By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Sara Paretsky "shies away from talking about my own work," whether it's the content or the process by which she produces V.I. Warshawski novels, of which her next is the 12th.
Though she appreciates e-mails from a 14-year-old cancer patient who reads V.I. Warshawski books enroute to treatment "because they make her feel strong," Paretsky retreats from what feels like exploitation for revealing it.
Her husband, Courtenay Wright, is a "thoroughgoing WASP and physicist, so neither by birth nor by training can he have any empathy with a Polish peasant who fears the Evil Eye. One of my grandmothers was an immigrant from eastern Europe. She came to America when she was not quite 13. She was well-educated for a poor Jewish girl, she also brought with her many beliefs. It was from this grandmother that I learned of the Evil Eye that infallibly pounces on those who brag about anything - their children, their own looks, the intelligence of anyone in their family. Many were the horrifying examples I heard of children disfigured by smallpox or reduced to idiocy from terrible street accidents because their mothers bragged about their gifts … believe me, the Evil Eye never sleeps," Paretsky said.
Saying "Gesundheit" could trigger a fatal coughing fit. Her grandmother also believed baby showers caused pregnant women to miscarry. "Perhaps it is this belief that we all have the power to kill others merely by saying 'gesundheit,' which I will do to anyone who starts coughing, that prompted me to write murder mysteries. I will not bring the Evil Eye down on myself tonight by saying I'm a writer. Instead, I'm going to talk about the process of finding a voice."
Contrary to 1994 Visiting Author John Updike moving to Massachusetts to write his Rabbit novels away from the glare of New York City, Paretsky "hasn't undergone the Manhattan initiation," though she moved to New York with $200 at 23 to become a writer - perhaps in a "junior capacity" at The New Yorker.
Her "shameful confession" in deference to "tabloid journalism where we learn about the baby Hillary Clinton conceived with a visitor from a UFO … before you read about me in the supermarket or a blog, let me bare all here in Dowagiac. There was actually a time in the '60s when I was a Mets fan. It makes me squirm to acknowledge it. In mitigation, I was still living in Kansas and the Athletics were more pathetic than the Cubs could ever hope to be. The A's only started winning championships when Finley moved them to Oakland.
In New York, "I made the rounds, but I never got past the front desk. I had no contacts. I didn't know you needed a sponsor. My skills are not now and were not then suited to journalism. As my grace period drew to a close and I began to panic, I fulfilled my destiny. I became a secretary. After four months of that I returned to Chicago, where I could be a secretary just as easily. Chicago offered certain advantages over New York," such as getting a dial tone immediately when picking up a phone.
At her apartment she shared with two other women on the Upper West Side, a dial tone might take a half hour.
One woman owned a motorcycle she kept in the entryway to keep it from being stolen. She revved it up. "I guess the guys outside the door thought we had a chainsaw. They left," Paretsky smiled.
When her agent sent out her first novel, "Indemnity Only," a lot of editors nixed its Chicago setting.
Her "destiny" as a secretary refers to growing up in Kansas in the '50s, the so-called "golden age of America, a society where everyone had a defined place, where everyone knew right from wrong and what happened when you forgot. We had mandatory Protestant prayer in our public schools every morning. Every Easter the school held a revival meeting in the auditorium that lasted most of the day. Those of us students who didn't want to attend - a small number because even those who didn't share the fervor of the occasion didn't want to stand out as different - were locked in a small room next to the principal's office until the religious assembly ended. What the school would have done in the event of fire, I don't know. Maybe rejoice at the deaths of the infidels.
Male writers such as Saul Bellow and Jean-Paul Sartre knew early in life that their "destiny lay in literature. I'm bemused by my writing life. It seems like such a fragile construction. I wonder how I got here and I think how easy it would be for me to lose it. I wrote from an early age, but I knew like all fields, literature belonged to men. History and biography we studied in school told us of the deeds of men. We learned to speak of the aspirations of mankind and of man's inhumanity to man. His inhumanity to woman not being worth recording," Paretsky said.
She raised two younger brothers, one born when she was 9, the other four years later, and cleaned the house every Saturday. Her mother stood her on a chair at 7 by the kitchen counter and had Sara make cake and cookies for her father and brothers. "Thus began a weekly baking stint that lasted until I left their house at 17. I would have made somebody a good old-fashioned wife. When I was 16 my parents sent me to a secretarial course so I would be able to support myself.
One aspect of her detective Paretsky thought consciously about was V.I.'s sexuality "and the role of sex in my stories."
Or, "She may not be depraved, but her appetites sure take a lot of satiation."
V.I.'s emotional involvements "do sometimes cloud her judgment, but that's just a fact of life for men and women alike," Paretsky said. "V.I. does have lovers, but her sexuality does not prohibit her from making clear moral judgments and acting on them."