Annie Vanderbilt’s Lost Pages

The Secret Papers of Madame Oilivetti is Annie Vanderbilt‘s first published novel, but it’s not her first novel… That, she explains, is lost to us forever:

The novel I lost, Yesterday’s Woman, was the first book I ever wrote. I was in my thirties. I remember some lyrical passages about canyons, sex on a sand bar on a desert river, and stars in the black canyon night burning like the tips of the cigars of a thousand South American heroes.

I typed the manuscript on an Olivetti portable typewriter, many of the chapters written in a stone farmhouse in southern France. When the book was finished I went hiking in the canyons of southeastern Utah where I fell off a cliff, suffered multiple injuries, and survived a long night alone while my husband went for help.

During the six years of my recovery, Yesterday’s Woman took up residence in my closet, my creative energies channeled into healing. I did not write again until, in my late forties, I began work on The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti. My life had changed. I was twelve years older. I regarded Yesterday’s Woman as a first draft of a first novel (and a bizarre one at that) but someday worth a rewrite. It would have to wait. I was already deep into the story of Lily Crisp and her intriguing past, and settings more sensual than arid canyons.

Then one night the telephone rang. I was in Florida. An Idaho neighbor said to me, “Annie, I’m standing in the street watching your house burn down.” Into the flames went almost everything Bill and I owned, including the manuscript of Yesterday’s Woman. Fire is cleansing, after the trauma has gone. The good news: no rehashing the past. The future—The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti—was safe on my laptop.

6 October 2008 | guest authors |

David Desmond Loves to Watch Egos in Motion

The eponymous star of David Desmond‘s first novel, The Misadventures of Oliver Booth: Life in the Lap of Luxury, is not especially likable at first encounter. In fact, he’s a colossal jerk. Desmond says he drew upon several people he encountered in Palm Beach and Paris, blending their traits into one massively narcissistic figure and then turning him loose on high society. In this essay, he explains how his pre-literary background helped hone his observational skills. (New Yorkers will have a chance to meet Desmond on October 16, when he’ll be reading at the Park Avenue Borders.)

I was a clinical psychologist in a previous life, although not in the Shirley MacLaine sense. I’m frequently asked how I decided to make a transition into a life as a novelist. I’ve never really thought of it as a career change, though, more as an effort to attack the same problem from a slightly different angle.

I discovered the profession of clinical psychology in my early teenage years. I didn’t really understand what that occupation entailed, but I knew that it involved the study and treatment of dysfunctional human behavior. I was fascinated by other people and, perhaps at too young an age, I had begun reading the existentialists, who with their nihilism provided very little in the way of constructive advice about the human condition. In my doctoral training, I studied a wide range of theories of personality, but I connected best with ego psychology and the insights that it provided into character disorders such as pathological narcissism and their infantile roots. For many years, it was common for people that I would meet at cocktail parties to ask, “Are you analyzing me right now?” I would jokingly reply, “No, I’m finished,’ but in fact that question was usually quite reasonable because there’s nothing more interesting than meeting new people, that is, if one takes the time to get to know them.

Every person has a story to tell. Although the well-adjusted among us can tell their own stories with some degree of insight, those who are more dysfunctional keep psychologist/writers such as myself in business.

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28 September 2008 | guest authors |