A new cover, a leprosarium, and a craft book

Author Abroad S2 E6

Greetings from a whirlwind trip to Australia to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday! This month, the entire edition of Author Abroad is inspired in one way or another by one of my favorite writers—Alice McDermott.

But first . . . as promised last month, here is the new cover and preorder link for the second edition of The Golden Land, to be released September 1st, 2024 by the University of Nebraska Press! 🥳🥳🥳

Preorders are one of the best ways to help authors by signaling to bookstores, libraries, media, and other players in the publishing industry that readers are excited about an upcoming book. (Reviews are welcome too!) Thank you for your support🤗

Reflections from abroad

Reading Alice McDermott’s engrossing new novel, Absolution (reviewed below), brought back a memory from many years ago. In the novel, the two main characters, Tricia and Charlene, visit a leper colony on the outskirts of Saigon in 1963. Tricia is initially dazzled by the setting:

“The sudden glorious glare: green shot with yellow, shadow shot with light, bursts of red and pink. The sandy grass at [their] feet flashed diamonds…the white sand and blue water, all seemed briefly unmoored. A floating kingdom by the sea.”

But when the “hobbled lepers” approach, she becomes “suddenly afraid. Suddenly doubtful of [her] own abilities here. [Her] ability not to look away.” She is not afraid that she might catch the disease or that any harm will come to her, but that she won’t have the courage to look the patients in the eye due to their deformities.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is among the oldest diseases known to humankind, as documented in multiple ancient texts, including the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (1550 BCE), the Indian Atharava Veda (900 BCE), and various parts of the Bible (560 BCE - 90 CE). Left untreated, it can cause extensive damage to skin, eyes, upper respiratory system, hands, feet, and other peripheral nerves, leading to physical damage, amputation, and related disabilities. Contrary to what these ancient texts proclaimed, however, the disease is only contagious through repeated and extended close contact with those infected; in other words, there is no medical need to quarantine those infected in colonies. In the 1960s, there were an estimated 10-12 million cases worldwide. Today leprosy is a curable disease, with an estimated 200,000 new cases undergoing treatment each year. Yet, colonies like the one Tricia visits in Absolution continue to exist in many parts of the world.

In 1995, I visited a leper colony on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola. I was 27 years old and working as a liaison officer for an American development organization called CRS—one of the best jobs and most exhilarating times of my life. Since my boss was based in the southern province of Benguela, and avoided the mayhem of Luanda at all costs, I was granted an unusual degree of independence and responsibility when it came to initiatives in the vicinity of the capital city.

A leprosarium on the outskirts of Luanda in 1995

Although decades and continents apart, the fictional account of Tricia’s experience brought me back to that day in 1995 when I visited the leprosarium. As in Absolution, the setting was quite beautiful. While I can no longer remember key details such as the name and location of the center, I can still see the building and surrounding area quite clearly. Angola was still in the throes of a decades-long civil war, and most of the countryside was besieged by UNITA insurgents and landmines, which meant that we couldn’t travel beyond a certain radius of Luanda. The colony was located just inside this boundary, surrounded by a greenbelt of small subsistence farms, banana plants, and palm trees. At the top of a hill, two single-story dormitories stretched out across from each other. Between them was a dusty courtyard where most of the cooking, eating and other daily activities took place. Like many structures in Angola at that time, the buildings were made of concrete, painted in pastel colors, and badly in need of repair.

I was greeted by the head nurse, a friendly, unassuming man with a big smile, who reminded me again and again that the residents were not contagious—though it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about this. While we stood talking, men, women and children began to peek out of their rooms, curious to see who was this estrangeira that had come to visit them. Soon, I was surrounded by a crowd of people wanting to shake my hand and say hello. Many were missing fingers and toes, their hands and feet covered in gauze to protect against further harm. Others had suffered damage to their eyes and nose. As the nurse explained, leprosy impairs the sense of feeling in the extremities of those infected, making them highly susceptible to burns and other injuries. Like Tricia in Absolution, I became suddenly conscious of the importance of meeting each person’s gaze, of not looking away.

What I remember most of all is how welcoming everyone was, eager to pose for a photo and exchange greetings, to ask me questions and share their stories, despite my terrible Portuguese. Misconceptions surrounding the disease at that time meant that many people infected with leprosy were ostracized from society, as well as from their families. The center received very few visitors. The only silver lining to this lingering stigma was that the rebels also left them alone, the unfounded fear of infection preventing the center from being ransacked and pillaged like many other rural outposts.

The Guardian’s review of Absolution focuses on the theme of white saviorism in the novel, which is a fair assessment. In the early 90s, we spent a lot of time in grad school learning how to avoid—or at least mitigate—bias in our work, to recognize and honor traditional knowledge, and to promote beneficiary participation in the design and implementation of development projects. Unfortunately, the development industry is fraught with unequal power dynamics, so we had to make a conscious effort to avoid them as much as possible. When I think back to that time, what strikes me as the most important and beautiful part of the experience was the sense of human connection—simply being in each other’s company, looking into each other’s eyes and absorbing as much as possible from the moment. I can only hope the residents of the colony remember it the same way.

Writing

Alice McDermott’s 2021 collection of essays, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), contains so many insights about the art and philosophy of writing fiction that I wanted to devote more time to it here, rather than reviewing it below. I had to read three versions of this book in order to fully absorb its wisdom. I started with the audiobook but found the experience wanting. Part of what makes this book so good, in my opinion, are the many quotes and excerpts from the works of master writers such as Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Eudora Welty and EM Forster, etc., authors McDermott has clearly studied extensively. It’s like a cheatsheet from a master class on novel writing.

The problem I had with the audiobook is that it’s hard to fully appreciate these gems—let alone remember who said what—when you’re listening rather than reading with your eyes. After listening to the full recording, I decided to take the book out of the library so I could see these words of wisdom with my own eyes. Seeing the words on the page was better, but since it was a library book, I still couldn’t write in the margins or fold down the corners of the pages to mark the passages I liked. In the end, I broke down and purchased What About the Baby? on Kindle where I could highlight phrases and paragraphs to my heart’s content and send myself the highlighted passages when I was done (one of the best features of Kindle in my opinion). I’m still thinking about whether to buy the paperback as well🤣

One of my favorite essays from What About the Baby? focuses on connectedness, that unique, almost magical quality of novels to bring together various aspects of a story, not just the big concepts of plot/character/desire/motive, but the little hints and clues that might appear in the form of a small object or a turn of phrase or a memory. This is something I’ve felt both as a reader and a writer but not seen discussed in many craft books, perhaps because it is so hard to put into words. It’s like there’s an invisible layer of connective tissue beneath the surface of a story that we as writers can sense but never quite grasp. As McDermott writes, “What is memorable is the sense of inevitability, of nothing superfluous, nothing wasted, of meaning and consequence revealing itself, resonating, page after page after page, in the completed work.”

Above all, McDermott reminds us that, as writers, we must be our own first readers; it’s up to us to recognize and capture these little glimmers of connection “because the nature of our art is such that every draft, even the first one, stirs our unconscious understanding.” It is our job to “go over again and again what we’ve already put down, just as a scholar would, looking for consequence, looking for pattern, sowing the psychological seeds in one scene that will blossom in another, as well as culling those seeds that fail to bloom.” This description resonates with my own experience writing novels, as do many other of McDermott’s words of wisdom in this insightful book. Those of you who are writers might also like this entertaining essay by Alice McDermott on the peculiarities of the writing life, published in LitHub last month.

Reading

Absolution: A Novel by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), audiobook narrated by Jesse Vilinsky and Rachel Kenney

Absolution is an epistolary novel about two young American woman stationed in Saigon in the early 1960s due to their husband’s work. Shortly after arriving in Vietnam, Tricia meets larger-than-life Charlene, whose unorthodox and morally questionable approach to life in Saigon challenges Tricia’s worldview on multiple fronts. Most of the novel is narrated by Tricia, who is now in her 80s and reflecting on her relationship with Charlene in a very long letter to Charlene’s daughter, Rainey. At the end of the book, Rainey also writes back to Tricia (though this part is not quite as compelling in my opinion). In addition to some of the themes mentioned above, the novel explores the changing role of women in the 1960s, the origin of the Vietnam War, and the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. Both narrators are more focused on the character of Charlene than their own trajectory, , an unusual form not often seen in literature—The Great Gatsby being the most the famous example. If you like immersive novels that take you into another world and make you question right and wrong, I highly recommend Absolution.

Charming Billy: A Novel by Alice McDermott (originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1997; republished by Picador Modern Classics in 2014)

I read this novel several years ago but thought to include it here since it’s the novel that first introduced me to McDermott’s work. Charming Billy is the story of Billy Lynch, a much-loved friend, brother, cousin, alcoholic, poet, mystic and hopeless romantic, and the Irish-American community that defined him. As the novel opens, the community is gathered for Billy’s funeral. What follows is a reckoning of the forces that shaped his life, especially his mistaken belief that his first love had not lived. McDermott is a master at capturing the nuances of culture and setting, in this case the Irish-American community of Queens, New York. Similar to Absolution, the narrator of Charming Billy is not the main character. I like how this form heightens the speculative nature of the novel. Billy is dead so we can never know what is real and what is perceived, let alone how he felt about it all. But isn’t that true in life as well? This is a terrific novel, highly recommended!

That’s it for this month. If you liked this post, don’t forget to like/comment/subscribe! I look forward to hearing from you.😊

💕Liz