiques to post, which I think will start Monday. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to post through the weekend–I’d certainly like to, because we won’t stop needing distraction just because it’s Saturday. On the other hand, the way things have been going, sigh, I feel like it might be good to get ahead of the posts. I guess I’ll see how we do as we go along.
Anyway. We talk a lot about books here; my books, mostly, but also books by friends of mine. But I thought it might be fun to talk about some other books, some of my favorite books that aren’t in those categories. I’ve actually intended to mention a few of these for a long while, and now seems like the perfect time. So I’m going to talk about one in particular right now.
Some of you may know of or have seen the 1990/91 Julia Roberts movie SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY. (Stay with me; I do have a point to this.) Which is interesting to me, because the first half hour or so is gripping, and the last ten minutes or so is gripping, and the rest is sort of…not so gripping. (Quick plot summary for those who are not familiar: Julia Roberts is married to Patrick Bergman, who is very wealthy and handsome in a creepy way, and in the first few minutes of the movie they seem like this glamorous, sexy couple in this glamorous modern mansion of glass on the beach–lots of white and shiny surfaces and sleek appliances. Then we see that Bergman–“Martin”–is a truly evil man; not only does he hit Julia (after accusing her–in a halfass way? He never mentions it again, so…I dunno–of having an affair with a neighbor or of inviting the guy into their house while Martin wasn’t home, which I guess to him are equal crimes), and not only is he a weirdly patronizing neat freak, but he says things like, “I’m sorry we quarreled,” after hitting her. A grown man who says “quarrel?” Avoid! At least, avoid if it’s after 1955 or so. Anyway. Julia is terrified of water but learns to swim, hoping to escape Martin’s evil clutches and perfectly arranged canned goods. She gets her chance when they go out on that same neighbor’s boat that very night, which seemed kind of weird to me, but hey, who knows what’s in the head of a guy who says, “quarrel.” A storm comes up at sea, Julia slips off the boat, swims to shore, and escapes, thus faking her own death. She runs off to Iowa, because her mom is in a home there, to start a new life.
Unfortunately, Martin figures out that she faked it and comes after her, while she’s getting involved with a drama professor who is the type of drama professor who directs “West Side Story” and then has forgotten the lyrics to “When You’re A Jet” a few months later. I mean, my sixth-grade class did a musical called “Let George Do It,” about George Washington, and I can still sing you most of those songs start to finish, and I am not such a drama geek that I grew up to be a drama professor and that was not a famous musical that has lasted several decades, with one of the most famous musical scores. But whatever. Ben, the professor, is kind of a weird guy, too, and super hairy in an early 90s kind of way, but he’s okay. There is an extended scene that I always thought was just an excuse for Julia to try on clothes and hats and laugh in front of a mirror, but which was in fact taken directly from the book. Of course there’s a dramatic climax which, as I said, has a couple of excellent moments.
The movie is based on a book of the same title by Nancy Price. And actually, although I’m not really writing this to discuss SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, I have read the book, and it is one of the rare cases where I can say that the movie is actually better, at least in some respects. I don’t especially care for the movie overall, and Price’s writing is excellent, so it’s somewhat worth reading just for that. But…eh. The thing is, in the book Martin and Sarah (the name of Julia’s character; in the book she’s Sarah and changes her name to Laura, in the movie she’s Laura and changes her name to Sarah. No idea why) aren’t rich. They’re really poor. Their mansion on the beach is, like, a shack with a hole in the floor or something (it’s been a few months since I read it), a rental in which they spend a couple of weeks every year. And Martin is an alcoholic, and instead of being a stockbroker or a financier or something he’s a salesguy at a computer store who constantly gets passed over for promotions because he’s such a mean, weird bastard. He’s constantly drunk and has strange hallucinations and, I don’t know. I understand that men like this exist. I’m not saying it was unrealistic, or that it’s somehow more realistic for him to be this sinister rich guy. Men who beat women exist at all financial levels, and at their base they’re all just mean bastards; it’s not that there’s some novelty in making him rich.
I think it’s just that however realistic Book Martin might be, and however much the book explains that Sarah’s life before meeting Martin was so tragic and poor that she still viewed Martin as a savior and he was so sweet and wonderful when they first met (although he did tell her a few dates in that he would rather kill her than see her date someone else, but you know, that probably wasn’t such a huge red flag in the 70s or even 80s as it is now), it’s harder to believe that this drunken loser with barely a penny to his name was able to track her down on the previous occasions when she left him? Or maybe having Martin be rich in the movie makes the contrast between the opening few minutes, where they seem like this amazing, gorgeous, happy couple, and the moment when he first hits Laura, so much stronger, like a fairy tale that shatters? The opening is just rather cleverly done, I’ve always thought, where you don’t see how controlling he is (even as he controls her) until he hits her and then you look back and are like, “Ohhh, right, he wouldn’t even let her pick her own dress, and wouldn’t let her out of his sight at the party.” Maybe it’s just that violent wealthy control freak creepy financier Martin is a more interesting character than violent drunken control freak loser Martin, who isn’t creepy–I don’t recall him saying “quarrel” once–but is just a brute? I really don’t know. But I do also think the movie’s opening sequence is the best part of the movie, so maybe I just missed that.
Anyway. In the book, Martin is just a boring, unpleasant loser and violent asshole, and I honestly think changing that made the movie’s opening a lot better and more interesting. He also kills himself in the end, which is far less satisfying. So as much as I’m not a big fan of the movie–it’s on a lot, and I always turn it off after that opening sequence–the movie is, actually, better than the book. I just wasn’t crazy about the book.
That is not the case with another book by Nancy Price: NIGHT WOMAN.
I love this book.
I bought this at a Walgreens or something, years ago, because I needed something to read and it sounded interesting. Here’s the blurb:
Randal Eliot is a hugely successful author, adored by a public unaware of his private anguish, his violent behavior towards his family…and his one great secret.
In the dead of night, it is Randal’s wife, Mary, who writes the books that have made him famous.
Trapped in the invisible role she has created for herself, Mary is content to protect her husband and bring up her children. Then a sudden sequence of events brings her to a new world of freedom and love…and a nightmare spiral of suspicion, deception, and danger.
Of course, the blurb doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s a really good book. More than that, I actually believe it’s a book every writer (especially) should read, and every reader should read. Every person who cares about books should read it–I’m not kidding. I have never found a book that speaks so deeply about books and writing, what they mean and what they should mean, and where the line is drawn between writer and reader.
That might sound a little dramatic or like an exaggeration, but it’s not. I at least have truly not read another book like it in that respect. I have read books that deal with the line between the writer and the book, and I’ve certainly read and participated in a number of discussions about how the writer affects the book, what sort of things the book says about the writer, that’s sort of thing. And I tend to vacillate; certainly I believe that I am all over my books: Hell, some of them have my own childhood memories in them, or mention places I have been, music I listen to, books I own and love.
But I also believe that the above does not mean that my books say anything particular about me; a story is a story. You buy a book because you like the story. You buy a book because the story speaks to you. It’s not about the author–or, sure, sometimes it is, whether it’s because you’ve read other books by the same author and trust them to entertain you properly (that sounds dirty, doesn’t it?), or because a friend or another author you like recommends them, or, sure, in this day and age, maybe because you saw them online and liked what they had to say and wanted to support them. I’m saying more that you don’t buy a fantasy novel because you heard the writer has divorced parents or was picked on as a child (really, what fantasy author wasn’t? What other adult human being wasn’t, for that matter?); you don’t buy a genre romance novel because the author has issues with depression or prefers winter to summer. I mean, maybe you do, I don’t know what makes you pick up a new author or book–feel free to tell me below–but in general, I don’t think most people expect that growing up fatherless or having perfect attendance in elementary school is going to make all the difference in a writer’s book. (Or maybe they do. If you do, that’s fine.)
I don’t tend to read books about writers, in general. I just don’t. Oh, sure, there are a few writers who write books starring writers (looking at you, Stephen King) that are excellent and I love them and they don’t bother me at all. I wouldn’t refuse to read a book that looks good otherwise just because the MC is a writer. I think they just have to work a little harder to grab me, maybe, or maybe it depends on the genre more than anything else.
Anyway. The above tangent is a lot of what’s at the heart of NIGHT WOMAN; it’s part of what makes the story so interesting (to me), and it’s also one reason why I think writers and readers would enjoy the book–which, again, is a book I like quite a lot.
I’m going to discuss it a little, with spoilers. Honestly, despite being ostensibly a suspense novel, spoilers really don’t matter much; there aren’t really any big mysteries and the identity of the Bad Guy (so to speak; it’s a bit more complicated than that) isn’t hidden. Although there certainly are a few suspenseful moments, the thing that makes this book so gripping is watching it happen, understanding what’s happening, and what that happening means; what makes it so gripping is the…well, the satisfaction of watching it all unfold. I’ve read this book countless times, and knowing what’s coming never affects my pleasure in it one bit. But if you’re the type who’s really bothered by spoilers, I’m afraid they abound here. Since I spent a long time trying and failing to find a way to hide them, I’ll just put a row of stars down where they end, so you can at least see the end of the post and the comments.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!
First of all, Randal Eliot doesn’t know his wife writes his books. I guess that’s not really a spoiler, as it’s revealed in the first few pages of the book, but still. Randal is seriously mentally ill; when he and Mary married, he wasn’t, but a few years into their marriage he starts to fall apart. Randal is an English professor, and of course even those of us who have never worked anywhere near academia know the biggest rule: Publish or Perish. So Randal, who needs to publish and has a young family to support, is surprised and thrilled to learn, when he leaves the mental hospital into which he checked himself for electroshock treatments, that in the last stages of his nervous breakdown he dictated an entire novel to his devoted wife, Mary. He was, he is told, quite literally in a trance as he feverishly spoke into the night, and his wife could barely keep up as she wrote his words down.
This is believable, at least to a large extent. Electroshock treatments are known for causing amnesia, and the book Randal “wrote,” is a book he’d been planning for a long time; he’d taken copious notes, talked about it for years…he’d done everything but the actual work of writing it down. Now he believes he has, but of course, we know he really didn’t.
The book is published. It’s a huge critical success and a decent financial success. Not only is the writing excellent, but Randal has the kind of “hook,” the kind of “brand,” as we would say now, that agents and publishers dream of: he is “The Writer Who Writes in a Trance.” Four books are published in his name, each more successful than the last. The accolades pour in. There is talk of a Pulitzer.
All of this is wonderful, of course, but living with Randal is not. The family’s trip to England, where Randal’s mental state begins to deteriorate, is both enjoyable and scary. Randal is not likable. It is hard at times not to wonder why Mary doesn’t leave–it would be hard, if Mary did not think of it herself, if we weren’t privy to her fantasies of flying off, abandoning the angry, pitiful man staring out the window counting headlights all night. And then Mary has a memory of young Randal, or a conversation with her children, and we understand again. Mary is all this man has. Who among us could truly abandon someone who is ill? Someone we promised to be with forever, in sickness and in health, til death do us part?
Then, without warning, they do part. Randal dies. Mary is suddenly free to write during the daytime, to be alone. Much of the early third or so of the book deals, to some extent, with the writer’s desperate need for solitude and the pleasure of being alone with one’s imagination and work. (The pleasure of work in general, whatever it may be, is also a big part of the novel.) For Mary, that solitude has the additional bonus of meaning she is no longer picked on, made fun of, yelled at by a husband who can’t keep himself from doing it. “It’s so easy to think, ‘If he’d just try.’ But the fact is that he can’t try,” Mary says to her (now adult) children at one point.
Of course, with that freedom comes a serious problem: Randal is dead…but the writer of Randal’s books still lives, and she plans to keep writing. And she writes exactly like Randal. As Randal’s agent tells her, when she reveals the truth to him:
“But even if this is so…” George Blumberg’s voice was hesitant; Mary could hear the wariness in spaces between his words, all the way from New York. “The style, the voice…you can see what you’re asking. Editors, critics, reviewers, readers–they won’t believe THE HOST isn’t Randal’s–not that I think you’re making this up,” he said quickly. “Not at all.”
“I can’t prove that I wrote the books,” Mary said, “All I have is my work sheets, and journals in my handwriting, not Randal’s. There are no versions of any of the novels in his handwriting at all, except for a few boxes of old envelopes with scribbles over them no one can read.” She twisted the bedspread’s flowered satin. “I know what people might say: ‘He dictated to her, She simply wrote and rewrote what he told her to put down.’ Or: ‘She destroyed all his papers, and now she claims it’s her work.'”
Mary is stuck. She thought Randal’s death would free her from the cage she was forced to create for herself, but it doesn’t. It actually leads her into a new trap, even, and as she keeps writing books we get the sense that time is running out, a little bit. We understand, as Mary does, that the situation can’t go on forever. How many posthumous books can one man write? Sooner or later, aren’t people going to start wondering? We feel this in the background, even though it’s only really directly mentioned once or twice.
Mary then meets Paul Anderson, a new professor at the university where Randal taught. Paul is handsome and intelligent, and Paul is a huge Randal Eliot fan. In fact, Paul is hoping to become the Official Randal Eliot Biographer. To that end, Paul introduces himself to Mary. They begin talking.
They talk about Randal’s books. Constantly. Incessantly. In great detail. Of course, they talk about their lives and hopes and all of that, but they spend hours and hours talking about Randal’s books: the plots, the characters, the themes, the phrases and words, what they mean. Paul is impressed with Mary’s knowledge of the books, how well she understands them. Mary is delighted with the same things in Paul, and flattered by the attention. This is a place where I think the book is especially meaningful, especially relevant, for writers: the sense that anyone who loves our books, understands our books, is special. Is our friend. The delight–a deep-down sense of amazement and joy–that comes from realizing that our work actually means something to someone else, too, that it’s not just us to whom they matter. It’s not just meeting someone who likes the same books you do (although that too is a delight, as we all know), it’s meeting someone who likes your books, who understands your work. There is the sense that they also understand you, even if you don’t think your books say anything about you in particular (which is a perfectly valid way to feel, and like I said I kind of go back and forth on it myself).
Conversely, although Mary’s situation is a little different in that no one knows she wrote those books with Randal’s name on them, there is a hint of the sadness that comes not from other people not reading our books, but from those people closest to us don’t read our books. There is a special kind of sorrow or loneliness in that; it varies from writer to writer (and some writers probably don’t care at all if their family or friends or significant others don’t read their books) and even from book to book, where you might really want your sibling or parent to read one book but not another, or you might want friends to read but not family, or you might want your spouse to read but no one else. Again, this varies from writer to writer; it’s not a general rule that all writers feel this way. But I know some of us do, to varying degrees. It can feel like we’ve put a little piece of ourselves out into the world, and those closest to us don’t care. It can feel that way even when we know and totally understand that those people are busy and don’t have time to read or try to read and fall asleep every time no matter how gripping the book. It can feel that way even when we know the person or people in question really, genuinely love us as people. Perhaps that’s another way we separate the writer from the work? I don’t know. All I know is that it can, on occasion, be simultaneously totally cool and terribly depressing that our friends haven’t read our book, just as it can be something that doesn’t matter one way or another.
But imagine if you were never able to even reveal that you wrote your books, and everyone just assumed you were the secretary who wrote them down. Imagine how heady it would feel to have someone not only discuss the books with you, see things no one else has seen in them, but actually listen and respect you for the way you spoke of them. To step out of the shadow of someone else and into the light yourself.
This is how Mary feels. This is where she and Paul fall in love, and marry. This is also where the two big problems of the book really come into focus, too. The first is, does a writer’s life truly influence and color their work–can their work be interpreted through their life? Paul believes it can. When he begins wanting to talk about how Randal’s mental illness is evident on every page of Mary’s books, the trouble begins.
Paul is given contract for a biography of Randal Eliot. Paul wants to write about Randal’s life and illness, and how it colored his work. Paul believes that Mary is the perfect wife for a writer, that perhaps there’s “magic” in dictating to her. It is both angering and almost amusing, the casual way he is so certain of his analyses of Mary’s books (“The Manic-Depressive South of Randal Eliot,” for example), the casual way he sees himself immediately as the Important One in the marriage because he has a book contract–a contract he gained based largely on analyses he wrote of Mary’s books, which:
“Sometimes Paul read Mary a new essay he had written about Randal’s novels.
Mary smiled as he read, recognizing her own analyses of her own work. Paul smiled back, glad that she liked what he had to say, happy to read his well-thought-out sentences in candlelight that flickered before a twilit garden.”
It is both the arrogance of sexism and the arrogance of the person who believes that his college degree automatically makes him smarter than those without one…and, especially, the arrogance of the person who believes that ideas and book contracts make him a writer, rather than the actual work of writing, of which Paul does very little. (Here again is another of the book’s little lessons and delights: talking about writing, dreaming about writing, thinking about writing, even taking notes about what one would be writing if one were writing…none of that is writing. It is prep work at the most. To be a writer one must write. Mary’s thoughts on this subject–which, having two husbands who believe themselves to be writers without actually writing, she had a few of–are a refreshingly blunt lesson, a refreshingly blunt reminder to those who are or want to be writers. To Mary, writing is work, a craft. She takes it seriously. She believes it is valuable, which is again refreshing, given how many writer protagonists seem to dismiss their work or not think about it, even if they are famous bestsellers (which many of them seem to be). It is rare to find a writer MC who doesn’t modestly shy away from talking about his or her books, or who discusses not just the downsides of long lonely hours and frustration and such, not just the joy of new ides and solving plot problems, but the good solid happiness of being absorbed in work, of fixing and rewriting and fixing and rewriting until every sentence is as good as it can be–the craft of writing, the way words and images are used to create something. Mary’s pride in her work is a pleasure to read. Her belief that her work–her art and her craft–is valuable is a pleasure to read.)
So Paul believes he is a writer, and he wants to write Randal’s biography, with lots of information about how Randal’s madness drove him to write the things he wrote. Mary, of course, cannot allow this. She knows, as we know, that sooner or later the game will be up; someone will ask how a dead man has written so many books. She is also angry, in the proprietary and possessive way all writers feel about our books, that her late husband’s mental illness–the mental illness of the man who was mean to her, who used her, who took the credit for her hard work to begin with, however much she gave it freely; the man who in the end was not the man she married–is being used to interpret and examine her books, that people are seeing his illness in her words. More than that, they are attributing her words to his illness. They are reading her books and finding madness behind them. Imagine for a moment how insulting that would be.
Now imagine it’s your husband, the man who is supposed to love you and know you best, reading your books, and seeing only the mental illness of a dead man, not you.
Now imagine that husband sees himself as a serious scholar, A Writer, and you as a “secretary.”
Now imagine that husband is angry that you will not go along with this version of your books, this imaginary mentally ill version that he insists is correct.
Imagine he is so convinced that he is right that he begins to think you’re lying to him. Imagine you try to give him clues, and he cannot accept the answer staring him right in the face–there are things in those books that your late husband never saw, so how could he write about them? Only you saw them. Only you could write about them. How did they get into those books?–because that would mean his analyses of your work is wrong. He would rather believe you are a conniver and liar than believe that.
Like Martin in SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, both Randal Eliot and Paul Anderson have a tendency to drink, and to become angry when drunk. Whether that anger turns to violence I will not reveal. Both Randal and Paul, at varying points in the book, say to Mary, from the angry depths of the bottle, “You got any ‘dea what it takes to write a serious/scholarly book?” Of course, Mary does; it is them who do not.
What I think is interesting (for me, anyway) is that when reading this, I think, “I wonder if Nancy Price had an alcoholic father or husband or something?” Which is exactly the kind of thing NIGHT WOMAN tell us is irrelevant–and it is. But the question remains, because books that touch us automatically connect us to the one who wrote them, and to the others they touched. We want to know if others saw and felt the same things we did, the same meanings. We feel like we are friends with people we don’t know, because they love a book we also love.
NIGHT WOMAN is about that connection, and what it means. It is about the love we feel for our work–whatever that work is. There is a minor character, an old lady who makes quilts. She and Mary have several conversations about the benefits of hard work, and about what we feel about the products of that work, and our right to feel that way. It is, to some extent, about how the work is and should be more important than the person who did it. It is about our desire to analyze, to frame things in a way we like, a way that makes us feel clever.
Certainly another strong through-line is about how the creative and artistic work of men–the writing of men–is seen as more serious, more important, than that of women. How the male “tortured artist” is an admirable, romantic trope, but a female “tortured artist,” well, that trope really doesn’t exist so much. Because of that trope, no one imagines that the books “clearly written by a tortured soul” (not a direct quote from the book, just my summation) could be written by a woman. And in Mary’s case, her work–the artistic and creative work of a woman–is consistently stolen or used as a stepping stone by specific men, who dismiss her as unworthy of truly understanding it, much less of creating it. Another through-line, less strong but still there, reminds us that while the wives of famous, serious men may be dismissed to some degree, they are also celebrated for their support, for being the “rock” on which their famous husbands lean, for being an inspiration to them; they are accorded some respect simply for being the women these men chose to marry, whereas the husbands of famous, serious women are far more often viewed as wimps, as hangers-on, as scheming gigolos or pussywhipped simpletons. A wife accompanying her famous husband is viewed as a necessary element of his work. A husband accompanying his famous wife is a hanger-on, and is pitied or derided.
Chiefly, though, it’s just a good story, an original and unusual one. Envy is a somewhat common theme or motive in suspense novels, but I’ve never seen one like this. I loved that about the book when I first read it, and I still do.
I have rambled on for a long time about this book now, in a post that was intended to be rather short. It’s now quite late. Part of the blame for that is the amount of time I spent trying (and failing) to find a way to hide the spoilery paragraphs. Part of the blame was how I, when scanning the book to find the relevant quotes, ended up skimming more pages, revisiting favorite moments. Sorry. (It also would have gone faster if Bullitt would make up his mind if he wants to be INSIDE or OUTSIDE, damn it, instead of going back and forth every five or ten minutes.)
And I have barely touched upon Price’s voice, her use of language, which I very much enjoyed. Mary is a lovely heroine, a woman we can identify with and root for, with vulnerabilities and strengths. it is easy, seeing the world through her eyes, to believe she is the writer of wonderful literary novels, but the writing never becomes dense or florid. It is still a commercial suspense novel, not a literary one, for all that I personally found deeper meaning in it and I think that you will, too.
NIGHT WOMAN was originally released in 1992. I gather it was re-released in paperback at some point in the last several years, because for a long time only used copies were available online but now there are new ones. I highly recommend this book, and I hope you like it as much as I did. It is not perfect–no book is–but it’s very enjoyable, both as a story of suspense and a story of independence.
What books have you read that you found had a deeper meaning for you? What books did you read that just seemed to strike you, to say something to you? (What did they say?) Any you’d like to recommend to me or my readers here?
Obviously there won’t be a later post tonight, since it’s already Friday morning. I don’t know why I can’t seem to just toss out a quick post lately. But we’ll have a few things going on today (Friday), so stay tuned!
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