CONSIDERING THE ANCESTRAL STORY — AND WISHING FOR TIME TO TELL THOSE TALES
(Author Photo – or more correctly, author copy of ancestral photo)
Hooked on the gnarly family tree? Personally, I never dared.
In the first place, I figured I’d find more skeletons than aristocrats. One family story involved my maternal great uncle Samuel having died in prison where he’d gone for some offense that got more grisly with each retelling. And in the second place, once you start down that ancestral rabbit hole will there ever be a spare moment for anything else in your life?
I do however love the photo above, handed down to me from somewhere, showing my paternal grandparents or great-somethings, the woman looking so much like my father as to be spooky.
Take any photo such as the above. If you’re a writer you can write forever from it. I mean. What’s with the faux window signifying a Moorish villa the photographer felt appropriate to my forebears? (They were reportedly from Scotland.) Or those delicate hands of the young presumed groom about to topple the faux column? Did he never do a lick of work in his life? I’m going with the story (this is how I’d start making it up, at least) that he became a traveling musician and wound up a famous pianist. But meanwhile she was writing travel pieces for the penny papers, overshadowed his fame and ran off with a circus performer. She does look writerly, doesn’t she?
There are at least a hundred stories that could evolve from the photo of that pensive twosome. But here I am, MFA in Short Fiction, with my fingers getting tongue-tied — or whatever recalcitrant fingers do — just thinking about what direction such stories might go.
(Johns family circa 1920)
Or take my in-laws — whom I would never give away and wish I’d known. These folks knew about work. All seven brothers joined their father in the the iron mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by the time they were 9 or 10. Grandpa came from Cornwall for the opportunity — Cornwall is where the robber barons went to get hardy folks good at deep underground mining. I’ve no idea how Grandma Johns found the energy to raise all those notoriously rambunctious boys, but at least she had the one daughter to help starch all those collars. The collars were reportedly worn only on Sunday — and for occasions such as this historic family photo. A picture worth a thousand made-up words.
All of the Johns boys (that’s the father-in-law I never met standing just behind his mom) worked their ways out of the mines and into a wild variety of subsequent paths. One became a mining company executive, and liked to say he was the only man around who had worked his way up from below ground.
If only I were a novelist.
But say you DO go down that Ancestry.com rabbit hole. My niece, it seems, recently did that, and discovered this fine lady:
(Author photo of text from niece)
. . .who seems to be my great-great-great-great-grandma. C’mon, really? Satin and lace, and powdered face?
(The following story resulted from a recent Labor Day conversation about worst jobs ever. I won hands down, despite one friend having spent a summer pouring gravel for a road construction crew in rural South Carolina – after which he decided he was college material. This appeared in a Medium memoir publication, and though much longer than anything I usually post here I thought you might enjoy it.)
It was a dark period of my otherwise bright life. Think alcoholic spouse and three children in grades one, four and five. Late 1960s. I was picking up any writing jobs I could find, including more than a few magazine ‘stringer’ deals that paid a penny a word — something guaranteed to ruin your narrative gifts. Those didn’t buy a lot of groceries.
Worst of all, my kids needed academic support. In those olden days when students had to look things up in books, home resources were critical. I had grown up with the Encyclopedia Brittanica in the upstairs hall next to the telephone; the Brittanica cost more than my mortgage. Plus, everybody who was anybody with school-age kids in the last half of the twentieth century had World Book.
The World Book Encyclopedia was the holy grail of pre-internet education. I desperately wanted a set of those cream-colored volumes for my children, and feared they would be through school before I could save up enough money. There was only one answer:
World Book offered free training for new salespeople (who seemed always to be in demand.) After you sold six sets you got your own set free — I think there were about 20 books in all — plus the requisite bookcase in which to house your prize. What’s so hard about selling encyclopedias, I asked myself. I signed up for the training course.
It was, as anyone who has ever taken a sales training course knows, about ten percent information and ninety percent pep talk. The information was a 5-minute spiel we memorized that would pluck every cultural, emotional and educational heartstring of every red-blooded citizen we approached.
As to the approach: we were carefully taught never to call ahead or try to set up an appointment, but to choose a neighborhood, ring doorbells, gain entry, deliver the memorized spiel and write up the order. Easy peasey.
It was the hardest assignment I ever had, before or since.
Some people are born to sell. I am not. Fervently as I actually believed in the value of my product, the idea of confronting a perfect stranger and trying to convince him or her of anything can still cause me to break out in a cold sweat and pull the covers over my head. Decades later, fervently as I believe our democracy is at risk, I still can’t do the door-to-door thing.
But stronger than my terror was my desperation. My beloved children needed the World Book.
On my first try I drove, as recommended, to a new suburban development and parked near a cul de sac. This being before traveling salesladies (or ladies of any sort for that matter) appeared in pants, I put on a crisp white shirt and my swingie wrap-around skirt with the big pockets — #1 morale-booster outfit — and slipped on my lucky red Capezio flats. Spiffy new satchel on my shoulder I marched bravely up to the first front door.
An angry-looking middle-aged woman answered, glared at me and slammed the door before I got the first word out.
I took a very deep breath and approached the next house. That door was opened by a youngish woman with a baby on her hip — and I had an opening spiel for that! Before I got past the ‘Good morning’ she said, “We’re not interested,” and slammed her door. By the time I got no answer at the third house I decided they were all calling each other to warn against the ditsy blond trying to sell them something, and watching my every move from behind the curtains.
I walked back to my car, shoulders straight, smile plastered on my face for all those eyes I could feel upon me. Before I got a block away tears were stinging my eyes. I quickly parked on a side street and wept. Then I summoned the courage to wipe my face, drive to another anonymous subdivision and start over. It was downhill from there. Six houses and five rejections later (the sixth wasn’t home) I was back in the car and in despair.
“How did it go, Mom?” asked the kids, excited to have a mom who dressed up and went off to work — as opposed to sitting at the typewriter in jeans. I did not have the heart to tell them it was torture. I told them I thought business would surely pick up tomorrow.
Tomorrow was worse.
By the third week I was sinking into the depths. But just as I was about to hit bottom, someone opened the door and let me in. She actually listened to my spiel. She said she’d think about it. We were never supposed to settle for less than a signature on the dotted line, but I was so excited not to have had the door slammed in my face that I didn’t even get her name and phone number. I jotted down her address and vowed to return.
There was not one day I set out on this journey without having to give myself a five minute pep talk just to start the car. For one chilly week the car was in the shop and I took to my bicycle. The exercise actually helped work out some of my anxiety and frustration, though I still made no sales during bike week.
We were encouraged to do our presentation thing for the man of the house and the little lady both — women’s lib was just getting off the ground — but we weren’t warned about the predator man of the house. I was early into my fourth week when I met him.
A nice-looking young man in jeans and fraternity sweater (that should’ve been a clue) answered the door with a friendly smile. He said his wife was upstairs but he’d call her, and ushered me into the living room. I settled myself on the sofa as indicated, satchel on my lap. He returned to say the little woman would be right down, and why didn’t I go ahead. I did. Within a few sentences he rose from the chair facing me, called upstairs to the supposed woman and returned. But this time he sat on the sofa, edged swiftly next to me, reached one arm behind me and the other hand up my skirt. I grabbed my satchel, dashed out the door and was in the car driving away in about forty seconds.
That, plus the general humiliation I felt, would have ended my saleslady career but for one happenstance. I got a call from a casual friend in the Junior League — of course, I was in the Junior League, but I had prayed that no one therein would learn of my new job.
“We’ve been meaning to get a World Book set,” she said; “and someone mentioned you were selling them. Can you order a set for me?” I was suddenly back in business.
Bolstered by my first commission check I also got smarter. By then it was November. I printed up several hundred cleverly decorated flyers declaring there was still time to order a set of encyclopedias and have this valuable gift under the family tree! My 10-year-old son and I attacked a new neighborhood in the late afternoon darkness, going house to house tucking flyers into front doors or mailboxes. Child labor laws or those prohibiting such use of mailboxes be damned.
I got two actual responses to that campaign, and sold my second set. I was on a roll.
Being on a roll still didn’t make this job any easier. I knew a little about rejection from the few freelance articles I was also floating into the universe, but those little slips were nothing compared to the cruelty of a stranger’s rude dismissal. Or the slam of a door in one’s face. I still fought tears on a regular basis.
But by New Year’s Day I had miraculously racked up another two sales and had a hot prospect thanks to the teacher of a friend’s kid who actually suggested he might benefit from this resource. I could smell victory.
It was a cold January in Georgia. But with the red Capezio’s traded for boots I could leave at the door I persevered. It never got easier. I never had a day I faced without fear and loathing. I still believed in my product, but cold-calling on perfect strangers who have better things to do than listen to a sales pitch does not boost belief in humankindness. I simply kept my head down, played the percentages as instructed and kept going.
In early February I closed my sixth sale and welcomed the beloved encyclopedia that would get my children safely through high school. The next day, I quit.
Anna Quindlen, on tour with her new novel Miller’s Valley, sat down for a rollicking interview with author Kelly Corrigan recently at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Within an hour they had traded profound thoughts and raucous asides – some printable and some not – on topics ranging from literary form to family histories to feminism, from death & dying to the prosecution of rapists.
A few random excerpts:
Re Miller’s Valley – which reviewers have described as “a quintessential small town story about a family you will never forget” – Quindlen said she felt early on that she wanted it to be written in the first person (Mimi, who grows from an 11-year-old into her sixties in the book, is the narrator) because she wanted to leave “some ambiguity at the end, and that’s only possible with a first person narrator. There is a kind of intimacy you can only develop through the first person.”
On how much of Miller’s Valley – and her seven earlier novels – is taken from her own life: “When I was a newspaper reporter people thought I made things up. Now I make things up and people think they’re real.”
On families, literary and otherwise: Corrigan, noting Quindlen’s untroubled childhood and long-lasting, happy marriage, asked if “people who have not lived through deep dysfunction” can still produce great writing. “I had a happy childhood,”Quindlen responded, “but I remember always feeling that there was no place for me in the world.” Then she listed three things that have made her the (highly acclaimed) writer she is: her mother’s illness and death – Quindlen, the eldest of five siblings, left college in her sophomore year to care for her cancer-stricken mother – the “good luck to be a street reporter in New York City,” and being a mom to her three now-grown children.
Corrigan followed with a family tale of her own. After calling her mother to tell her about an award just received, Corrigan was dismayed by her mother’s being “not very impressed.” So after a few moments of disappointment she called back to find out why. Her mother said, “I’m glad you called back. I’m jealous.” To which Quindlen added, “We all said, ‘I don’t want the kind of life my mother had.’”
On memoir (both authors have produced well-received memoirs) v fiction: “In memoirs there is stuff you can’t talk about,” Corrigan commented, “like jealousies, or sex with your husband. But in fiction we can be more honest about what hangs us up.”
“How’s feminism going?” Corrigan asked toward the end of the conversation. “We (feminists) are, like God, everywhere,” Quindlen replied. Concerning one major issue of the feminist movement, Corrigan mentioned data that “reported rapes are up.” Possibly, she added, because for so long rapes went unreported.” But Quindlen noted ruefully that “fairly recently, in New York, you couldn’t prosecute without a third party witness. “Someone had to walk in during the event, preferably a nun or a policeman.”
Asked to name her favorite rising feminist, Quiundlen paused only briefly before saying “Lena Dunham. She immediately used her fame to help others. Every book event she does is tied to the local Planned Parenthood.” Citing the oft-repeated feminist mantra Learn, Earn, Return, Quindlen said Dunham “is doing all three at the same time.” And Quindlen couldn’t resist getting in a plug for another woman she admires, “Hillary Rodham, as I like to call her, not using her slave name – is best qualified, and will make a great President.”
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