Milestones

On the passing of time and a degree of deja vu

Once upon a time, a graduate student had an idea for a novel. The idea was born, to some extent, from her surroundings: from the exoticization of the unfamiliar, as the daughter of a late 20th Century New South city found herself plopped into an old New England town with an even older memory.

The idea was also born out of terror, as one dissertation idea after another wrecked on the shoals of institutional disapproval or archival impossibility. I was running out of ideas. I was running out of money. I hid from both of these hard truths by burying myself in the story that I had begun telling myself because my real life had become unsustainable.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, about a graduate student whose own ideas wreck her life in new and exciting ways, was published fifteen years ago today.

My imagination was the key to my escape.

Now you know why I wear a key necklace in all my author photos.

(Here’s me looking very tall at my first book party in 2009, given by the original publisher of Physick Book, Hyperion, which no longer exists. I’m with Julie Metz, a memoirist who can be found here, and Cecily von Ziegesar, who wrote the Gossip Girl books.)

I recently found myself at a reception for grad students, and I stood sipping wine whose major selling point was that it was free, listening to 30 year old people bemoaning how old and tired they felt. I was 30 and a grad student when I started working on Physick Book, and I remember also feeling old and tired. Like I had been in graduate school forever. Like there was no world outside the one where I had unaccountably trapped myself.

I was standing there, holding that glass of free wine, because I, too, was a grad student. Or should I say, am a grad student again. In the UK they (we?) are called “postgraduate researchers.” There are lots of acronyms to master. I’m a PGR in AMA which is part of the HUM faculty at UEA. What this alphabet soup means, beyond spelling out “deja vu,” is that by the end of the autumn I will finally, unaccountably, impossibly, hold a doctorate in American studies, with a dissertation on American historical fiction.

Several friends are already promising to show up with signs at my defense, which in the UK is called a “viva.” (Like “VIE vah”, not like Zapata.)

Is there a comic aspect to an American finally getting her doctorate in American studies from a UK institution? Yes. And it only gets more comic when she threatens to show up for commencement the following year with like 25 other Americans ready to get rowdy.

So what’s next?

This weekend I am attending the storied Nantucket Book Festival. My talk will be early in the proceedings, on Thursday afternoon at the Nantucket Athenaeum, but I will also be present at the author dinner on Friday and events throughout the weekend.

Then on July 7 I will appear with my fellow Marblehead author Julia Glass at the Marblehead Festival of the Arts, celebrating the opening of the new Abbott Public Library.

Then for the remainder of the summer I will be appearing at my desk, working on my dissertation and on the next novel. But also at the pool and on assorted sailboats and in my pocket garden.

I keep thinking of the closing lines of When Harry Met Sally, not a common association with graduate programs, but apt.

“Yeah, it only took three months!”

“Twelve years and three months.”