I started to read when I was about ten years old. I didn’t read children’s books, or fairy tales. I read books that were available to me, which is to say books that were assigned to me in English class in the public school I went to, near the Brooklyn Museum. I seem to remember that the books we were assigned–fiction mostly–were on a list–the Scholastic Book Club?–and I loved reading them because they didn’t so much reflect my life as have some relationship to it. I suppose books like Alice Childress’ “A Hero Ain’t Nothing But A Sandwich,” were meant to warn the primarily black and Hispanic student body about the dangers that would inevitably inform our lives, but what I loved about those books were their generally first-person immediacy, and the interiority of the characters. One novel we read was by a man named Paul Zindel–“My Hamburger, My Love.” Another: “Go Ask Alice,” about a young female drug addict. In those pre-Wikipedia days, you had to really be interested to find out something about a particular author, or follow their career. I was so taken with Paul Zindel’s 1969 novel that I went in search of his other books. He was writing about a world I understood: one where fathers weren’t so much non-existent as a thing of the past; the emotional center of his plays are ruled by women who mask some essential hurt through laughter, and regret. I had an aunt like the mother in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning play,””The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Mood Marigolds.” I had a grandmother like the old woman in the same play, and whom the girls call “Nanny,” And because I so loved Zindel, I wrote a monologue about my aunt in the Zindel style, and another one about my grandmother. In each piece I tried to approximate his everyday, dramatic language, and how he contrasted hope and bitterness, nearly on the same page. In 1973 Paul Newman directed the film version of the play. I went to see it. The colors were just like the colors I imagined while reading the play: gray and some blue, a dead grass color mixed with bad pink skin. It was clear to me at once that Joanne Woodward, who starred as the cruel mother, was essentially too kind a person to play that part. In any case, I was more taken with an actress named Nell Potts, who portrayed Woodward’s sensitive, very quiet, and watchful daughter. I didn’t know that Potts was Newman and Woodward’s actual daughter. In the film I fell in love with how the beautiful and solemn Potts played her character’s obsession with science–like a fact. It didn’t feel so very different from my obsession with words, with writing. Around the same time, I discovered other writers, like Herman Raucher, who wrote “The Summer of ’42,'” and a novel called “Class of ’44,” and my favorite, a movie called “Buster Loves Billie,” a horrible tale about small town Southern prejudice inspired by the Bobbie Gentry song, “Ode to Billie Joe.” In addition to everything else I lived in a pre-World War II or rural Southern world then. Babysitting my sister’s kids in Brooklyn, I couldn’t put down Irwin Shaw’s “Rich Man, Poor Man,” or Herman Wouk’s “Youngblood Hawke.” I loved those books, and even after I did a little more research and discovered that “Hawke” was in part based on the life of Thomas Wolfe, and that I could read Thomas Wolfe, and did, and that Zindel had probably been influencecd by someone named Tennessee Williams, and that Newman’s version of Zindel’s domestic drama presaged the look of films like Robert Altman’s “Three Women,” or the colors I imagined while reading Joan Didion’s 1977 novel, “A Book of Common Prayer,” I still look to literature, and to films, for what Potts, and Zindel, and Raucher, and others gave me first: fairy tales that weren’t so much instructive, as conversations I could feel.
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