My autobiographical essay for the H.W. Wilson Authors Series

 

The following is an essay I wrote for the H.W. Wilson Company, which publishes a literary reference series called World Authors:

I like to joke that I am the child of a mixed marriage: North American and South American. My father was born in 1922 to a family of Midwestern dairy farmers. He entered the Lutheran ministry, and after the failure of his first marriage came east to work as a hospital chaplain in New York City. My mother, ten years younger, was a missionary’s daughter who grew up battling snakes and scorpions in the jungles of Brazil.

They made an odd couple. My father was a quiet, non-confrontational person. Mom was a born warrior: boisterous and tough, always game for a fight and sometimes spoiling for one. Our house in Queens served as Ellis Island for other immigrating South American relatives, and this, along with a religious schism within the family—my mother’s mother and one of her brothers were converts to Mormonism—provided plenty of opportunities for argument, even when Dad and I weren’t in the mood.

It’s probably no coincidence, then, that my novels feature characters of different backgrounds, temperaments, and beliefs being thrown together, often with volatile results, although my protagonists’ fictional debates tend to be very controlled and Socratic affairs compared to the theological free-for-alls that used to break out at the Ruff house.

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was five years old. While I did occasionally write short stories to entertain my friends or to try to impress girls, my emphasis from the beginning was always on longer works. I must have started at least half a dozen novels while I was still in grade school, always abandoning them before the end but each time getting a little farther along.

The first novel I actually completed was a semi-autobiographical religious drama called The Gospel According to St. Thomas, about a minister’s son who comes to question his faith. St. Thomas was intended, among other things, to break the news to my parents that I wasn’t growing up to be the devout Lutheran they’d hoped for. The whole time I was writing it I was imagining their reaction; Dad, I figured, would take it well (and he did), but I anticipated a royal set-to with Mom. Naturally, she chose that exact moment in history to turn pacifist. While cleaning my room one day she found the manuscript and read it without bothering to ask permission. Not only did she not blow her top, she thought the book was really good. So I was the one who ended up getting mad, partly because of the violation of privacy, but mainly because I felt cheated. I was rebelling, God damn it! How dare she not be outraged?

At least I’d proven I could finish a novel, if I was passionate enough about its subject. As I was in college now, fast approaching the day when I would have to start paying for my own food, I started thinking about another book, one that would be good enough not just to tame my mother, but to actually be published, and save me from having to get a real job.

I started writing Fool on the Hill near the end of my sophomore year at Cornell University. Rather than choose a single plot, I took four different story ideas—one about a lovelorn writer who gets drawn into a storytelling contest with the Greek god Apollo, one about a dog and a cat in search of heaven, one about a group of modern day knights and ladies, and one about a clan of magically inclined Little People—and wove them together, using Ithaca and the Cornell campus as a backdrop. Even allowing for my multicultural upbringing, this kitchen-sink approach really shouldn’t have worked, but I turned out to have a knack for complex narratives.

I finished the first draft of Fool just in time to submit it as my senior thesis for Honors English. The members of the thesis committee were both impressed and appalled: after allowing me to graduate summa cum laude, they changed the rules, limiting future fiction submissions to a maximum of 80 pages.

Meanwhile one of my professors, the novelist Alison Lurie, gave me the address of her literary agent Melanie Jackson, and told me to send her a copy of my manuscript once I’d revised it. Melanie liked the book, and by October of that year had sold it to Atlantic Monthly Press. Published in 1988, Fool on the Hill gained an early cult following that continues to this day. I’ve been writing full time ever since.

Where Fool on the Hill was a comic fantasy, my second novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, was a science-fiction satire, and my most recent book, Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, is a mainstream drama about two people with multiple personalities. I didn’t consciously plan to write in a new genre each time, but I like the challenge of not repeating myself, and I’ve never been short of ideas. The hard part is deciding what not to write; since I’ve only got a finite amount of time left, and since I take, on average, four or five years to finish a book, I want to make each one count.

Author bio & interview links / Home