Susan Elia MacNeal

macneal susan elia c Andrea VaszkoThe sign was posted on the wall of Wellesley College’s English Department: John Irving, Novelist, seeks assistant for one year. I’d read everything John Irving had written, starting with The World According to Garp, up to his (then) most recent book, A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’d even read the lesser-known novels, about wrestling and bears and infidelity.

I was a senior and an English major in 1991—and if you remember, it was an awful year for college grads. Well, everyone, really. The stock market was down, unemployment was up, everyone I knew was trying to get into grad school or law school because there were no jobs….

And then that sign, in black Times New Roman on ivory paper, showed up.

I wish I could remember my interview—but I don’t. John Irving’s wife, literary agent Janet Turnbull Irving, did most of the talking. I do remember she was beautiful, enormously pregnant, and had green suede shoes. Irving himself stared out the window, but I did get the feeling he was listening intently. And I do remember when he spoke, he gazed up and out, as if picturing the words on an imaginary page as they were coming out of his mouth.

Through some feat of crazy luck, I got the job, and that fall, I moved to Vermont. I took a studio apartment in the attic of an old house in Manchester and drove every day to Dorset. I’d drive up a mountain, to the very top, where the Irvings lived in a huge house, built by an architect to their every specification. The painting of the apple used on the cover of The Cider House Rules hung in their kitchen.

I wish I could say I was a good assistant—I wasn’t, particularly. But I did learn a lot about writing and writers. Some of Janet’s clients were Robertson Davies, Alison Lurie, and other Canadian luminaries, and I read as much of their work as I could. John had author friends like Ron Hansen and Robert Stone, whose work I also devoured.

John approached (and I’m assuming still approaches) his work like a “regular job.” He would already be in his wood-paneled office when I arrived at 9 am, and worked throughout the day on Son of the Circus and various articles (I remember his piece against censorship for The New York Times, “Pornography and the New Puritans,” shaped much of my thinking about freedom of authors, censorship, and feminism.) At around 4 pm, he’d stop and go to his huge private gym (complete with red wrestling mats) to work out, and then around 5 or 6, begin cooking some gourmet feast for dinner.

macneal mrsrooseveltsconfidanteHe only used a manual typewriter—I think some version from the 1960s?—so I was asked to type draft after draft into the computer, which he wouldn’t even touch, then print out and present the pages to him for revision and editing. Then he’d pass them back to me, and I’d enter the changes into the computer file. Seeing his writing change, what he’d edit out, what he’d expand upon, was an education better than any MFA program. It was a fascinating bird’s eye view and one I learned much from.

It was a hard year—I remember being lonely (my friends were in Boston or New York, and there weren’t a lot of twentysomethings in Manchester). My little attic room had a bat infestation. My winter driving skills and tires were lacking, and I ended up in ditches a few times. But it was still a heady experience.

At the time, I had no conscious ambition of becoming a novelist (and if I’d had, being in the presence of one of the greats would have been unbearably intimidating). I instead aspired to be an editor, and went to the Radcliffe Publishing Course at Harvard, and then worked for the “Little Random” part of Random House as I made my way through the byzantine corridors of publishing.

But something has always stayed with me from my Vermont adventure: a firm belief in freedom of the press, an obsessive love of em-dashes, and the knowledge of how one of the great authors of our time every day sits down to the same blank piece of paper as the rest of us do.

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