A Private Library

At the heart of my new novel, Must Read Well, are some 300 journals kept by the once-famous author Anne Taussig Weil. Weil’s single blockbuster, The Vengeance of Catherine Clark, was published in 1965, and in the forty-five years since (the book takes place in 2011), she has given up on writing novels, vanished from the world of letters, and grown increasingly reclusive. By the time the book starts, she’s nearly ninety and very frail; in particular, her vision is so damaged that she can no longer read her own handwriting. So she puts an ad on Craigslist offering a room to rent for a pittance in her elegant Greenwich Village to a quiet young woman willing to read aloud to her. “Must read well,” she adds.

The idea for this book came to me five or six years before I started writing it. I had scribbled on a scrap of lined paper: “A woman whose vision has deteriorated so much that she can’t read her own writing hires someone to read her journals to her in her old age.” This idea struck me as terribly poignant—and full of literary possibilities, but at the time, I just tacked it to a bulletin board near the window of my office. I have five large bulletin boards in my office, and they are mostly covered with such bits of paper.

Some suggest titles of books or essays I might write (“Hormones: A Life” is one I still hope to follow through on), some little bits of description that floated into my head unbidden (“crocuses turning their throats up to the coming snow”), the occasional snippet from of poetry (“‘The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.’ T.S. Eliot, East Coker), all sorts of flotsam and jetsam that might come in handy one day. By the time I revisited this particular note, it faded so much in the sun that the blue lines on the paper had disappeared and even the ink was all but invisible.

So—back to the journals. Like Anne Weil, I’ve kept a journal since I was in my twenties. I now have about 150 of them, all—like Anne Weil’s—in small brown spiral-bound notebooks, all marked as hers are with the start and end dates and all, as hers are, crammed full of terrible, terrible handwriting. 

Why do I keep these journals? Certainly not in the expectation that they will ever be read by anyone else. For me, and I suppose for Anne, too, they were a place to let my feelings loose, write out thoughts too intimate to share with anyone, discharge anger or grief. They also serve as memos of when I did what—books read, concerts attended, art exhibitions seen, people encountered, parties attended, illnesses suffered, meals enjoyed. But mainly they serve as private places where I can offload my feelings. Into them I have poured buckets of ink, tens of thousands of words about loves unrequited, requited loves that went bitterly wrong, love that went right, moving from house to house, getting married, being married, traveling, articles I was writing, books I was writing, books I scuttled, new books I started, books that came out, infertility, adoption, motherhood . . . are you getting bored reading this paragraph? Because I am getting bored writing it. 

In Must Read Well, the journal entries Anne Weil’s eventual tenant, Elizabeth Miller, reads to her are exciting, and all the more so because Liz is a Ph.D. candidate in desperate need of revealing material about this proto-feminist author. This fact she has hidden from Anne in order to gain her trusted position. They skip the boring stuff—what Anne cooked for dinner, who she ran into at the market—and read only the part of her life she wants to revisit: the story of the passionate, secret, disastrous affair she had more than four decades before. she can hardly believe her luck. At the same time, her uneasy suspicion that Anne could somehow have been onto her rises and falls only to rise again and again, pulsing through the story like a quickening heartbeat. 

There is so much in these notebooks that need never be thought of again, by me or by anyone. So much grief and joy, anger, pain, so much wonder. Most especially, though, there is so very, very much that is embarrassing. The ranting, the crushes, the faux pas! And yet they have served their purpose. Almost every night of my adult life, I have unspooled my day into writing. My journals have always been my secret friends, all ears, more patient than any friend could ever be—and with a better memory. And maybe sometimes no less helpful than friends, since writing out my thoughts helps me make sense of them. Writing my feelings helps me put them in perspective. Writing down my life gives it a shape. It makes it a story.

As for reading all these notebooks, I do sometimes skim through a few in search of a name or a date. When did I give up on IVF? What were my thoughts when we first met our son’s birthparents? Sometimes I’m stopped by a pungent phrase, something unexpectedly well written, but I never sit down to read an old journal just to pass the time. They weren’t written to be read. They were written to be written. 

—

ELLEN PALL is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Among the Ginzburgs, Corpse de Ballet, and Slightly Abridged. She has also written many features about people in the arts for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and published numerous personal essays, most recently in The New York Review of Books. Ellen grew up on Long Island, went to college at U.C. Santa Barbara, then moved to Los Angeles. There, she wrote eight Regency Romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. (Not to be confused with the former U.S. National Security Council official Fiona Hill. Very different person.) After ten years, she left California for New York, where she promptly began work as a journalist, wrote novels under her own name, and met her husband, the international human rights advocate Richard Dicker. She now divides her time between New York and L.A. More at www.ellenpall.com.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/Ellen_Pall

MUST READ WELL

Ellen Pall’s Must Read Well immerses the reader in an escalating game of cat-and-mouse between two women: a millennial scholar driven to deceit to reach her goals and a frail octogenarian no less capable of deception. Narrated by Liz Miller, a penniless Ph.D. candidate desperate to finish her dissertation, the novel begins when Liz’s boyfriend abruptly ditches her, rendering Liz homeless and reduced to couch-surfing at best friend Petra’s tiny Manhattan studio apartment. Trying to find an affordable living space, she stumbles across a Craigslist posting that will change her life: a room with a view in a pre-war Greenwich Village apartment. The rent is a pittance, but in exchange, the tenant must be willing to read aloud daily to the apartment’s sight-impaired landlady.

Liz quickly figures out that the sight-impaired landlady is none other than Anne Taussig Weil, author of the 1965 international blockbuster The Vengeance of Catherine Clark and the very woman whose refusal to cooperate for the past four years has held up Liz’s dissertation on the feminist works of mid-century women novelists. Access to Weil is the key to completing her doctorate at Columbia and finally getting her academic career back on track.

Liz sets scruples aside and presents herself as a quiet young woman still finding her way in life. Once settled in, Liz learns from Weil that her need for a reader stems from a desire to revisit a key episode in her life. That episode, recorded in the scrawled journals Weil kept since she was a young girl, turns out to be the story of her passionate, disastrous, secret love affair with a celebrated pianist—the affair, in fact, which gave rise to the plot of Vengeance.

The novel, which builds from there to a double-twist climax, is fast-paced women’s fiction, perfect for book club members everywhere.

“From its suspenseful unfolding straight through to its gratifying ending, Must Read Well reads so well that I couldn’t put it down,” says Alix Kates Schulman, best-selling author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.

“Gorgeous assured writing, a captivating plot, and a delicious, totally unexpected ending make for a seriously entertaining novel,” says Jeanne Winer, author of Her Kind of Case, in praise of Must Read Well.

An escalating game of cat-and-mouse between two formidable women, this fast-paced novel explores themes of love, lust, loss, addiction, depression, betrayal, professional ambition, feminism, and literature.

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Category: On Writing