“I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest
challenge.… There are endless possibilities, infinite choices…. When I'm trying
to think about these things, I often make notes, lots of notes, and sometimes
the answer emerges from them, from a kind of talking to myself I do on the
page. Other times I read certain people I admire to get a sense of the
possibilities, to make myself feel it can be done. It helps to give myself permission
to make mistakes. It helps to think of what I put down on paper as provisional.
(I think writing the first draft in longhand is useful in that regard.) But
finally, you just have to step off into the unknown and trust that somehow you
will get to where you wanted to go.”-- Sue Miller, quoted in Jennifer Haupt, “Interview with Author Sue Miller,” Psychology Today (“One True Thing:
Life's Questions, Big and Small” blog, posted May 31, 2011
Yesterday marked the 70th birthday of
novelist Sue Miller. Born in Chicago, she has set much of
her fiction in the Boston area, which is now her home. Though most famous for The Good Mother, made into a very fine
1988 film starring Diane Keaton as the titular character, it is not the only
one of her books adapted by Hollywood. Inventing
the Abbotts starred Jennifer Connelly and Billy Crudup, while Family Pictures was made into a TV
mini-series with Anjelica Huston and Sam Neill.
In 1990, when Family
Pictures was published, I attended her reading from the novel at a New York
bookstore, then had her autograph my copy. She was the soul of graciousness to
myself and other fans, and her reading perfectly complemented her precise,
elegant prose about domestic life.
It is a comfort to me to know that an author as
accomplished as Miller is, by her own admission, not terribly well-organized,
as she explained in an interview with Eugenia Williamson of the Boston Globe
this past summer. For those of us who find it hard to carve out a sizable slot
of time for writing, it helps to know that someone with her considerable
credits has still managed to produce work simply by force of will that allows
her to seize the moment as it arises.
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