Our October/November featured artist is New York Times best-selling author Susan Dworkin. Susan shares with our Arts Arlington readers the nitty gritty behind writing in this piece “Getting to The Garden Lady: What Shapes a Novel”
In a way, it took me a lifetime to write my latest novel, The Garden Lady – because what I had learned previously fed into it like streams to the river.
My university offered no practical arts training. So, I majored in that most practical of the arts, political science. When I graduated, I did not think about studying writing. I thought about “what I could do for my country.” Like so many of my generation, I heeded John F. Kennedy’s message and signed up for public service. I went to work for the US Department of Agriculture, and learned how easy it is to go hungry in this hard world. My next boss taught me how to write speeches that sounded like they belonged in the mouth of the politician who was giving them. I learned that a girl with a mere BA in political science could make people laugh or tear up, even change their vote, just by saying things that no one would have listened to if she had been the one saying them.
I went to work for Ms. Magazine. My beat was “culture.”
As a result, I met women who made an excellent living just by being gorgeous. They astonished me. How could it be that the girls we envied so much in high school grew up to be clinically miserable? Why did so many of them seek out men who beat them up?
I began to truly understand the soul-destroying, craziness-inducing wages of objectification. And therein lies the heart of The Garden Lady’s main character, Maxie Dash.
In 1999 I co-wrote a book called The Nazi Officer’s Wife with the woman who lived the story, Edith Hahn Beer. A Jewish law student from Vienna, she was hours away from getting her degree when the Nazis destroyed her world. A young German officer married her, knowing who she was, and hid her in his household. Edith’s story showed me first hand how easily millions of people could stay silent in the presence of a horrendous crime.
And therein lies a major theme of The Garden Lady.
Maxie is a knockout. Actress, model, artist’s muse, and very smart. Taylor Swift-smart. She turns 50 and realizes that time has her number. She marries a wealthy guy who will guarantee her a comfortable future. He adores her. Gives her everything. Supports her philanthropies. He asks only that she agree to know absolutely nothing about his business.
Then somebody murders him — and Maxie must contend with his bitterest enemies, who know how he really made his money. Her acquiescence to silence gets a new name: complicity.
As though channeling John F. Kennedy’s ghostly anthem, she seeks redemption through public service and builds a great community garden on the site of a vermin-infested sanitary landfill.
This is Maxie’s settlement with history.
This is what she can do for her country.
