Table of Contents
To Mother
INTRODUCTION
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I started submitting stories to magazines when I was ten, painstakingly pecking them out on my mother’s manual typewriter, and shipping them off to the addresses of publications I found on my parents’ coffee table.
Needless to say, those manuscripts were quickly returned.
The editor of Ladies Home Journal was kinder than the others. Instead of a form rejection slip, she sent me a personal note that said, “Try us again in ten years.” That bewildered me, as I had not disclosed my age and thought no one would guess I was a child.
Rather than stopping me, those rejections stirred me on to greater activity. My writing attempts became more and more ambitious. Tales of flaming romance, blood spurting violence, pain and passion, lust and adventure, flew back and forth to New York in a steady stream. My parents thought me cute and funny. My teachers thought me horrid and precocious. As for myself, I was proud. While my schoolmates were playing jacks and trading comic books, I—plump, bespectacled, and unimpressive as I might appear—was plunging ahead toward the glorious career that I was certain would be my destiny.
Three years passed, and I accumulated so many rejection slips that my mother made me stop saving them.
“After all, dear, once you’ve read one of them, you’ve read them all.”
Then one day I came home from school to find a craggy-faced giant of a man occupying the living room sofa. He was a new neighbor who had just moved in down the beach from our home in Sarasota, Florida, and he was a writer. His name was MacKinlay Kantor.
“Lois,” my father said after introductions had been made, “why don’t you show Mr. Kantor that story of yours that came back yesterday from the Saturday Evening Post?” He did not have to ask me twice. What an opportunity! A published author was right there waiting to appreciate me! I rushed to get the story and stood expectantly at his elbow as Mr. Kantor scanned the pages.
The praise I anticipated did not come.
“My dear,” Mr. Kantor exploded, “this is pure shit!”
It was the first time that word had ever been used in my hearing. My mother was as shocked as I was.
“Mack,” she said reprovingly, “Lois is only thirteen!”
“I don’t care how old she is,” my idol roared. “If she is putting her stories into the market and expects somebody to buy them, she is old enough to take criticism. What kind of subject matter is this for a kid? She’s never had a love affair or seen a man get murdered. Good writing comes from the heart, not off the top of the head.”
He turned to me and added more gently, “Throw this stuff in the trash, child, and go write a story about something you know about. Write something that rings true.”
I was crushed. I was also challenged. Later that week I did write a story about a fat, shy little girl with braces and glasses who covered her insecurity by writing stories about imaginary adventures. I submitted it to a teen publication, and by return mail I received a check for twenty-five dollars.
That was one of the most incredible moments of my life.
From then on, my fate was decided. I wrote what I knew about, and could hardly wait to rush home from school each day to fling myself at the typewriter. The pain and joy of adolescence poured onto page after page. My first loss, my first kiss, my first heartbreak, became subjects for stories. I flooded the teen publications with manuscripts, and despite the unpolished writing, the gut reality of the material carried them over the line, and a number of them were published.
And MacKinlay Kantor went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Debutante Hill didn’t start out as a book, but as a short story called “The Presentation Ball.” The idea for the plot came to me one day when I was thumbing through my hometown paper and found a notice on the society page that gave a schedule of events for “this season’s debutantes.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading! A debutante season in a little town like Sarasota, Florida? That town where I had grown up had had one high school with such a small student body that, when I attended it, there had been no dividing line between students from affluent families and poorer ones. Popularity
