Elin Hilderbrand: Nourishment For An Interior Life

I say I’m a novelist. Then they ask if I’ve published anything. I say yes, twenty-one books. Then they ask if they’ve heard of any of them. I sometimes say my name and my most popular title, Barefoot, or my most recent title, The Identicals, and once in a great while, there’s a glimmer of recognition.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.

Nancy Drew, when I was in elementary school. I used to check the mysteries out of the school library and bring them home for the weekend. Then I would have to hide from my sister so I could read in peace.

I don’t think there’s any one book that kids should read. Everyone is so different. My daughter loves novels about disenfranchised orphans from Third World countries, for example. The grimmer the story, the more she loves it. I see her someday becoming a human rights activist. But my sons would read the first paragraph and put it down. Kids should read what interests them. But they should read!

I wrote a series, based on Nancy Drew, called Rachel and Gretchen. They were the twins who were the heroines of my books. Rachel and Gretchen Fly to the Moon, Rachel and Gretchen Make Breakfast in Bed for their Parents. I illustrated the covers, punched three holes in the pages and bound them with ribbon. My mother has saved them and, for a while, they sat on the shelves of my elementary school library (the same one where I used to check out the Nancy Drew) and the librarian would tell the kids, “These were written by a former student here, and now she’s a real writer.”

Let me preface by saying: every summer until I was 16, I went to Cape Cod with my family, and it was all beach days, sunsets, sparklers, miniature golf, ice cream and Uno by candlelight. Very idyllic. The November after my sixteenth summer, my father was killed in a plane crash and those summers came to an end. My seventeenth summer, I worked in a Halloween costume factory. I spent eight hour days folding Rambo headbands (it was 1986), stapling clown hats to cardboard forms and assembling ghoul kits. It was really, really bad. As I worked, I mused on my reversal of fortune and vowed that no matter what I did, I would find a way to spend every summer at the beach. (Spoiler: I did.)

There’s only one piece of advice and that is to be disciplined. I attended the University of Iowa Writer’s workshop. I was not the most talented writer there by any means, but I could finish. You start a piece and move forward to the end. You are persistent. And if the story or book doesn’t get published, you start something new and you finish that. That’s how you become a writer.

I read all the time. Reading is part of my job. I read one book at a time. I used to have a code that I would finish whatever I started no matter how atrocious, but since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I abandoned that rule. Now, if I don’t like something, I stop reading and move on. I do wish I were a faster reader. My TBR pile is towering.

Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin. Colwin died when she was 48, which is my present age. I consider her my spiritual literary ancestor. She was a tremendous cook and always had delicious food in her novels. This particular novel is sheer perfection. It’s about an Upper West Side woman who is happily married with two children. But at the same time, she’s having a passionate affair with an artist in Soho. She has a hard time reconciling the two parts of her life, and the reader feels her conflict, feels her pain and her indecision. Colwin is so delicate with her characters that you love all of them equally, whether or not they are on the conventional side of morality.

Alice and Oliver by Charles Bock. I read this novel a year after my breast cancer treatment was finished. It’s a cancer novel, a health care novel and a tremendously complicated love story. I was profoundly moved by it.

Kate Atkinson, Meg Wolitzer, Anna Quindlen: They never disappoint. Never. And trust is very important when you’re talking about writers.

A professor of mine once said: An education makes you good company for yourself. I love this quote and that’s exactly how I feel about reading. As long as I have a book, I will never be bored. As long as I have a good book, my life will never be wholly bad. My favorite comments from readers are those people who say they read my book while they were in the chemo chair, or while they were sitting bedside by a loved one in the hospital because it helped them to escape. Reading provides nourishment for an interior life that is sometimes/often preferable to real life. To eradicate the world of the imagination would be the end of civilization.

I really like to read other women novelists but here I have to pick Tim Winton, out of Western Australia. His novels Cloudstreet, The Riders and Dirt Music are three of my all-time favorite novels. He’s a genius.

They never will for me.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. I read it when I was sixteen and something about Franny’s spiritual crisis struck a chord with me as I was struggling to grow up. Salinger only wrote four books, every one of them perfect. His best known, of course, is Catcher, but the other three, all chronicling the Glass family, are far superior. The Glass family is the most intriguing family in literature. One of the things I like is you just know there are volumes and volumes written about the Glasses somewhere, but we only have the three slender books to give us a glimpse into that crazy, brilliant bunch.

The perfect “beach” read is The Vacationers by Emma Straub. Another great beach read is The Good House by Ann Leary. And one more for good measure: The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli.

Normally I only read novels, but on my TBR pile currently are two memoirs I’m looking forward to reading: Hunger by Roxane Gay and Educated by Tara Westover.

Wildly Inappropriate: The Elin Hilderbrand Story.