|
For Immediate Release:
Perpetually Almost Famous Writer
Announces Latest Dubious Coup
The enterprising Frances Lefkowitz has won yet another literary award guaranteed to increase her name recognition among small numbers of eccentric readers who borrow their books from the library or wait for them to show up in paperback at the used bookstore. The award is from the National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org), an organization dedicated to the absurd and ambitious goal of writing a novel in one month—the month of November, to be exact. Since 2001, thousands of writers of all ages and abilities (though weighted heavily toward computer nerds writing sci-fi and fantasy) have pledged to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days, guided by the principle of quantity over quality. This year, Lefkowitz, who had been thinking about making the leap from essays and short stories to novels—“they’re more marketable,” says the high-minded literary snob—joined the fray and completed SORRY, her 50, 710-word novel, in just 25 days. On November 28, a sophisticated judging panel of word-counting automatons at the “Nano” cyberspace headquarters counted all her words but read none of them, and declared Lefkowitz “a winner.” Though she has accumulated numerous literary honors—including state arts fellowships and nominations for a Pushcart Prize and a James Beard Award—this one, she says, is “special.”
SORRY is a story of love and murder involving an aimless, wealthy young man with culinary ambitions and a woman of indeterminate nationality who is a refugee from a child-sex-slave ring. After they kill her master—or “Daddy,” as she calls him—the woman, known as Sorrel, blossoms, finding work as a cake decorator and surrounding herself with her delicate, pastel creations. Her lover, Tim, however, is bereft without a murder and body-disposal project to occupy him. He turns anxious and abusive, but has the sense to abandon her before the violence escalates. Eight years later, the city tax collector uncovers inconsistencies in the records of the house Sorrel “inherited” from her Daddy, and soon the police are investigating. Tim, now the owner of several restaurants and married to an interior designer, gets a chance to save Sorrel again by confessing his guilt. Will he or won’t he step up and take the fall? Will the fact that she has a son—probably his—sway him? Oh, you’ll just have to read the book to find out.
“The plot came to me in its entirety in a dream,” explains Lefkowitz, who, as the books columnist for Body+Soul magazine felt it was finally time to write novels rather than just write about them. “All I had to do was flesh it out, so to speak.” After spending the last few years penning a memoir of growing up poor, white, and female in San Francisco, writing fiction came as a welcome respite. Her memoir, HOW TO HAVE NOT—a kind of Dorothy Allison meets Barbara Ehrenreich and then runs into Mary Karr at the corner store—is currently in rewrites.
As for her novel, the magazine editor and writer admits, “It’s the epitome of what you’d call a messy first draft.” SORRY is riddled with inconsistencies at every level, including plot, voice, location, character names, weather, seasons, and hair color. It starts out, for instance, in a gloomy Eastern city reminiscent of Worcester, Massachusetts, and then inexplicably the main character goes out for a walk and finds herself in the bright white fog of San Francisco. Then there is the narrator, who can’t decide whether to refer to himself as “I” or “he.” “But these are minor problems,” says Lefkowitz, dismissing them with a wave of her bruised and calloused hand. “As they say in Hollywood, ‘we’ll fix it in post.’” In other words, it’s on to editing. Speaking of editing, that process will begin—and end?—in the month of March.
|
