Reading and Writing Together: Interviews
with Offshoots of a Providence Writer's Group
by Kathryn Kulpa
It was the late 1980s, somewhere in that power-grey era of Ronald Reagan and Bush the First and wet-look hair and Bret Easton Ellis and Wall Street, and I was discovering that graduate school was not the blissful continuation of college I'd imagined it to be but was, instead, exactly the kind of grind one of my professors had warned about. I wasn't entirely sure of the difference between post-structuralists and deconstructionists. The former wrote incomprehensible jargon-ridden essays and the latter did the very same thing, only with more attention paid to Latin roots. I recall reading, with a growing sense of disaffection, if not alarm, a two or three-page exegesis on the color of Coleridge's eyes: certain contemporary sources had defined them as green, but other textual clues pointed to them being blue. Why was it important for me to know this? And hadn't Elton John already wrestled with the same vital literary question in Your Song? Read more
Another
Providence Writer's Group Success: Lisa Borders
Q. I know that Cloud Cuckoo Land was recently honored with the Massachusetts Book Award. That must have been a great surprise. Did you know it had been nominated?
Lisa Borders: It was a great surprise. Cloud Cuckoo Land was a finalist for two awards that honor small press publications -- the Independent Publisher Awards, and ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards -- but in the Massachusetts Book Awards, my novel was competing with books from major presses. I did know the book had been nominated; the nominations are open to any book published in a given calendar year whose author lives in Massachusetts. Knowing how many accomplished authors there are in this state, I certainly never expected to be recognized in this way, and it was quite an honor.
Q. The process of getting a first novel published can be novel-worthy in itself. Can you talk about some of the twists and turns you encountered on the way? Where did you hear about River City's contest, and was that the first contest you'd entered? What were some of the other routes you tried?
LB: I finished a draft of the book that was ready to send out to agents and/or editors at the end of 1999, and it took me two years after that to find a publisher. I started with four agents who had been referred by friends. Two of them loved the novel's opening section, which takes place in Texas, and didn't like the way the rest of the book unfolds in Philadelphia; the other two, of course, loved the Philly sections and didn't like the Texas scenes. I considered what they'd all said very carefully and decided (with the help of trusted writer friends who served as readers) the book was structured exactly as I wanted it to be, so I kept pressing onward. Not that I didn't doubt myself as the rejections continued to pour in. There were some amusing moments: I received a rejection from an editor who said, "This novel has no plot," and one of the comments in the very next rejection I received was, "This book is certainly heavy on plot!"
After trying numerous agents and not finding representation, I decided to enter all the small press contests. River City's contest was listed in Poets & Writers magazine. I wasn't familiar with the press, but the contest was judged by Pat Conroy and his wife, the novelist Cassandra King, so I figured I would be in good hands. That was one of many contests I entered that year -- in fact, my book was still pending in a few other contests when I found out I'd won.
Q. I remember that the news of your contest win got overshadowed for a while.
LB: This is actually a somewhat touchy subject for me. I got the call that my book had won the contest on September 10, 2001, so I had about 18 hours to celebrate before it looked like the world was coming to an end. I sent an e-mail out on the night of September 10, telling friends I'd won the contest, but some people didn't read it until after September 11, so I got some odd reactions. One person (someone I didn't know well) excoriated me for sharing such news at a time of national tragedy. So it was very weird, to finally have this news I'd been waiting for for years, and not be able to share it for fear I'd look self-centered or insensitive.
Q. Can you talk about the origin of the novel? I know it grew out of a short story. When did you write the first version of the story? What was it about the story that made you decide it needed to be longer? Around how long did the process take?
LB: I wrote a short story in 1988 called Cloud Cuckooland. It was told from Jamie's point of view, not Miri's. I handed it out in Jincy's class (Jincy Willett) at Brown University's Learning Center before I moved to Philadelphia to go to grad school at Temple University. Jincy had some suggestions -- I still have the comments she wrote, and it was clear she thought the story needed more work than some others of mine she'd seen -- so I revised it along her guidelines, and handed it in to my first grad school workshop, where the professor hated it. Just completely dismissed it. He asked the class in regards to my story, "Does its reality mitigate its banality?" That's one of those moments that you just never forget. Fortunately, I'm quite contrary, and the surest way to strengthen my resolve is to insult me or suggest that I'm not up to a given task. I think his complete dismissal of the story was part of what eventually made me want to work it into something longer.
Looking back on it, that original story was bursting at its seams: it was very long, and was trying to tackle a range of subjects that was really too great for a short story. At the time, though, all I knew was that while the story was not successful, I could not let go of the characters. I kept thinking about Jamie and Miri, all through grad school. After I finished my M.A. in 1990 I wrote a story from Miri's point of view, which my writing group at the time liked a lot. At that point I thought it would become a collection of interrelated short stories, some from Jamie's POV, some from Miri's. Eventually I decided it was not a short story collection, but a novel.
Q. Miri's voice is so strong, it's hard to imagine CCL being told in any other voice but hers. But I think you've said that you originally told the story with two voices, alternating Miri's and Jamie's point of view. Was it first person narration for both of them? What made you decide to go with a single narrator?
LB: For a long time I still intended it to be a novel told in two voices. I have over 100 pages written in Jamie's point of view. But as Miri's voice emerged, especially as I started to write about her childhood in Texas (this was around 1993 or so), the feedback I kept getting was that Miri's voice was much stronger than Jamie's. Eventually, she just took the story over, and rather than resist her, I gave in. The best way I can break it down in terms of time is that I conceived the characters in 1988, worked them over both in my mind and on paper for about six years, and then really began writing the novel in its published form in 1994. It then took me until 1999 to finish, though there were periods during that time when I got no writing done at all, for all the usual reasons.
Q. The novel's sense of place is vivid in both the Texas and Philadelphia sections. You lived in Philadelphia during grad school, but had you also spent time in Texas?
LB: I've never lived in Texas. My father, who died when I was a child, grew up in Beaumont, Texas, roughly the area where the fictional town of Prairie Rose is supposed to be. He told lots of stories of his childhood, and I think Miri and her grandmother, in particular, grew out of those stories. When I started writing I had no idea if I'd rendered the region in any way approaching reality, so I took a trip down there after I got a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant in 1995. I spent about four days in East Texas just driving around, listening to people talk in diners. Then I drove to Austin. Initially I just wanted to see Austin, because I'd heard good things about it as a city, but after spending a couple of days there, I realized that not only was it a likely place for Miri to run away to, it provided the perfect transition between her life in a small town in East Texas and her life in Philadelphia. I saw lots of street kids there, including one with a grimy Snoopy and Woodstock sleeping bag, and Rick's character was immediately conceived.
Q. Miri is a fascinating character. She can be difficult, though: she's not always a "nice" character, even to Jamie. I think this makes her richer, but did you have to struggle with letting Miri be mean at times, or make the wrong choices?
LB: That's a really interesting question, because I don't think Miri is mean, at least not purposefully so. She hurts people either unintentionally or when she feels threatened, but I don't think she is ever mean simply for the sake of being mean. I certainly agree that she's difficult, though, and not always nice. For me, all of her actions and reactions come out of her formative experiences -- her early abandonment by her mother, the absence of her father, her grandmother's death, and what she sees as a betrayal by her surrogate father figure, Wendell. She has to learn to take care of herself from an early age, and as a result, she often comes across as self-centered, but it's not out of a lack of empathy for others -- I hoped to get this across, in part, through her love of animals. Miri simply doesn't have the luxury of caring for others when she's young, because every ounce of energy she has goes into her own survival. By the end of the book, when she is in her 20s, she is finally faced with a choice -- she can either grow up and realize that there is room in her life and her heart now to care for others, that she no longer has to focus everything on her own survival, or she can continue in her accustomed way, live only for herself, and flee when things get difficult.
So I never felt like I had to struggle with letting Miri behave in a certain way -- I think I knew her so well by the time I started writing the book that it was always clear to me exactly how she would react. Interestingly, though, I struggled with some of the other characters, particularly Jamie. In early drafts of the novel, he came across as too much of a saint, and I had to work to make him slightly less nice. He's still a very nice guy, but I added some places where he gets annoyed or vents frustrations, because he was nice in a very unbelievable way in some of the early drafts. Likewise, Miri's mother Annmarie was pure evil in her earliest incarnations, and I worked hard to soften her enough that the reader could see she was a bad mother, yet perhaps not entirely dismiss her as a bad person.
As a fellow writer you're probably familiar with Ernest Hemingway's iceberg theory of characterization -- that in fiction we only see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a character's traits or personal history, but the rest of it needs to be submerged in the writer's mind for that tip to be believable. I have a whole backstory in my mind for Annmarie that is not in the book, and I believe, or at least I hope, enough of it is hinted at that the reader can feel some slight sympathy for her even while realizing how badly she's treated her daughter. Likewise, I know things about Jamie's family that are not in the book, but which I hope come across and help to render his family dynamic believable.
More information is available on the Massachussetts Book Award at www.massbook.org.
Winner
of The National Book Award Author Tells All: A Chat with Jincy Willett
Jincy Willett’s first novel, Winner of the National Book Award, uncovers moments of bizarre humor in ordinary life—and in a few lives not so ordinary. It’s a tale of two sisters, twins who are anything but identical. Dorcas is an acerbic librarian who has rejected sex, not from any particular moral platform but simply because it makes people ridiculous. Her voluptuous sister, Abigail, is a promiscuous postal worker who embraces ridiculousness wherever she may find it. The two women live in the fictional Rhode Island town of Frome, an otherwise undistinguished hamlet that is home to a famous poet and his slavishly devoted wife. Awed by Abigail’s "life force," the couple draw her, and eventually Dorcas, into an odd literary circle where they meet Conrad Lowe, author of a seamy tell-all biography of his movie star mother. Misogynistic, predatory, heartless, and charming, Lowe marries one sister, courts the other, and takes both their lives in directions they could never have imagined. Along the way, we also learn a few things about hurricanes, graffiti, the nature of literary fame, how to know if someone is choking, and the real reason Rhode Islanders rush to the store to buy bread and milk at the smallest flake of snow.
Q. It's been a long time since the original publication of Jenny and the Jaws of Life and your re-emergence with the reissue of your story collection and the new novel. I know there's quite a story behind the reissue of Jenny. Can you talk about how that came about?
Jincy Willett: When Jenny first came out, in 1987, it got some good reviews, but it basically sank from sight, since it was a book of short stories by an unknown writer, and we all know how well they do. St. Martin's did a small printing (2000 or so), mostly selling to libraries.
So not many people read it, and in fact I only got one piece of fan mail, from a guy in Chicago, who liked "The Best of Betty" so much he wanted to put it on as a puppet show. I didn't think much of it at the time, but after a while I appreciated it more, as it was the only fan mail I ever got. Over the years I taught a lot of extension courses, and did some editing for a living, and continued to relax into total obscurity.
One day I was noodling around on the internet, apparently in search of negative reinforcement, and did a search on my own name, just to make sure that I was indeed totally obscure, and came up with something called "Sedaris Reading List." This piqued my interest, as American humorists are a passion of mine, and David Sedaris is the only one writing today whom I really love. I went to the site, which turned out to be for some Chicago alternative newspaper, and there was David Sedaris's list of his favorite writers, which included Flannery O'Connor, Tobias Wolff, and me.
It was a stunning moment. I actually wondered if I was hallucinating. When I came to myself, I wrote him a grateful letter via his agents, and spent a day or two basking in the glow. Not only had David Sedaris read my book and liked it, but I had two fans now, that guy in Chicago and David Effing Sedaris.
A couple of weeks later I got a gracious letter from same, from Paris, and he wrote about this and that, and closed with something like "You probably don't remember this, but a long time ago I wrote you about putting on 'The Best of Betty' as a puppet show." (Sorry to be so long-winded, but it is a terrific story, isn't it?)
Anyway, a few more years went by, and then, at Christmastime immediately following 9/11, a magazine called Time Out New York asked ten writers which book they would rescue if they could rescue only one, and Sedaris was the first writer asked, and he said Jenny and the Jaws of Life. At which point my publisher got excited and suggested re-releasing Jenny in paper, with a new cover, and a forward by David Sedaris. And that's what they did. And this time I made actual money.
One interesting sidelight is that I have now had two very different publishing experiences with the same book -- and the same publisher. I know what it's like to be published for the first time, and I know what it's like to have my publisher really get behind the book the second time. Believe it or not, the first time is the best. There's nothing like your first time.
Q. Was Winner of the National Book Award something you started and then put aside for a while and went back to?
JW: I had started the novel pretty soon after finishing the collection, in 1987. I thought I should try a novel, as I had pretty much exhausted my story ideas. I wrote a about a third to a half of the novel really fast, without thinking much about it. I was pregnant and on autopilot. Then my husband became very ill, and then he died, and I had to pack up my baby and move west, where my parents and brother live, and it was years before I even thought of it again. Every now and then I'd write a chapter, but I just wasn't enthusiastic, as the world was not exactly waiting to hear from me again. Then, suddenly, it sort of was, and my publisher wanted me to finish it, so I did.
Q. Winner of the National Book Awardis very much a novel of Rhode Island. I love the details like the 'Rational Tap' and 'Original Rational Tap.' Did the story grow out of place or character or both? Did you always see it as a Rhode Island story, or did you play with other settings first?
JW: It was always a Rhode Island story.
Q. Did you find your sense of Rhode Island as a place got sharper after leaving the state? I'm thinking of my own time in California, in college--it was the first time I became really conscious of Rhode Island as having a distinct identity.
JW: Absolutely. I moved out here because I had to, not because I wanted to, and though I may never be able to leave it, it's not my home. Rhode Island is my home, and my yearning for home and my old life really sharpened my sense of it.
Q. You've been in Southern California for at least 10 years now. Was there (or is there still) any culture shock?
JW: I hate the weather. I hate the traffic. I miss home. I will say, though, that when I started teaching adults (at UCSD and SDSU) my cliché expectations about airhead Southern Californians proved seriously misguided. California is full of interesting people. They come from everywhere, and when they make the decision to brave the freeways at night to come to your class they're seriously committed to working.
Q. The centerpiece of your novel is, oddly enough, one of my favorite childhood memories, the Blizzard of 1978. Were you living in Rhode Island at the time, and where were you during the storm?
JW: I was living on South Angell Street, and going to Brown as an undergraduate. It's one of my favorite adult memories.
Q. There's something almost fairy-tale-like about the duality of Dorcas and Abigail, the twin sisters in your novel, as if they really are one person split in two: "Abigail and I divided up the world. Sacred and profane. Spiritual and physical. Mind and body." I think you carry it off, but it can be risky to characterize people this broadly. Did you ever worry about them being seen as caricatures?
JW: From the beginning. I came up with the idea of the twins for lack of anything better, and I didn't much like it. It's an arid concept. People aren't like that. Fortunately, when I got into the novel, it turned out that this duality was mostly in Dorcas's mind. She's the one who makes a big deal out of it, the mind-body thing. And there's something to it: Abigail really is fleshy and pleasure-driven, and Dorcas is cerebral, etc. But the sisters are more alike than Dorcas admits, to her eventual sorrow.
Q. Having worked in libraries myself, I loved all thelittle details about the different kinds of book defacers and the Library of Congress cataloging of "In the Driver's Seat." Were you pleased by the LC cataloging of your book--triangles and eccentricities?
JW: Now that you mention it, yes!
Q. I thought of your 'Universal Choking Sign' recently when I saw a poster in a coffee shop bathroom--not only did it command employees to wash their hands, it gave STEP BY STEP DIRECTIONS: 1. Turn on faucet. 2. Wet hands. 3. Apply soap... etc. Do you see things like this as signs of the general dumbing down of our culture, or am I just idealizing some mythical time when our culture was actually smart?
JW: You and me both. Who knows. The Universal Choking Sign assumes we're dumb as a box of rocks.
Q. Conrad Lowe is a genuinely evil character without being a cartoon. Was he fun to write? (Or painful, or both?)
JW: Fun. A little daunting, as I had to make him charming, or else he'd be so hateful that no reader would want to spend time with him.
Q. Dorcas is a narrator who doesn't suffer fools gladly. There's a scene where she compares herself to Big Bob: they both think most people are "horse's patoots," but he likes them anyway; she doesn't. Which side would you say you fall on? More disgusted by human folly, or more amused?
JW: I hope I'm more charitable than Dorcas. Actually, I think people are pretty terrific, in light of the fact that just a few days ago, in geologic time, we were paddling around in the primordial ooze.
Q. There's a softening in the language Dorcas uses to describe her sister toward the end of the book, and I think a change in attitude that may come from those moments when Dorcas lives, briefly, in Abigail's world. I'm thinking especially of the scene where they ride the carousel: it's almost a merging, or an exchange, and that image resonated for me because of Dorcas's reference to Something Wicked This Way Comes. Were you thinking of Bradbury when you wrote that scene, or was it one of those things that just fit, but you don't realize until later on?
JW: Hey! Of course that Bradbury scene must have been at work. How good of you to pick up on that! See, this is what I love about writing fiction. It's like letting your subconscious out on a long leash.
Q. The Bradbury reference is from that lovely passage where Dorcas speaks in defense of reading. I loved the story of her staying up all night and the lantern lasting just long enough. Are there any books you've read recently (read 'recently' as loosely as you wish, say, 'in the last 10 years') that compelled that kind of complete, absorbed attention?
JW: Nope. And that story about the lantern is true. It even happened in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Q. Are you writing any short fiction now, or thinking about another novel?
JW: I'm trying for another novel. Don't have any more story ideas, and novels sell better, anyway.
Q. You were the first adult to take me seriously as a writer, and I know your classes had a huge impact on me, and I think on a lot of other people as well. Are you still teaching fiction? Have you heard from any other former students?
JW: Once in a while. I don't teach any more. It's something, isn't it, how important your first teacher is. Verlin Cassill was mine, and I learned a lot from Jack Hawkes too, they were both fine teachers, but Verlin's the one I really miss. I wish he'd lived long enough to appreciate my last-gasp improbable success. He would have gotten a bang out of it.
Sundays
at Sarah's: An Anthology of Women's Writing
The newest literary birth to come out of the Providence writer's group is an anthology, edited by Martha Manno. The book features stories, essays and poems by members of the group who meet at The Sarah Doyle House on Brown University, and at each other's homes, on Sundays. Martha is both a member of the writing group and founder of Little Pear Press.
Q. Why did you found Little Pear Press?
Martha Manno: I wanted to be in control of my life and my writing, and the world of publishing has gotten so big that it is really only about the Danielle Steeles and the John Grishams. It is very hard for someone starting out to get the recognition, so I thought it would be a good thing to do it myself. I've never been someone who likes to work for others.
Q: What were some of the difficulties of publishing your first book?
MM: The whole thing has been a learning experience: how to work with a printer, the editing process itself, choosing work not just on the basis of the quality but also how the works fit together with other pieces. The most fun has been working with my daughters who are both artists and who were both involved in the design of the cover.
Has it been difficult being part of a writer's group, and then deciding to take on a different role and become the publisher of the group's work?
MM: In the beginning it was, because we thought we would produce the book as a group, but once I realized that wasn't going to work, then things started to fall into place. A writing group of ten people is really too many to make all the small decisions along the way -- title, cover design, which stories to use...
One of the things I'm enjoying about the book is the opportunity for people to read from the book in front of an audience and for them and myself to get that immediate feedback that you can only get reading to an audience.
Q. What are the longer range plans for Little Pear Press?
MM: I hope to do other anthologies and publish books that might not get published otherwise. Somebody once told me my work was not splashy enough. I'd like to publish those books that might be known as mid-list books, quieter books, but well-written and literary. I think there's room for more than just the JK Rowling and Barbara Bradford Taylors of the world.
I love reading and I love books, just the physical object of a book, so creating them is engrossing for me. It's like bringing a baby into the world.
Q. Was it a surprise to realize that you wanted to become a publisher?
MM. Yes. It was an idea that slowly evolved. It wasn't a 'eureka.' It grew very slowly. Part of it grew from the knowledge that there is a platform now for writers and for publishers on the internet, that there are ways to connect to people, for example Amazon, that level the playing field between the Random Houses and the small presses. There are a lot of little tiny presses, but so few of the big houses are independent anymore -- they're now part of a larger media/entertainment conglomerates which I think narrows their own decision-making ability and takes the decision-making out of the hands of editors and gives it to the PR people. Disney does a book because they do a movie because they do a Burger King toy. Books are evolving in a different way today.
Q. Do you think you would have had this idea to publish if you hadn't joined the writer's group?
MM: Probably not. The idea really evolved out of making a small book out of everyone in the group's work.
Q. Sundays at Sarah's is an anthology of women's writing. Do you think you'll publish works of men as well in the future?
MM: Oh sure. I really think it's about the writing, not about who's writing it. But I think women have an affinity for groups with other women. It's a safe, comfortable place for them. That's why women's groups have been so popular.
Q: How long before next book?
MM: I think I'll do another in the next year. I don't know whether I'll do them faster than that. It's really not about making money. That's kind of irrelevant for me. It's about giving more voices a chance to be heard. I'll do another one when I feel like there's something that I want to get out there.
Writing is a very solitary occupation, but I think most writers write for some kind of audience, so I'm hoping to connect writers with their audience.
Q: Who do you think will enjoy Sundays at Sarah's?
MM: I think there's something in there for almost everyone. I got an email from a male friend who obviously, from what he was telling me in the email, had read the whole book with great attention, and I don't think I would say that middle-aged men would be the audience for the book but he obviously enjoyed it.
Q: Do you think Little Pear Press will publish any novels?
MM: I wouldn't rule anything out.
I missed reading, reading for pure pleasure and not for dissection and microscopic analysis. Most of all, I missed writing fiction. I'm not sure when I first started making up stories, but I know that by the time I started kindergarten, at the ripe age of four, I was already well into my "Ducky series." Now I was stranded in another country. As a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Brown University, I discovered I was not allowed to take creative writing classes. The very request seemed to earn me a look of surprised contempt: why would I ever want to associate with those writing people?
That, of course, was exactly what I wanted to do. For a few brave souls, it may be possible to write in complete, Walden Woods-like isolation, but I not only missed writing, I missed having someone to read my stories and talk about them; I missed knowing other writers. And so, like any good addict, I found a back-door way to indulge my habit. The Brown Learning Community, the adult education wing of my university, offered a non-credit fiction writing class called "Prose in Progress." The instructor was Jincy Willett, a writer I'd never heard of, but whose succinct biography seemed promisingly eclectic: she had published short stories in Yale Review, Massachusetts Review, and Playgirl. And so I defected, and took my first-ever adult education course. I'd taken creative writing classes all through college, but they weren't like this one. Mostly, we just read things out loud, and those who weren't daydreaming, scribbling in their journals, or otherwise occupied offered off-the-cuff commentary. Jincy's "Prose in Progress" class was my introduction to the classic writing workshop format. We handed out stories the week before, read them on our own, once or preferably twice, wrote comments, and then discussed them as a group.
We were an odd assortment that first semester. I remember a silent man whose only contribution to the group was a hand-bound booklet he passed out, an apparent prose poem accompanied by photographs of a whale spouting, and an older, married couple from my hometown, one of whom wrote a story about being attacked on an airplane, while "toileting," by a Japanese stewardess who kept screaming about revenge for Pearl Harbor. Jincy, I recall, gently suggested that perhaps the stewardess might be more likely to wish for revenge for Hiroshima. She was awaiting the birth of her child and the publication of her first book, and she was the calm center of our circle, self-effacing, quietly funny, and able to find something helpful and meaningful to say about every work we discussed. I remember reading one of her story critiques, always on yellow paper and running to a full page or more, single-spaced, and feeling that for the first time in my life I was being taken seriously, not as a "child prodigy" or a student with "promise," but as a writer.
I left Brown soon after, with a wholly unmarketable master's degree, but I took Jincy's fiction class again and again, until Jincy herself left Rhode Island. "Really you are your own teacher now," she wrote in another one of those yellow sheets. A group of us, all veterans of at least one class, decided to keep meeting on our own, to continue the fiction workshop. We'd pass out stories, read them on our own, write comments, discuss them together. We were our own teachers now.
Amazingly, like some veteran rock band that just keeps chugging along, that Providence writing group still survives today, despite several changes in venue and many, many changes in membership. Since then, I have taken a number of writing workshops with some fine teachers and writers. I've been a member of three other writing groups, one on Cape Cod, one in the Boston area, and another in Providence, and I've taught fiction classes on my own and with Kiersten Marek, another writing group veteran. I often thought about the ripple effect of that first writing class, and I wondered what had become of Jincy Willett. Sometimes I imagined she'd retired into Salingeresque seclusion, never to write again. Happily, I was wrong. Jincy's short story collection was re-issued last year, and her new novel, Winner of the National Book Award, has just been published by St. Martin's Press. How all that happened is a story only she can tell.