Fiction as disguised memoir

 

Georgia Arbuckle Fix (and Mattie) did not consider herself attractive.

“Write what you know” is classic advice to beginning writers. Sometimes it’s true. I probably shouldn’t write about traveling to Antarctica because I’ve never done it, and no amount of research will make me warm to the subject (okay, bad pun). The flip side of that advice though is the general belief that creative writers pour some of themselves into everything they write. I’ve had a strong lesson in both these truths this week.

I’ve been reading proof of Mattie, my 1988 novel that will be reprinted by Two Dot in coming months. First published by Doubleday in 1988, it tells of the life, career, and loves of Mattie Armstrong, pioneer woman physician on the vast and bare prairies of western Nebraska in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel is loosely based on the life of Dr. Georgia Arbuckle Fix, who was the first woman physician in Nebraska and who really did leave Omaha to heal the widely scattered settlers in sod huts on the prairie. But don’t attribute everything in the novel to Dr. Fix. That the novel won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America as the best novel of the year, was high praise, especially in a category one man angrily declared was for the men’s action adventure novel.  The funny news about the original Doubleday hardback is that it was in their Double D Western line, which sold mostly, I’m told, by subscription to prison libraries. The digital edition, indie published by me at something like ninety-nine cents, sold well for years, making it the bestseller of any book I’ve written. Now it will be in a hardback again.

If you can’t attribute the fictional story to the real Dr. Arbuckle, you can attribute a lot of Mattie’s story to the real Judy Alter. Re-reading it, after all these years, I realized that in some ways I had written the memoir that I was always reluctant to attempt. When she was first settles on the prairie, Mattie meets a charming, charismatic man with a sad story about being disowned by his wealthy family back in St. Louis. Against the advice of her brother and stepfather, Mattie marries Em Jones, who turns out to be, as we would say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. In 1964, against the advice of my family, I married a medical student and followed him to Texas (the Texas part worked out well). The two stories are variations on a theme, but it’s all there—the sweep-you-off-your-feet joy, the domesticity, the quarrels over money and child-raising (I had a few more children than Mattie’s lone daughter), the growing estrangement, and the final betrayal. My ex and I divorced in 1982; the book was published in 1988. I had had time to process, but I don’t think at the time that I realized that I was writing my own experiences into Mattie’s life.

In her forties, Mattie Armstrong developed an unlikely relationship with the uneducated but skilled workman who single-handedly built her a two-story sanitarium on the prairie. Here’s a spoiler: the relationship was never meant to last, and he rides away, both of them filled with regret for what could not have worked on a permanent basis. As I was writing the last pages of this book, I was in the midst of the one serious relationship I had after my divorce. I clearly remember sitting at my desk and pecking out the scene where he leaves—and the realization came like a load of bricks that the man I thought loved me—and who I thought I loved—was going to leave. As it was for Mattie, so it was for me—decisions turned out to be right, and a more than satisfactory life followed.

I have talked before about my reluctance to write a memoir. Oh, I wrote Cooking My Way Through Life with Kids and Books, but it was a surface memoir, hung on a peg of cooking. I don’t think in it I came to grips with the emotions involved on my journey. And I have since shied away from memoir.  With minor variations, this novel is the memoir of two significant periods in my life. I’m still processing that realization.

My children may say this is TMI, as they put it, but it’s something I felt I needed to say. And one other thing: Mattie’s husband was Em, short for Emory; the builder was Eli (okay I hadn’t yet learned the lesson not to give two characters names starting with the same letter). The original dedication to the book was “For Em and Eli/They know who they are.” Em is dead now, and I suspect Eli maybe too. But I have asked the editors to restore the original dedication, replacing the one now that says it is for my daughters. They have enough books dedicated to them. I want them to know how close this story hits to home.