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The Secret Papers of Madame Oilivetti<\/i><\/a> is Annie Vanderbilt<\/a>‘s first published novel, but it’s not her first novel… That, she explains, is lost to us forever: <\/p>\n The novel I lost, Yesterday’s Woman<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n During the six years of my recovery, Yesterday’s Woman<\/i> 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<\/i>. My life had changed. I was twelve years older. I regarded Yesterday’s Woman<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/i>. 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. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n