Julia Glass
Winner of The National Book Award, Author of:
The Widower's Tale |
CINDERELLA STORY:
Jaws dropped when unknown author Julia Glass beat a field crowded with literary luminaries to win the National Book Award for her debut novel, Three Junes. Why haven't we heard from this 46-year-old West Village mom before now? Just call her a late bloomer.
—Meryl Gordon, New York Magazine
Julia Glass, who won the Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for Best Novel in 2000 with her beautifully constructed novella, Collies, already was in her 40s without a book to her name then. She left Words & Music and immediatelly set about expanding her concept into a novel of three-linkednovellas, Three Junes.
It is an astonishing first novel—British in flavor, not unlike the narratives of many Booker Prize winners—which traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses. Another four years pass and in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.
Photo of Ms. Glass by Dennis Cowley
The book was published with a respectable first printing of 25,000 copies and great reivews, but little media fanfare otherwise. As Julia said in her New York Magazine interview:
I gave a reading at a bookstore in Marin County and two people turned up....I did separate events with Ann Packer and Richard Russo. I felt like the opening band for rock stars.
So,when she beat out such literary rock stars as Alice Sebold, Mark Costello, Adam Haslett, and Jonathan Safran Foer to win the literary world's equivalent of the Oscar for Best Film, shock waves reverberated throughout the writing and publishing world. Novelist Bob Schacochis, a judge for
The 2004 National Book Award, put his choice of Julia's book this way:
Three Junes is an anti-hip book, an anti-cool book. It was like choosing a 25-year-old single-malt whiskey.
In her acceptance speech at the prize ceremonies, Julia dedicated her award to all late bloomers everywhere struggling to find their way to publication.
Julia wrote the novel in her 700-square-foot Greenich Village ground floor apartment which she shared with her two sons Alec and Oliver and her partner, photographer Dennis Cowley, not exactly Virginia Wolfe's "room of her own." Julia, in fact, is proof positive that no matter how late in life you decide you are a writer, if, indeed you are one, you will write, regardless of the obstacles. Julia had no book contract and no steady income while writing Three Junes. She supported herself as a copy editor for magazines and publishers and by writing magazine articles on parenting and pets. Because of the need to support herself in this manner, she could not adhere to the advice of many successful writers to set aside eight hours a day and just write, as a nine to five job. Her success—achieved in spite of obstacles, including breast cancer, which would have thrown most would-be writers completely off-track— is an inspiration for all writers.
I'm not a believer that you have to write every day," she says. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.
Whatever works for you, use it, she advises.
Photo of Julia with her two sons, Alec and Oliver, and their father, Dennis Cowley, by Len Irish
JULIA'S SPECIAL ADVICE TO WRITERS:
The old adage is, "Write what you know." But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, Write what you want to know.
We highly recommend that you read Ms. Gordon's entire article in New York Magazine and a Boston Globe feature for insight into the way Ms. Glassfound her stride as an author and how and where she finds her inspiration, including the taste of an exceptional cocunut cake. The links are:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/n_8225/
and
http://www.boston.com/ae/food/articles/2006/08/02/baking_with_julia/
ABOUT JULIA'S NEW BOOK: The Widower's Tale
In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love. One relationship Percy treasures is the bond with his oldest grandchild, Robert, a premed student at Harvard. Robert has long assumed he will follow in the footsteps of his mother, a prominent physician, but he begins to question his ambitions when confronted by a charismatic roommate who preaches—and begins to practice—an extreme form of ecological activism, targeting Boston’s most affluent suburbs.Meanwhile, two other men become fatefully involved with Percy and Robert: Ira, a gay teacher at the preschool, and Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener who works for Percy’s neighbor, each one striving to overcome a sense of personal exile. Choices made by all four men, as well as by the women around them, collide forcefully on one lovely spring evening, upending everyone’s lives, but none more radically than Percy’s. With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.
ABOUT HER OTHER BOOKS:
Just as Julia's Three Junes and her new novel, The Widower's Tale, are about the complexities of family relationships and how they affect the courses of our lives, the different types of love, and the redemptive power of love and so are her novels I See You Everywhere and The Whole World Over.
I See You Everwhere is an intimate tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over 25years. Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who yearns for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of the fence–mine–every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world–or plummet in very grand style.” In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louisa settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.” Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work, I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.
The Whole World Over is a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four–year–old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. It is at Walter’s restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts—and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie’s orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made—or has refused to face.Julia Glass is at her best here, weaving a glorious tapestry of lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In The Whole World Over she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love.
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