Women in a Man's World, Crying: Essays

By Vicki Covington

This thoughtful, engaging collection showcases the best nonfiction prose produced by one of the nation's most observant and incisive writers.

This collection of warm, heartfelt essays from award-winning novelist Vicki Covington chronicles the multitude of "in between" moments in the writer's life. These are her stolen moments in between the writing of four novels-Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women; in between coauthoring the edgy memoir Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage with her husband Dennis Covington; in between raising two daughters; in between her husband's struggle with cancer and the author's own heart attack; in between a life full of trials and triumphs, disappointments and celebrations - moments that, as Covington demonstrates here, are always rich and revealing.

In the title essay, the author questions why all seven middle-class women who live on her street confess at a neighborhood cookout that in the past 48 hours each of them has cried. In "A Southern Thanksgiving," Covington reflects on the "family dance" that is Thanksgiving in the South: "In the North they put their crazy family members in institutions, but in the South we put them in the living room for everyone to enjoy." In "My Mother's Brain," the author recounts the onset of Alzheimer's in her mother and how, with the spread of the disease, an untapped vein of love is revealed.

Some of these essays were written as weekly newspaper columns for the Birmingham News. Others were written for specific literary occasions, such as the First Annual Eudora Welty Symposium. They are divided into six thematic sections: "Girls and Women," "Neighborhood," "Death," "The South," "Spiritual Matters," and "Writing."

Throughout, as Covington casts her candid, attentive eye on a situation, confusion yields to comprehension, fear flourishes into faith, and anger flows into understanding. In memorializing the small moments of her life, she finds that they are far from peripheral; indeed, they are central to a life full of value and meaning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780817382698

Vicki Covington

Vicki Covington was born and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Her previous work includes the novels Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women and the memoir Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage with Dennis Covington. She wrote a column for the Oxford American and has also written for The New Yorker. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council for the Arts, she now resides in Lubbock, Texas.

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Epilogue

Prologue

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I didn’t know I was a writer. I knew there was something wrong with me. I just didn’t know that’s what it was. When I say there was something wrong with me, what I mean is this: I didn’t like to play with other kids. I liked to spy on them. I roamed my neighborhood, searching for a group of kids to watch, to determine who was boss, who was left out, who was picking his nose.

I was also fond of eavesdropping on adult conversation, especially that of my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I craved their stories. But it bothered me that I didn’t like to play with other children, that I was an observer and not a participant. Without having the words to describe it, I knew I was a square peg in a round hole. I craved solitude. Life was a movie. I loved watching it. I just didn’t want to act in it.

When I was eight, in 1960, my perceptive mother (seeing what was happening) gave me my first journal—though we called them diaries in those days. I started recording what I was watching. I did this faithfully, for years. But it never occurred to me that I might be a writer just because I wrote every day.

So I spent my childhood spying on people. I can remember, in high school, being on dates. I was much more interested in watching the rearview mirror to see what the couple in the backseat was doing—as opposed to whatever it was I was supposed to be doing in the front seat. Around this time, I discovered the word voyeurism and thought, uh-oh, there’s a name for this thing and it ain’t so healthy.

When it was time to go to college, I went to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and decided I’d study sociology and psychology. It seemed right for me—again the preoccupation with people and their behavior. Plus, I figured I might learn what was wrong with me. I got a B.A., then a master’s degree in social work, and went to work as a therapist. Had a heyday diagnosing myself and everyone around me. You can imagine—day after day people come into your office and tell you sordid, poignant stories. I noticed that I loved writing up the sessions better than the sessions themselves. I was still keeping journals, still writing every day, but never putting it together that I was a writer.

During my early twenties I remet Dennis, my husband (he had been my big brother’s best friend in high school); we fell madly in love and got married. He was already a writer and knew it, was, in fact, teaching creative writing. The first year we were married, we lived in Ohio, where Dennis had landed a job at the College of Wooster. I was miserable that year, being away from the South. I kept lots of journals. The more miserable you are, the more you write. One day, I found myself writing in third person rather than first. I was writing about a character who was me, yet wasn’t. I gave her a name. I let her go through a series of events in a day.

When I finished, I showed it to Dennis and said, Look at this journal entry.

He said something like, This isn’t a journal entry; it’s a short story. Welcome to the house of fiction.

Oh, yeah. All right. I get it.

I knew, then, that I was a writer. And it was the beginning of my coming to understand that the things I’d always fretted over in myself—the fact that I was an observer and not a participant, that I was a loner, that I felt out of place in the world—all these things are wonderful qualities for a writer to have. In fact that’s just the way we are.

So I kept writing short stories and sending them out. They were rejected. I’d always send first to The New Yorker, then Harper’s, Atlantic, Red-book, the slick magazines. After they were rejected there, I’d send to the literary magazines. A few stories were accepted for publication in the literary, or little, magazines during the early eighties. In 1986 The New Yorker bought a story, then another the same year. This was the turning point. An editor at Simon and Schuster got in touch with me and asked if I had a novel. I didn’t. I had a lot of short stories, most of them unpublished and some of them pretty bad. But I sent them anyway. She rejected the collection but pulled out one of the stories and said, This is the seed of a novel. Write it. It became the first chapter of my first novel, Gathering Home, which S&S did buy and publish. (Let me insert that this is the point at which I got an agent. People will often ask, do I need an agent in order to find a publisher? The answer is no. I sought and found an agent only after S&S had given me an offer on a first novel. In other words, I was able to say to an agent, here is a 10 percent cut waiting for you.)

Can you make a living writing? Yes, almost. I’ve made roughly—each year—what I made as a social worker, which clearly isn’t a lot. But you can do it. If you are a midline writer like me, book advances are between fifty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars. This has to last two years and after your agent has taken her cut and the government has taken its cut, that’s not much—but it’s a great feeling to be doing what you passionately love.

I stay afloat.

With a perpetual fear of drowning.

It’s a terrifying but exhilarating way to live. In essence, I have a small business without an iota of sense about how to run it. For example, the first year I made a profit writing (the year I got a twenty-thousand-dollar NEA grant), it never dawned on me that I needed to pay quarterly taxes. You can imagine what the end of the year was like. But writing is indeed like prostitution—first we do it for ourselves, then we do it for a few friends, and then we do it for money.

Often when asked to speak, I’m nudged to discuss the value of good writing and the need to connect with readers. If I’ve had any success in connecting with readers, I think it can be attributed to one thing: I don’t mind being exposed. And I think that, more than anything else, works for me. I’m not smart—wise, maybe, but not smart. I don’t read enough.

But I can undress on paper.

I’ve had a hard time finding a place to fit in. Writers are oftentimes placed in English departments. That’s the last place in the world they belong. It’s nice to find a university press like this, with readers like you, knowing that I fit with you all—you’re more the company I like to keep. You’re crazy, literary, probably southern, and above all, love a story.

I must admit I feel like somewhat of an imposter in that I’m a fiction writer, not a journalist. Most of the essays here are nonfiction. But I don’t suppose it matters. As the Chilean writer Isabel Allende says: I never knew I was a writer; I always just thought I was a liar.

The lies contained in this collection were written in nooks and crannies during the writing of four novels: Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women (all from Simon and Schuster) and the memoir I coauthored with Dennis Covington, Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage (North Point Press).

But I can say for sure that this collection is my guts. Some pieces were written as a weekly newspaper column. Others were written specifically for various writers’ symposia—The House Within and The Horse were written for and first read to the audience at the First Annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. I think I signed a statement saying that I’d always, for the rest of my life, acknowledge this fact whenever these essays were read or collected. So there it is. For a year I contributed on a regular basis to Oxford American magazine, a column called Meditations for Bad Girls.

The past few years have been hell: the death of both my parents, my own heart attack, Dennis’s diagnosis of prostate cancer, and public lashings for telling the truth in Cleaving, while raising teenage daughters, Ashley Jennings Covington and Laura Russell Covington. I dedicate this collection to them, for they inspire me and give me courage. They don’t censor me, nor I them. They are, themselves, gifted writers. It’s not genetics. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father. That’s from the Bible. Or as Billie Holiday might whisper in that sultry voice of hers, on a hot summer night when the moon has overtaken the light from the fireflies, God bless the child dat’s got her own.

Ashley, Laura: Don’t ever let anybody tell you to shut up. Write the truth, as you see it.

I know you will.

GIRLS AND WOMEN

Women in a Man’s World, Crying

I LIVE ON A CUL-DE-SAC. I love my neighbors. Among the seven of us women, there are two lawyers, three teachers, a nurse, and a writer. Together, we have seventeen children. The other night the women were gathered around a kitchen table for a neighborhood supper. I said, I’m curious. How many of you have cried sometime during the past forty-eight hours?

Every single one admitted she had.

Granted, we are in varying states of hormonal flux—some pregnant, some lactating, others premenopausal. Plus, we are in varying states of career flux—most of us part-time. But hormones and work aside, I think it’s interesting that, on a given night in August, we’d all cried during the past two days.

We are the daughters of the post–World War II American dream. Many of us wanted to be like our fathers us much as our mothers. We wanted to be boys. We wanted to be men. We wanted the symmetry of men: the skin, the bones, the dreams.

We accomplished this metamorphic feat. Briefcases replaced aprons. Credit cards, black suits, power, frequent flyer miles, and heart disease befit us. All went fine. We had become our fathers just as we’d planned, and history was in the making.

Then we got pregnant. And no matter how you look at it, no matter how you want to deny it, no matter how badly you want androgeny, only women can make eggs, labor, give birth, and lactate. And no matter how good the fast lane felt, this other stuff made us higher.

In her book, Motherhood Deferred, Anne Taylor Fleming grieves her infertility that resulted from postponing having a child. Fleming, a New York Times journalist, says that the women’s movement isn’t responsible for her plight, but she can’t help but study what it did to her life. In her case, the idea of women having it all simply didn’t work. In many ways, her story is our collective story: the ‘60s and ‘70s, the sexual revolution, the empty womb, oh to swap a byline for a