ELIZABETH STROUT Lezione inaugurale, l’inizio molto lento della mia carriera molto veloce - SALTO24

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Elizabeth St [Applause] [Music] we [Applause] we Elizabeth Stout [Music] [Music] hello um I'm so pleased to be speaking to you all today of the opening this wonderful bookal um I want you to know that I love Italy it is my favorite country to visit and um that's the truth for many many years so many thanks to those of you um who have made sure to invite I mean invite me to give this address to you and many thanks to you all for listening um and my greatest admiration goes out to the turn so originally I was asked U to say something about being a woman and therefore a woman writer but here's the truth I have almost nothing to say about that um and this is why I am a woman I am a writer therefore I am a woman writer do I ever feel disrespected because of that maybe sometimes do I ever let that bother me no because there's not one thing I can do about it except to be the best writer that I can be so I'm going to talk to you today about instead why it took me so long to get to this point in my career and maybe part of that was because I was a woman but I do not know if that's true and so we will just leave it at that um let me just say to begin with this in the original book all of pdge there is a scene where Olive um being distressed by her new daughter-in-law who has just spoken poorly about Olive's dress for the wedding there's a scene where Olive steals her daughter-in-law's bazer and one shoe just one shoe hoping it will make the young woman crazy my point in mentioning this is that when I ran on the road with that book now so many years ago I will never forget the number of women who leaned into me in the signing line after and said very quietly you must have a daughter M and I did not but what I realized by these women's responses was how many women must want to be stealing their daughter-in-law's and one shoe and I thought that okay I've done it because my entire life I have believed in this power of fiction that allows us to see into other people's lives and to recognize our own feelings and maybe for many of those women who responded to allive that way they can feel better about themselves because they never did steal their daughter-in-law's prum or one sh but they wanted to I has become their friend and it was in Italy when a woman spoke to me in Italian after my presentation and The Interpreter said to me she said you have seen into her soul and that right there is all I ever wanted to make someone else feel not so alone in their private thoughts I believe from a very very young age that I would be able to do that if I just never gave up I was 42 years old when my first book a was published so how did I keep myself going all those years the truth is I have no memory of myself not being a writer which means that by the age of four or five I was writing things down in those children's notebooks they used to have you know those huge spaces between the lines and this was because of my mother only many many years later did I realize that she would have wanted to be a writer herself it makes me think of progams quote nothing affects the life of the child so much as the unlived life of its parent but my mother was the furn of my life and it was my mother who gave me those notebooks and she said WR down what you do today so if we went into town to buy me new Little Red Sneakers my mother said to me when we got home write down what the man was like who sold us sneakers and so I did but you're not going your writer just because when you're little your mother tells you to write down what you did today there are multitudes of other factors in the making of a WR and one of them for me was isolation we back then in New Hampshire and also in Maine and in both places we lived far outside the town in the woods there were no other houses around for many years and I played in those woods alone in New Hampshire there was in creek and also a stone wall and my parental directions were do not cross this Creek and do not cross the stone wall and in that way I had four acres of woods and pine needles and wild flowers all to myself for hours on end I was extraordinarily happy in those wood the beauty of the physical world seemed to be my first and dearest friend I would play with the toes and the turtles that would the creek and then there were the wild flowers that I gathered and brought home to my mother she pressed them in a big book for me this ability to be alone this joy in being alone I have often thought served me very well well for the wife of the writer I was to become I should add that we had no television my parents did not believe in it they were Puritans and very strict and we had no newspapers as well the news came from the radio in the kitchen which was turned on every morning and so interestingly I remember the day when the radio announced that Papa Hemingway had died I was 5 years old that day but I remember the new cast's voice coming through that radio about this man prop coming way and my mother had tears in her eyes now we did have a piano and I took lessons at some point I wanted to quit my piano lessons and my mother did not let me I went on to study eventually with a retired concert pist who was at the University of New Hampshire and he taught me this that every single note matters and I think of him often as I write because every single word matters now about reading I should say I have no memory of children's books in the house my mother never read to me as a child and it was my father who taught me to read but on the top of a bookshelf in our living room was a row of blue books and cheap covers this was the work of Hemingway my grandfather had bought them from a traveling salesman and during the summer of my 17th year I read the all straight through but before then I would make lists for myself of books to read and either get them from the library or buy paper bch with my babysitting honey and I think in this way I was very selftaught which also as I the back was a really good thing for my life as a writer because I could accept these books by myself the texts would rise up to me with no teacher telling me anything about them at all and so there was impurity to that but it's not just books that make provider a writer I think has to be unbelievably curious about people around them and we had very few people around us in these towns whenever I did go into town with my parents my father would go and do his business and my mother and I would waiting in car watching people walk by in [Music] once I remember my mother said oh look at that woman she's not anxious to get home to her husband and I scrambled in my seat watched the woman my mother was talking about and I said how can you tell and my mother said just look at her and so I noticed then that the woman's expression she seems grim and look at the H of her coat it hasn't been fixed in ages my mother add she's depressed I watched the woman all the way down the sidewalk and I wanted to go into her house I wanted to see what her front doorway looked like with her many boots and shoes by the door what did her kitchen smell like I will in this talk keep returning to my mother because she was so instrumental in my becoming a writer but what about my father he was a very kind man a deacon of the Congregational Church and he was a scientist he was a the University of New Hampshire here's an example of the difference between my parents one Sunday when I was a very small we went to church and what I remember was that a woman who my parents knew named Clara or a hat they have to understand at this time congregational churches in New England were just as plain as they could be and except for Easter no one ever wor but CLA that day had worn a hat and it was some hat it had toring things coming off it and some fake fruit was on it and it was a little bit scary to me as we drove home my mother said to my father now why in hell did CL where that hat and my father said as he frequently did if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all and this is a great sentiment but it is death for a writer and it has occurred to me more than once that as a writer I tried to combine my mother's pan eye with my father's natural compassion and then a few years later this happened when I was about 12 years old we suddenly got neighbors a little bo House was built next to ours and into it moved a couple and a a nice bubble and a cute baby and I Babys sat for the baby and one time my parents must have been out of town because they spent the night at the neighbor's house after Babys sting and in the morning the woman at the house made french toast and she cut it in diagonal slices and sprinkle confectionary sugar over the top and in my entire life I never seen anything so beautiful so when my par returned home I told my mother about this thing of Wonder hoping of course that she might take the hint and start making french toast for us in such a manner and she listen to me she let me go on and then when I was then she said well Lista just remember you never know and boy did that turn my head around she meant of course you never know what goes on anyone's house and she was right and I think it was at that moment that my curiosity became absolutely inflamed because we don't know what goes on inside anyone's home not really we often don't know everything that is going on in our own home and we certainly don't know what is going on in someone else's mind this is about the same time that I realized we will never know on this Earth anyway what it is like to be another person we will only see things through our own two eyes and void to that frustrate me one time I gave a talk in which I mentioned at late how important it was to imagine what it was like to be another person I went on about how it gives us empathy and all that sort of thing and afterward this very cheerful woman walked up to me and she said that was so interesting I have never once tried to imagine like to be another person and I thought well what is that like what's it like to be you my fascination with other people began at such a young age that I can barely remember not looking at someone and wondering who are we later in New York City on the Subways I would sit across from a woman and I would think okay I know what that feels like I your jeans that tight I watch the Expressions on the faces of these people and when I left the Train sometimes I would arrange my own face like the face of a man who I had seen with a fur in his brow and his lips covered and I realized oh if your face is like that all the time you're very worried my point is this has become so instinctive for me for so many years and I cannot remember never doing it so we have a mother encouraging her daughter to write things down we have the books in the house we have curiosity about other people but still we need more than that to create a fiction wrer we need to make the sentences into something that can get conveyed to another person and thus began my very long apprenticeship in finding my own storytelling Bo by the time I was 16 years old I was checking up stories on Old Smith ponic typewriter that my parents had i s them all to the New Yorker and to the Atlantic and they all came back within two weeks with what was then a Xerox copy that said we are sorry but this story is not for us I was not deterred I suppose my mother must have known about this but if so she never said a word my mother taught English at our local high school yet having her teaching in the school was uncomfortable for me and I think it was uncomfortable for her I never felt I could get out from being Mrs st's daughter in high school I really did not like it and with my mother's encouragement I left high school after my junior year without graduating and went straight to college in main this was when I had my first sort of mentor the chairman of the English Department at this college was a teacher of mine my first semester and I liked him and he liked me and we talked in his office sometimes and I told him I wanted to be a writer let me see your stuff he said and so I did and if I wrote something this professor didn't think it very good he would say I don't think this is very good if I wrote something he liked he would say I like this one day he said you know Li how about every time you have a paper do in class you give me a short story instead and it will be out of secret so I did and I took every class I could with that hand but I never took a creative writing class the whole time I was in college my intuition told me it would not be helpful to me to hear what my peers thought of my work and I never took a psychology class either again my intuition told me that what I needed to know about people would not be found in the psychology class I want to say this about intuition essential for a fiction writer my mother had disted intuition and I believe I inherited it from her a number of minutes ago I was sitting in a hotel room with her and she glanced out the window and she said oh second wife and I said M come how do you know that's a second wife and so I went to the window and I said oh yeah second wife I was married to a trial lawyer at the time who always liked and there is no proof when you're a writer there is only your intuition when I graduated from college this professor who had been kind to me said no one will be interested in your work and he was exactly right no one was remotely interested but I was determined and I took jobs that left me the time or mental space to keep writing meaning I mostly worked in bars at Point either playing the piano or righteously I looked to England for a year and worked at a pu in Oxford always always writing my father by the way was distraught by this he said you had that expensive education and you're just a barid but that Professor mine was correct nobody was interested in my work nobody there at that point I had learned not to tell people what I knew about myself that I was a writer because if I ever did they would look at me with a variety of responses mostly pity for being so self-d delusional and also for thinking grandiosity so I just didn't tell anyone I think even my mother at that point had lost through me and my father was essentially just waiting for me to get [Music] married one night when I was c ring I had a thought and the thought was this if I'm a 58-year-old cocktail rist don't know why 58 but if I I thought if I'm a 58y old cerous and I have failed at my writing that would have been a pathetic life keep that in mind I'll return to it again the thought was if I a 58-year old cocktail Rous and a failed writer my life will have been better so I went to law school I went to syracus law school which felt like a different to me in some way and then I dropped out of law school after my first year and I wrote a really bad novel but here's something interesting Syracuse had a writing program and I mostly hung out with the writers in that program and not so much the Lost students so why did I not transfer into that writing well first I'm not sure I would have gotten in I got to know Raymond caror personally he was such a kind man and I showed him a story of mine at the urging of his students and he said I really don't like stories in the second person I also took one class from schol he's also very lovely me and I dropped out of the class so I can still get my money back because he CLS his students piece of work that I thought was not praiseworthy at all so I did not apply to that program I Su my and know that to be the writer I was I had to rely on my own sense of what my workers wor and what was worthy of Praise but I also didn't apply to that writing program because I noticed this that the students there my friends talked about writing all the time but in fact they were actually doing far less writing than I was on my own so during this time of not being in school I had my usual assortment of jobs at one point I landed a job in a department store which I thought was going to be absolutely glamorous and it turned out I could not sell the manager watched me and she said Elizabeth if somebody comes in to buy a skirt then you to walk over to them with a blouse and say this blouse would look just terrific with that skirt but I couldn't do it I didn't like it when sales FS did that to me and I could not do it to others so I was sent up to the eth floor to sell my I would sit on one of them with my notebook and write and I never sold the mattres not one maybe were to meet a couple would step up the elevator and tentatively walk in and I would say try any mattress and after a few moments they walked out I went back to LA scho but here something I had noticed in that compartment store that in the women's Lounge the restroom there would be a number of older women who sat there for much of the day they would bring the paper bag of who knows what and just sit there and I understood they had no place to go these older women moved me very much I noticed that they did not talk to each other their loneliness was palpable so I went back to LA school and also got myself a gerentology certificate at the School of Social Work my idea was that I would do elder law and that I would have a little stor on the Main Street of the town and that any elderly person who wanted to could come sit in it all day and then I would write at night anyway I also during this time worked in the nursing home of the town I be friended a woman who lived named Mary an she had no and she was supposed to be allowed to get dentures though nobody ever can gotten them for her so I set out to do this the day before weed the dentist Mary Anna wanted me to polish her fingernails and I remember painting her fingernails of bright red as her hands shook before me we went off to the dentist and Mar got her te and then she never wor these are the things I have used in my work so many years later I suspect my interest in geontology came to the fact that in may we lived on a dirt road with a few other small houses and in these houses lived my great auns so my numor consisted of these older women who were quite depressed and they would gather and speak in their dry L accents of their dead husbands and the last meals that these men ate one of my great aunts was woman named Olive she's probably the sweetest one of them I remember her tapping the cigarette and saying I'm so glad Frank had the M that last night and potatoes just the way he lik them children often feel responsible for those around them and I suspect that I felt responsible for these elderly aun of M in any event I have always been interested in the all right so I graduated from law school and I got a job with legal services and I was terrible at it I did not have an adversarial bone in my body but I did not know that until one of my client services were and I was told by the lawyer in the office will call the school board and tell them we will see them important tomorrow I had to close the door to my office my P sweat Mars on the desk and I meatly made the and I understood I was just terrible I had a darling client one time whose benefits had been cut and I went to plead his case before administrative law judge he said to me you have nice legs and then he denied the benefits to my client it was about this time that I went home one day after work and I stood in the backyard and I thought to myself okay I can be a terrible lawyer for the rest of my life I give myself over and write forever even if it doesn't work out and that's when I remembered how I had had that thought years earlier that if I was a 58-year-old coil agress and my writing had not worked out it would have been a pathetic life and I stood there on that back L and I thought no that would not have been a pathetic life a pathetic life is if I do not try with my entire heart to be the writer I have always know that I am at that point I was married with a small child and we still moved to New and we moved to New York City and I still wrote every minute that I could I got a job teaching English in the community college and I loved it I would teach in the mornings and come home before my daughter got home from school and would write those few hours every day now when I was 30 years old this happened I read a short story in and I really like the story and I saw it in the Bine that the author was a fiction edor at the New Yorker and his name was Dan maner so I sent the story to him directly and he wrote a personal note saying it was good please try him again and so I did and he called me up and told me that the story had been rejected by only by one b and to keep on trying it was to be 13 more years before I had a story published in the New Yorker but Dan meder during most of those years would write me the lovest rejections I probably only sent him two stories a year but he was always very generous in in his response to that and it helped keep me going but it was about this time that I thought what is wrong with my work why is it not happening and I kept thinking there must be some truth I'm not get but I could not for the life of me figure out what the truth was that Wasing me when we moved to the city I became interested in comedy and my husband and I would go to the little stand up comedy clubs in the village and I realized this when people laughed it was because something had been said that was true so I began to wonder what would come out of my mind if I was immediately responsible to for people standing there in front of me so I signed up for stand up ComEd school and it was one of the most frightening things that I have ever done as a final exam I had to perform in a comedy club in New York I didn't allow anyone I need to attend and the place was pack that night when it was my turn I stepped up and began my routine and in a moment there was a low laughter from a man and I would never forget that I this man was almost water so I did my routin and they asked me to come back and audition for a Tuesday night week job but I said no I knew that night itself had probably taken at least two years out my but but here's what happened my intuition was right it worked my routine was all about making fun of myself as an uptight white woman in New and I swear to you that until I did that routine I did not even know I was a white woman that's how white I was and I did not really understand until I did that routine what it meant to come from New England it was his own seate culture and so I began to write inan Isabelle what would be my first published novel about an uptight white woman from New England who works in the Sho Factory as I have worked one summer I am not is wi but I understood her for two years that completed book sat on our dining room table while I look in vain for an agent and then a friend suggested that I contacted AIC who had since moved to R and so I sent him the book and he L it he said let's get to an Angel and the next week I had five different lunches with five different AG who take when the book came out it did very well and while I should have been pleased the truth is I was terrified all of a sudden there were records in our home People magazine did a shoot of me on my bicycle I had to make sure I was wearing something red and the whole thing was overwhelming I was sent to 27 cities on a book tour and back then there were mobile television shows that I had to be on and I could not tell any how frighten I was everybody was very excited about me many people said what an overnight success and I thought yeah about a 40 year over but never mind I persevered as I had done my whole life and I have continued to do so and it turned out I began to write faster and P it was as though I had been training for AER my whole life and I was now running it I remain clear to my mission that it soon matters in PR we can find the friends we need if we are lucky we can find small moments of BRAC if we are lucky when my daughter was very small she lined up all the stuff animals one day in the room just the mommy come look and she put her spreading little me in mind and said with a sweep of her other hand these are my friends and I have never forgotten that my hope is that my characters that I have written will become friends to my leaders the way so many characters have become friends in all the books I have read over the years and has been such an honor here to speak with you today about my very slow begins thank you [Music] what [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause]