Elizabeth Enright's Dream Became My Dream.

 

One Saturday, (how appropriate) while I was in the Greenville library (at around age eleven), I was sitting at a table full of kids and they were all talking about a "thick red book" with all three of these books compiled in one volume. They were younger but I asked if I could look at the book.  I was so curious about "this Melendy family, four children, who lived with their father and a housekeeper named Cuffy in New York City that I could not resist asking all sorts of questions. The oldest child, Mona, was around my age, well thirteen years old, close enough I thought, and so I checked the book out and went home with it. 

People, I never returned this book to the library and only recently parted with it, giving it to my younger sister, because she loved the stories, too, and I was feeling generous. The "thick red book" was one of my beloved treasures. I've mentioned previously that I never really got to read age appropriate fiction. I was an advanced reader and I sort of missed out on a lot of good books. And this book was so dear to me that I clung to it for years and years, rereading right through high school. Sometime last fall, in a conversation with my sisters, I realized that in some ways, I still write four siblings, a father, and a housekeeper. It's perfectly Freudian. And people who know me personally, know this about my fiction. In fact, the books I am writing now both have four siblings in each tale and housekeepers. I'd write six siblings if I thought an editor would not ask me to cut a few of them, but I know editors pretty well. 

There is some psychology going on here about this book and what it represents, and the fact that my mother had sisters, and that my husband had great-aunts who were sisters, and I had sisters. All of this seems to matter to me. I understand sisters really well and what I don't understand I want to explore. I suppose we do write what we know or want to know, whether it's a fantasy set in Middle Earth or a spaceship in trouble on Mars. Authors who are paid to tell stories, really can't lie. That's the irony. Their fiction exposes them, not only the stories they choose to tell, but how they tell them. Elizabeth Enright's dream has somehow mingled with my dream in a long twisted history.