This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (19 page)

I sometimes think I should put my novels in a sample case, the expensive new hardbacks on one side, the smaller, friendlier paperbacks on the other, and go door-to-door through some neighborhood in St. Louis with my wares. If someone wanted me to stand on the sidewalk and read to them, I would read. If somebody wanted his or her book gift-wrapped for the holidays, I would wrap. If they wanted to cry in my arms, I would hold them. The door-to-door sales perfected by Fuller Brush and various encyclopedia companies seemed to operate on a more reliable formula than the marketing schemes of publishing houses. Even as my audiences got a little bit bigger, most hovering in the fifteen-to-twenty-five range by the
Magician's Assistant
days, I could still fly halfway across the country to a room full of empty chairs. Who knew I was scheduled to read in Chicago on the night of an NBA playoff game (back in the days when that meant something substantial), or that Ethan Hawke would be reading from
his
new novel in the room across the hall from me at the Texas Book Fair? I never minded reading to three people. I had plenty of experience. The key is that all of you must sit very close together.

All this raises the question: Why don't I just stay home? Believe me, I've asked myself that many times, mostly in dark hotel rooms when the alarm goes off at four-thirty in the morning because I have a flight to catch. The answer is partly that touring is in my contract; selling is part of the job. But more important, I really do believe Allan Gurganus. Watching a book wither on the shelf would be worse than never having the chance to fight for its success. The market out there is big and crowded, full of noise and hype demanding the reader's attention. The book, not weighing much more then a pound, with no jack to plug it into, can use all the help it can get. I know a lot of writers whose publishers, whether for lack of funds or confidence, don't send them out. I don't know any writers who wouldn't jump at the chance to go.

Jane Friedman says what matters to her is that the tour is successful for the author, which means sending out people who have an established fan base. Gone are the days of simply dropping a newly minted novelist into the ocean to see if she can swim. The process is too expensive, and too emotionally damaging, to replicate the kinds of tours I lived through in the early nineties. Yet I wonder who I would be, and where I would be, without those early, soul-crushing tours of duty. It would be like opening directly on Broadway without the formative years in vaudeville, where I was, quite literally, getting my act together.

L
ate one night, I was reaching the end of my signing line for
Run
, after having given a talk at Washington National Cathedral. A woman came up to the table with a girl who might have been sixteen, though I doubt she was as old as that. “It's awfully late for you to be up on a school night,” I said to her.

“And it's going to be a lot later before she gets to bed,” the mother said. The daughter was looking at the floor. “We've got a four-hour drive back to West Virginia tonight.” She beamed at me. She was a mother, after all, and very proud of what she had accomplished for her child. “I knew you would tell her something she needed to hear, something she'd always remember, and you did. You're her favorite writer, you know. She's going to be a writer, too.”

I wished to God I had something to give that child, an amulet or a golden compass, something that would have proved just how completely I believed in her. She didn't say a word to me, and I put my arm around her so that her mother could take our picture. I wrote her name and my name in her copy of my book. I thanked them both for coming, but there was no way to thank them enough. It was late, and people were still in the line behind them, and they had a long drive ahead.

(
Atlantic Monthly
, October 2008)

“The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal”

M
Y SISTER,
H
EATHER,
first broke the news about my pornography in the middle of last July. She lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she was able to get her information from a couple of newspapers, the
Greenville News
and the
Spartanburg Herald-Journal.
My sister doesn't watch television, but a friend e-mailed her a link to a local TV news story and she watched it on her computer. She then sent it on to me with the attached note:
You've just got to laugh
.

As I didn't have to make my appearance at Clemson until the latter part of August, I had five weeks to decide whether or not to laugh.

T
his is the story: Clemson University, located in the button-sized hamlet of Clemson, South Carolina, had assigned
Truth & Beauty
, a memoir I had written about my friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, to the incoming freshman class of 2006. Such reading programs are popular nowadays. The idea was born of the book club, a social activity in which the book is often nothing more than an excuse for getting together with friends. Since Oprah took the book club national, entire cities have decided to read a single book, high schools and colleges have picked one book as a way of bringing students together. Discussion groups are organized, papers are assigned, and then, if all goes well, the author is brought in to give a talk, do a signing, meet and greet.

I know this drill. I have been the all-city read and the freshman read and the radio-book-club read, as both a novelist and memoirist. It's good work for an author: lots of books are sold, and an audience that might otherwise have never thought of you starts searching out your backlist. My extensive prior experience with one-book programs, both civic and academic, had been uniformly positive, so when a panel of Clemson administrators and faculty voted to assign
Truth & Beauty
some ten months in advance of the late-August engagement, I agreed to attend, marked it on my calendar, and then forgot about it.

I went back to my computer and watched the news clip again. The reporter shook my paperback at the camera as if it were a bloodied knife. “This is the book,” she said. “And for at least one parent, there's nothing beautiful about it.”

That parent turned out to be Ken Wingate, a Clemson alum, a lawyer, and a member of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education. His own children were not members of the Clemson incoming freshman class, but two of his nieces and a nephew were. On the news, he outlined his problems with the summer-reading committee's selection. “The book talks in graphic terms about pornography, about fetish, about masturbation, about multiple sex partners . . . The book contains a very extensive list of over-the-top sexual and antireligious references. The explicit message that this sends to students is that they are encouraged to find themselves sexually.”

Then the screen was taken over by a sleepy-looking coed who seemed to have been stopped and questioned on her way to class. She was a Clemson junior but her little brother was an entering freshman. “I've heard that there's girls that are doing drugs and having sex at early ages,” she said in heavy South Carolinese, “and it's just not good for people to have to read.”

In the Greenville paper, Mr. Wingate furthered his views. “I'm certainly not anti-Clemson,” he said. “In fact, I love Clemson, which is why I've waded into this sewer, both in terms of reading the book and being an outspoken advocate for an alternative book, because this is inappropriate to shove down the throats of incoming freshmen.”

“Did he call me a sewer?” I asked my sister.

“I think he's saying the book is a sewer,” Heather said. “Or the circumstances are sewer-like. I don't think you yourself are a sewer.”

Either way, the battle had been launched to keep the youth of Clemson and, I imagine, other citizens of South Carolina safe. From me. Ken Wingate had lost his bids for both the state senate and the governor's seat (for which in the 2002 primary he garnered a total vote of four percent) and had now turned his attention to me. To save the parents of freshmen and other concerned citizens the trip through the sewer that he himself had endured, he posted excerpts from my book on a website: every instance of profanity, every reference to body parts and their uses and to pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs that appeared within my pages was on his list. That way the citizenry could be fully informed without having to go to the bother of reading the book for themselves.

Nothing about this seemed especially shocking to me. I live in Tennessee. We're the people who brought you the Scopes Monkey Trial. I never did meet Ken Wingate, but I have been meeting people like him all my life. Still, his attention grated. To be charged with a crime you've committed is one thing, but a special kind of bewilderment comes of being wrongly accused, and I believed I had been wrongly accused.

Where
Truth & Beauty
errs, it errs frankly on the side of sweetness. It is a book that appeals to high school girls. In 2005, it won an award from the American Library Association for being one of ten adult books most suitable for teenaged readers. It is my own story, the story of Lucy and me meeting in college, becoming friends in graduate school, and trying to find our way in the world as writers. Lucy, who had lost part of her jaw to cancer at the age of nine, had endured years of chemotherapy and radiation. She had thirty-eight reconstructive surgeries over the course of her lifetime. She was a spectacular person, brilliant and difficult, demanding and talented. She was capable of great love and tenderness, as well as great suffering. She was my best friend for seventeen years. After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir,
Autobiography of a Face
, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive. This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend. Even when the details of our lives became sordid, it was not the stuff of sewers.

My friends from New York offered to go with me to South Carolina, expecting a gladiatorial match I would surely win. My friends from home read drafts of my speech and howled over the ever-growing stack of newspaper clippings. My friend from Mississippi told me not to go. “Cancel,” she said. “Cancel, cancel, cancel.” Mississippians tend not to be cavalier about the dangers of bigotry in the Deep South.

“I never cancel.”

“There's a first time for everything.”

Over at Clemson a hue and cry was being raised from a quickly gathering organization of concerned parents, who had read all the juicy highlights on the Internet. Not only were they calling to have the assignment rescinded, or, at the very least, to have a more appropriate book like
To Kill a Mockingbird
serve as an alternate choice, they also appeared to want me barred from campus.

“At a minimum,” an alumnus wrote the university's president, “I trust that the current assignment will be pulled immediately and that the author's visit to Clemson will be cancelled. If not, shame on you and shame on Clemson University.”

In an article published in the
Anderson Independent-Mail
, headlined “Protesters: Little Beauty in ‘Truth and Beauty,' ” a reporter wrote, “In the book, there is an implied lesbian relationship between Ms. Patchett and Ms. Grealy.” The article went on to quote a seventeen-year-old Clemson freshman who had joined in the protest. “The friendship and the love portrayed in the book are not exemplary,” she said. “The love between the two women is not normal.” The reporter and the seventeen-year-old had finally come out and said the thing that no one else had had the nerve to mention: Lucy and I must have been having sex with each other. That was the only possible explanation for our loyalty, love, and devotion. Sex was the payoff for a difficult relationship, and without the sex the whole thing made no sense.

I
drove to Spartanburg and picked up my sister on the way to Clemson. “If it had been a couple of guys who met in college and saw each other through sex and drugs and illness, it would have been
Brian's Song
,” she said to me in the car. “They would have made a Movie of the Week out of it and named the football stadium after you.”

We had been hoping that the controversy would have spun itself out like a summer storm before my arrival. No such luck. Mr. Wingate managed to keep his disgust and disappointment in the papers, culminating his efforts with an on-campus news conference the day before my arrival. Excerpts of all the bad reviews of
Truth & Beauty
that had been posted by readers on Amazon were assembled in a flyer and distributed to passersby, but if anyone missed them, they were also posted on the website of a faith-based organization called the Palmetto Family Council, under the heading “Praise Not Universal.” The site also provided a Bible-study guide for the book. The local paper claimed that seven students joined about forty parents, grandparents, and alumni to protest.

“It wasn't that many,” a dean told me as I was whisked into an office upon arrival. “And he brought most of them with him.” Still, the people in the dean's office, the people who had worked so hard to get me there, looked nervous. They looked really nervous.

“He took out a full-page ad in the paper.” An assistant woefully passed over that morning's edition of the
Greenville News
. It had been paid for by “Upstate Alive,” an organization I had never heard of.

In big orange letters, the ad in the
Greenville News
asked: “Is CLEMSON trying to educate students or socialize them?”

The freshman reading project at Clemson University is:

1. A violation of academic freedom of choice because it's REQUIRED reading.

It's not optional and denies students a choice, which violates the “marketplace of ideas” ideal of the University . . .

2. A violation of the University's own sexual harassment policy, which states that sexual harassment of university faculty, staff, or students is prohibited.

Yet these freshmen are required to join in group discussions about virginity, pornography, masturbation and seduction . . .

3. Not in harmony with the values of South Carolina or the Clemson community.

. . . Forcing this book on Clemson students now is particularly inappropriate and insensitive given the recent rape and murder of a Clemson student.

4. Not supported by a majority of Clemson's faculty and staff.

A small number of instructors chose this book without the advice or consent from the majority of faculty and staff.

5. A squandering of University, taxpayer, and student resources.

In a time of record tuition increases, when many students must borrow tens of thousands of dollars to pay for college, the estimated $50,000 to cover the cost of nearly 3,000 books, the author's speaker fee and travel expenses is a gross misuse of taxpayer and student funds.

I was now somehow an accessory to rape, murder, and sexual harassment, and charged with participation in a $50,000 swindle. The ad also included a copy of Mr. Wingate's original letter to the president of the university, with a suggestion that he “pull the plug” on the author's lecture. I stood in the dean's office wishing that someone had been able to do exactly that. Then I went off to meet with seventy-five honors students.

“This is a very good group of kids,” my escort assured me. “Only one of them refused to read the book on the grounds that it was morally offensive.”

I wondered if, as a student, I could have opted out of French or math on similar grounds.

The honors students were easy. Perhaps that was because their numbers were small, or because the room was open and bright, or because they were served cookies, or because they were simply smarter than the other kids. I don't know. They asked straightforward questions about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, the reliability of memory, how I felt about the protests. They lingered at the door to shake my hand and have me sign their books.

Maybe my visit wasn't going to be so bad. That's what I wanted to believe. The voice of an unpleasant minority had taken center stage. After all, who ever took out a full-page ad to say how thrilled they were about a freshman summer-reading program?

C
lemson's is a pretty campus with redbrick buildings and old-growth trees. It sweeps along with just the degree of majesty that one looks for in a southern college. The worst thing I can say about the campus is that it was very difficult to find a restroom. When the school first opened its doors to women in 1955, they never did even out the number of bathrooms. So while it's easy to find a men's room in the older buildings, the women's rooms required a great deal of hunting. “Couldn't they just tack the word ‘Women' on a couple of the men's doors?” I asked. How hard could it be to attain equality on this very basic front?

“Oh, no,” my escort told me in a whisper. “There are urinals in there.”

And so my sister and I hiked up to the third floor, to a place were we could use the facilities without being disturbed by urinals.

Next we were off to a luncheon at the president's house. The faculty and trustees in attendance, as well as the president himself, were in full support of my visit. They had spent the last six weeks on the front line of criticism serving as my tireless defenders. The state legislature had been pressing for more control over Clemson's curriculum for some time, and the storm over
Truth & Beauty
had finally pushed the question of who made those choices out into the open. At the long dining room table, everyone seemed more than pleased that I was there to fight the good fight for higher education. The problem was, I was not inclined towards a fight. I hadn't been paid for one. I had only been brought in to talk to students about a book.