Novelist Alice McDermott Finds an Audience--in Pasadena

PASADENA —  If you’re looking for the literary scene in New York, you may want to drop in at Elaine’s, a shadowy but cheery East Side bar where authors meet for Beaujolais and bon mots. In Pasadena, try the public library’s hushed little Donald R. Wright Auditorium, where the library presents its author series.

There’s not a bottle of wine in sight, and the conversation tends to run less to the cosmic issues than to practicalities (“Where do you find an agent?” or “Do you write in longhand?”), but it’s often intense, say organizers of the annual lecture series.

“A few times, we’ve had to bar the doors to comply with the fire codes,” says Victoria Johnson of the library’s adult services department. This season, for example, there were overflow crowds in the 177-seat auditorium in the Central Library on Walnut Street to hear pop philosopher Leo Buscaglia and feminist Betty Friedan.

About 75 people gathered there Wednesday night to listen to novelist Alice McDermott read from her novel “That Night” and talk about writing. The crowd, respectful and earnest, appeared to be there more to pick up helpful hints on breaking into print or to learn about a new author who has not quite made it to best-sellerdom than to express their devotion to McDermott.

Take George Padilla, a John Muir High School junior sitting in the back row. A McDermott fan? “I’ve never heard of this person,” said Padilla, 16. “I’m here for extra credit in my American lit class.”

‘Very Popular’

Others, however, clustered around McDermott, thrusting copies of her book into her hands to be autographed. “She’s a very popular contemporary author,” said Anna Harlander.

A short woman with bobbed mahogany-colored hair, McDermott talked about some of the thorny realities of her profession. First of all, she suggested, there’s no getting around one central reality: To be a writer you have to write.

“Everywhere I went,” said McDermott, describing a recent national tour to promote her widely acclaimed second novel, which was nominated this year for the National Book Award, “I ran into would-be novelists who had done all kinds of preliminary work. They’d say they’d taken notes, filled outlines and written character sketches, and what did I think they should do next?”

McDermott, a serious woman who listens serenely to all questioners, breaks the news gently: “You’ve got to write the first sentence on the first page of the first chapter.” All the rest, she said, is “often an excuse for not wrestling with the words.”

‘Suburban Kid’

The 34-year-old novelist, six months pregnant and wearing a striped tunic, looks more like a young corporate climber than a literary light. “I’m your typical baby-boomer suburban kid,” she says.

But she’s passionate about writing. “It’s a way of making sense of the world,” she says, trying to dispel the notion that writing is instead the transmission of information somehow acquired by a scholarly author.

Writing is really a process of discovery, says McDermott, who for four years has lived in La Jolla, where her neuroscientist husband does research on Alzheimer’s disease. “The best part is when that sense (about the world) comes to you, and you know you wouldn’t have gotten it unless you’d done the writing,” she says.

Take “That Night,” a brooding, tragic story with deft touches of suburban reality. A modern tale of star-crossed teen-age lovers, the story seemed to thrust itself on McDermott while she was writing an entirely different novel, she says.

“The characters kept on talking about things I didn’t want them to talk about,” she said.

Violent Confrontation

A central incident suggested itself--a violent confrontation in a suburban town between a frustrated young man, deprived of contact with his girlfriend, and the men from the girl’s neighborhood.

“It came from an incident in the town where I grew up,” said McDermott, who is from Elmont, Long Island. “There was a loud argument between the parents and this boy. People in my family often referred to it as a way of proving what our town was not.”

From that incident, rendered as the opening episode of the book, she eventually “discovered” the novel’s voice and its characters, she said. Then, she added, she was confronted with “that difficult, relentless dilemma that comes to every fiction writer--where’s the plot?”

McDermott batted down another myth about novel writing. Intricate narratives don’t reveal themselves to novelists in their sleep. “If only that would happen,” she said. “I’m still waiting.”

Headlong Rush

Rather, plots come from putting characters together and seeing what they do, she said. For McDermott’s characters, there is an unexpected pregnancy, forced separation and a wild, instinctive, headlong rush by both boy and girl to rejoin.

Along the trajectory of the story, though, there are some familiar little snatches of suburban life. There is a passing reference to a boy “who ate whole sticks of butter, played the clarinet and still, at 17, appeared constumeless every Halloween to rattle an orange milk carton in your face and say in his girl’s voice, ‘Trick or Treat for UNICEF.’ ”

And there is a hilarious conversation in which some children talk about how babies are conceived. “The guy’s got to sweat, and the lady’s got to drink it,” insists one boy. There’s also a revealing conversation between the narrator, a 10-year-old girl, and the teen-age Juliet of the modern tragedy, who expresses blind certitude about love conquering “even the Angel of Death.”

“That’s when I began to learn what my book was all about,” said McDermott.

What was it? McDermott is reluctant to sum it up in a sentence or two. Perhaps it is that passionate teen-age love, though transformed by adult realities, can survive. “I don’t think either of them truly give it up,” she says of the two principal characters.

Members of the audience wanted to know if she set a goal of writing a specific number of words every day (“I just try to be at my desk between 9 and 5 as much as possible”) and if she sent “queries” about short stories to publishers (“Just send the stories in a manila envelope with a stamped, self-addressed envelope, which has a way of reappearing in your mailbox”).

Are you ever concerned about being sued by fictionalized personalities from real life, one woman wanted to know.

“I don’t see the connections,” McDermott said. “I never say, ‘Oh, this is so-and-so, and I’ll put him in here.’ I don’t think I could do that.”

The Pasadena literary life may be less alluringly esoteric than that of the world’s major literary centers. “We get rejected a lot,” Johnson says of the library’s attempts to put together a series of authors for lectures. “We have to go to 40 or 50 authors to get six for a series.”

Authors Listed

But there is a passion about books there. The library has compiled a list of 76 Pasadena-area authors, ranging from celebrated novelist Harriet Doerr (“Stones for Ibarra”) to computer expert Chris Wood (“The SuperCalc Program Made Easy”) to children’s author Lael Littke (“Trish For President”).

Vroman’s Book Store on Colorado Boulevard brings in about 15 authors a year for autographing sessions, including, in the past year, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Sophia Loren and Walter Cronkite.

And the library’s authors series keeps packing them in, library staff say.

“There’s nothing like this is San Diego,” McDermott said after her lecture. “Most of the invitations came from back East. I was tickled to hear from someone in my own neighborhood.”