Edge
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Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me.
My book Night Kites is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.
I have also written a teenage autobiography, called Me Me Me Me Me, which deals with my years growing up in upstate New York during the thirties and forties. My older brother, Ellis, was a fighter pilot in the naval air force, seeing action over Japan. After World War II, he fought in Vietnam for our secret airline Air America, and later in Korea. He was my favorite relative until Vietnam. We had a major falling-out over the war when he called me a “peacenik.” We never felt the same about each other after that, up until his death in the nineties. My much younger brother has lived with his family most of his life in Arizona. We don’t see as much of each other as we’d like because of the distance between our homes.
I have always given my parents credit for my becoming a writer. My father was a great reader. Our living room was filled with walls of books. I grew up with him reading to me, and ultimately began reading any novel he did. But I am a writer largely due to my mom’s love of gossip. Our venetian blinds were always at a tilt in our house because Mother watched the neighbors day and night. Many of her telephone conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!” On execution nights in our prison, my mother and her girlfriends huddled outside in a car, waiting for the executioner to go inside. He was one of ten men who entered the prison together on execution night, so no one snooping could know who had really pulled the switch.
I have taught writing for thirty-four years at nearby Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. We benefit, in part, the Springs Scholarship Fund. My teaching inspired me to write Blood on the Forehead: What I Know about Writing. A dozen members who had never finished a book became published writers after joining the class, and we also have members who are already professional writers. Currently, I am in the middle of a memoir called Remind Me. The title comes from an old Mabel Mercer song:
Remind me not to find you so attractive
Remind me that the world is full of men
Portrait of Meaker, drawn by Louise Fitzhugh from a baby picture.
Seven-year-old Meaker, her mother, and her brother Ellis in Auburn, New York.
Meaker (front left) with her mother, her brother Ellis, her father, and several other Meakers at the home of British relatives in Brighton in 1938.
Meaker as a girl scout in Auburn in 1939.
Meaker, age seventeen, with her first car, a 1937 LaSalle convertible with a rumble seat, and a sailor from Sampson Naval Base. The bane of her parents’ existences—both the base and the sailors.
Meaker and Jim Sears at a fraternity dance in Missouri in 1948.
Meaker with Irving the dog in East Hampton, New York, in 1976.
Meaker (front), with close friend and author Tom Baird and Barbara Dicks of Harper & Row in 1980.
Portrait of Meaker at age sixty-two.
Meaker with Tom Baird in 1989.
Meaker holding Gerbils the dog, next to ER the Siamese cat, in East Hampton in 1989.
Meaker and neighbor John “Trip” Timmerman in East Hampton in December 1991.
Meaker, her brother Charles, and her grandniece Tracy Hovelin in August 1999.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Do You Want My Opinion?” Seventeen magazine, 1985 and in Don Gallo’s Sixteen, 1984.
“The Sweet Perfume of Goodbye.” Visions, edited by Don Gallo, Delacourt Press, 1988.
“Sunny Days and Sunny Nights.” Cicada, March/April, 1999.
“Son of a One Eye.” Scholastic Scope, 1989.
“The Author.” Funny You Should Ask, edited by David Gale, Delacourt 1992.
“We Might As Well All Be Strangers.” Am I Blue, edited by Marion Dane Bauer, HarperCollins, 1995.
“Like Father, Like Son.” Scholastic Scope, 1995.
“I Will Not Think of Maine.” Family Secrets, edited by Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Viking, 1998.
“I’ve Got Gloria.” Delacourt Press, 1997.
“Grace.” I Believe in Water, HarperCollins, 2000.
“Guess Who’s Back in Town, Dear?” Stay True, Scholastic Press, 1998.
“The Green Killer.” Bad Behavior, edited by Mary Higgins Clark, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.
“Great Expectations.” On the Fringe, Penguin Group, 1991.
“I’ll See You When This War is Over.” Shattered, Knopf, 2003.
“The Fire at Far and Away.” St. Martins Press, 2004.
Copyright © 2015 by M. E. Kerr
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-5040-0989-8
Published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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