As she said herself, “That’s what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.”
I hope someday to finish that melody. I hope it’s good enough for a masterharper to sing. I hope she regarded me worthy of the title. Because that’s what she was for so many of us—the masterharper, singing in prose songs that reminded us of where we’d been and what we could become.
She came and stayed with us in Nashville, bringing a broken shoulder and trusting me to care for her. We visited Andre Norton, Annie insisting I not just drive but sit with them and listen to “a bit of gossip.” These two women—one writing at a time when pseudonyms were necessary for a woman to get published, the other cracking the New York Times Bestseller List with, of all things, a science fiction book—and by a female at that!—talked of publishers, rumors, scandals old and new, while I sat as silent as an unopened book, wishing I’d thought to bring a tape recorder.
At first, as her health declined, she bore it cheerfully. “I’m bionic now, Petal, complete with metal knees!” she declared. “Better than ever, and no pain.” She kept to her writing schedule, doing what she could to help her body retain its youth. She swam every day, bragged about her granddaughter’s accomplishments at school—“First prize, don’tcha know!” and commiserated over our various surgeries. We sound like a couple of old Yiddishe mamas, comparing whose surgery was worse! I laughed, and she laughed along with me.
Neither of us reckoned on the psychic toll. “‘Old age is not for the faint of heart,’” she quoted, as her energy began to leech away.
How is it we artists always forget just how hard it is to writer How much work it is? How can we ignore the vast psychic drain that accompanies every act of creation? We both knew it from her Pern books, when going between enervated even the hardiest of dragon riders. But somehow, we never expected it in real life.
It’s only when we lose that effervescence, through age, through illness, through sheer attrition, that we realize how necessary it is to our work—how fundamental to our beings.
“I can’t write.” She confessed the shameful secret to me not once, but dozens of times, as if repetition would prove it a lie. At first, playing the friend, I tried to reassure her. Then don’t! Take some time off, Annie. Restore your body, and the brain will follow. Talent doesn’t just disappear, you know—it lies in wait.
But she knew better. “I’m still not writing. I think I know how Andre Norton is feeling, too, because I suspect that she’s finding it very difficult to write, as the wellspring and flexibility that did us so much service is drying up in our old age. And no false flattery. At seventy-six, I am old, and she’s in her nineties. It takes a lot of energy to write, as much as it takes you to keep on adding flavor to your song presentation. Sorry to blah at you, but you’re one of the few people who does understand the matter when an artist questions their output.”
No worries talking to me about not writing . . . I sure as hell know the amount of energy it consumes. Every time you sit down to write, it’s a performance. Only you don’t have the luxury of props—no lights, sound, other actors to step behind when the inevitable fatigue hits. Heck, Annie, I’m feeling it more and more now, and you’ve got a quarter century on me. I notice it mid-show; two hours used to be a piece of cake. Now I feel myself flagging at 45 minutes, and I really look forward to that 20 minute intermission, if only so I can have some water and sit for a few minutes.
Same with writing, for me. Used to be able to sit and write for 6 hours at a stretch. Now I’m good for two if I’m lucky. Part of it’s my back, but most of it is—I fear—just that I’m older. It sucks.
“Must write. There are IRS problems. You wouldn’t believe. Mouths to feed, people depending on. Advances already spent and gone. Must write.”
And so, she wrote, but for a while there was no joy in it. Still, I loved what she wrote, and told her so. I was proud of our friendship, not because she was so damned famous, but because she was so damned good. She even used my name in a book—Ladyholder Janissian—and roared with laughter when I admitted I’d been so wrapped up in the story that I hadn’t even noticed.
But she knew—as artists always do—that while her ability to plot continued apace, the actual writing of it was becoming an endurance contest she couldn’t hope to win.
“Turn more of it over to Todd,” I argued. Her son had a real knack for a sentence, but it was hard for Annie to let go. Of course. What artist can?
“His words may not sing the way yours do—yet. He doesn’t have your lyrical grace—yet. But he will, Annie, you’ve just got to let him breathe!” I said it and said it and said it, to no avail.
Then came a day when, twenty-five years younger and an ocean away, I finally lost patience and angrily berated her. “Damn it Annie, quit complaining and just stop! By God, you have created a mountain of work, an incredible legacy that will endure and be read by zillions of people long after both of us are gone—so quit whining about what you cannot do and start looking at what you have done. It’s time, Anne. Take this unbearable weight off your shoulders and stop!”
I sent the email off and waited for her response, fearing I’d gone too far. A day. Then another. Finally, sure I’d lost a friend, I called to ask just how angry she was with me. Oh, no, not at all, she’s “in the hospital.” She took a fall. She’d write soon. And she did, quoting me and saying, “I knew you, of all people, would make sense.”
A sweeter absolution I’ve never had.
We continued our friendship, bitching about our bodies, menopause, the inevitable “drying up” of everything that comes with the feminine mystique. You cannot imagine the luxury, for me, to have a compatriot a quarter of a century older. As an artist, I admired her work. But as a woman, I was relieved to have someone relentlessly honest about what was to come in my own life.
We traded constantly. I sent her Lhasa de Sela, Sara Bettens. She sent stories about her animals and the garden. One spring she changed my salutation to “Dear Crocus Petal—there are eight coming up now!”
We planned to visit Prague together in September ’01, but then came 9/11, and I chickened out. To be brutally honest, I was afraid to fly. Annie gently took me to task, then went off with someone else instead.
I will regret that for the rest of my life.
She went into the hospital for the last time while I was touring the UK—just a ferry boat and an ocean of commitments away. Knowing how out of touch she’d feel, how fretful she’d be, I tried to call every day. We fell into a pattern—I’d wait until I was in the van, then phone her up and tell an off-color joke, a bawdy story, a bit of kindly gossip. Sometimes about people we knew in common, Harlan perhaps, or Scott Card, whose work she admired. Sometimes just a silly series of puns I’d found online. Whatever it was, I wanted to make her laugh, because I loved to hear her laugh.
She died while I was on vacation, just days after the tour’s end. I’d brought a copy of Dragonsinger with me because on vacation, I always brought a few “comfort rereads.” I’d fallen asleep over it, waking to an email from her daughter Gigi. “Please keep it quiet until I can reach everyone,” she asked. “My older brother Alec is still in flight, and we don’t want him seeing it in the paper before I can reach him.”
I called with sleep still in my eyes and heard the hum of people behind Gigi’s answering voice. It was fast. It was painless. It was everything Annie had wanted.
No lingering. A “good death” for her. But not for me.
It’s hard to open my computer knowing there will be no “Dear Petal.” It’s hard, after knowing such a warm and giving shelter, to go without. Sometimes I run across a sentence that sings to me, and jot it down to show her. And sometimes, when she leaps out at me from the cover of a book, I remember she is gone, and it hits me like lightning, fast and lethal and unexpected. It stops my breath, until I remind myself that she is gone, but I am still here.
When the lightning hits, I comfort myself with this. The beauty of Anne’s writing is that she makes it all seem, not just possible, but normal. For men to go dragonback. For women to become ships. For young, unwanted girls to become master-harpers. For brains to pair with brawns and sing opera under alien skies. And for an unlikely friendship to bloom, a pairing no one could have imagined, between a petal on Earth and an orchid in flight.
JANIS IAN is a songwriter’s songwriter who began writing songs at twelve years of age and performed onstage at New York’s Village Gate just one year later. Her first record, “Society’s Child,” was released two years after that. The seminal “At Seventeen” brought her five of her nine Grammy nominations, and songs like “Jesse” and “Some People’s Lives” have been recorded by artists as diverse as Celine Dion, John Mellencamp, Mel Torme, Glen Campbell, and Bette Midler. Tina Fey even named a character “Janis Ian” in her movie Mean Girls!
Janis’ energy does not stop at performing. Her autobiography Society’s Child, a starred Booklist review and Publisher’s Weekly pick (and now also available as an audio book), details her life and career. Her song “Stars” is also the title of an anthology featuring twenty-four major science fiction writers, all of them “tipping the hat” by writing original stories based on songs Janis wrote that affected their own lives.
Most recently, Janis’ audiobook recording of Society’s Child won her a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album and netted her Audie Award nominations for Best Narration by Author and Distinguished Achievement in Production. Her illustrated children’s book, The Tiny Mouse, with illustrations by Ingrid and Dieter Schubert, will be published in September 2013.
Janis runs The Pearl Foundation, named for her mother, which has given away more than $700,000 in scholarships for returning students at various universities and colleges.
More information can be found at her website, www.janisian.com.
After two boys, Anne McCaffrey could be understood for hoping that her third child would be a girl. And what a girl!
As might be expected from Anne McCaffrey’s daughter, Gigi is a force to be reckoned with. Although she was distracted by Crohn’s disease from adolescence onward, she has maintained her sense of humor, her love of life, and her cheerfulness.
She has also, as you will see, inherited her mother’s gift with words and is one of the two people permitted to continue the legacy of the Dragonriders of Pern.
Universal Mum
GEORGEANNE KENNEDY
I FELT A lingering sense that the road had dropped away beneath my feet as I finished sorting through the last of my late mother’s books and personal possessions. Throughout the process of packing, I’d looked forward to the time when I would be free to write my very own tribute to my Mum, hoping that the very act of writing would ease my grief. But I’ve finished cataloging and caressing books I know my mother held in her hands or crying as an ornament recalled decades-old memories. My days are free now, my hands idle, empty, and it’s become increasingly difficult to sit myself down and say what’s in my heart. It seems far too soon, the jagged pieces still too sharp for me to share just how deeply I miss the person who was larger than life—and such a very large part of my life.
Of course you may already know that my mother wrote amazing stories, tales that took her readers on journeys far away, where her characters were people we longed to have for our friends, whose struggles became our very own, and whose worlds appeared, at first glance, to be kinder than this giant globe we call home. But a real live, warm-blooded female person existed behind those worlds and words, a person whose experiences had shaped and framed her life, a woman who wanted more from her time on Earth than just the prescribed college, followed by marriage and kids. She grew up during the Great Depression, when the world was going to war and women were expected to follow a set path through life, fit into a prearranged mold, and above all else, be restrained and dutiful. Mum watched her father and oldest brother go to war, stood by helplessly while her younger brother suffered a horrendous illness in childhood, and was packed off to a stifling boarding school when her natural vivaciousness craved nourishment. I think my mother’s innate need to stand out from the crowd, to be noticed, was at the root of her penchant for touching the lives of as many people as she could in a positive way.
I clearly recall the day, as a young woman, when my mother’s greatest gift became apparent to me. I was standing on the doorstep of Mum’s house, quietly watching as she comforted a physical therapist hired to help her regain her mobility after hip replacement surgery. Mum’s regular window washer, Tim, joined me on the steps, and we both watched in silence as Mum offered gentle advice and a motherly hug to the young therapist. I made some silly remark to Tim about how Mum always had a ready shoulder for anyone who needed it. Without hesitation and with a dawning recognition in his voice, he said that it was because she was—and these were his words—“a universal mum.” Tim’s declaration couldn’t have been any truer, and as soon as he’d uttered the words, while they resonated around the cosmos, we looked at one another, nodded our heads, and smiled in silent accord. One of my mother’s finest qualities lay in her ability to see strength in others. She nurtured many people, men and women, boys and girls, in a way that only a mother knows how.
An old friend, now a pilot, and one of the gang to whom my mother dedicated Get Off the Unicorn, contacted me recently, out of the blue. He made a point of telling me that Mum’s confidence in him was probably greater than his own. I got the impression that my mother’s abiding faith in his abilities to achieve what he set out to do were not shared by his own parents, or by anyone else, for that matter. Mum was benevolent by nature, and she made it financially possible for him to explore a new path in life, one that proved to be not only successful, but very satisfying. Her generosity is something he’ll be forever grateful for and is a quality he’s tried to emulate in his own life.
When I recounted the pilot’s story to a school chum of mine, she shared a recollection of her own about Mum: that when we were teenagers, she loved going over to my place—eagerly looked forward to those visits—because the house was filled with music, laughter, tolerance, and fun. I think Mum would chuckle over that—she always felt it was the young people visiting her house who kept it full of laughter and music and love. It was an atmosphere that she cultivated—cherished—and one that made any who entered into it feel immediately at ease. It wasn’t just the reassurances and hugs that made my mother a universal mum. She knew how to allow young people to be themselves; she had an innate knack for accepting everyone for who they were, not who they or their parents thought they should be.
An English literature scholar, who’d first met my mother more than half a dozen years ago, here in Ireland, wrote to me at the end of last winter. The scholar was due to give a talk on James Joyce at Trinity College, in Dublin, and with a few free days in hand before her work commitments began, she wanted to pay her respects to my mother—at her grave, no less. Where Mum chose to take her final rest is on a quiet, winding, narrow road, not really close enough to any major transport links, even though it’s within a few miles of the town of Greystones. Because of its somewhat remote location, I thought it was a fitting gesture to offer to meet the scholar at the train station, just as my mother had done years before, and take her to Mum’s new “home.”
The cemetery where Mum’s buried is a wonderfully serene place, strangely lacking in the heaviness of grief, but full of light and bright, brisk air, nestled on high ground over the village of Kilcoole, and overlooking the sea beyond at Greystones. When the scholar had paid her respects—I’d removed myself a good distance and left her to do so in peace—we chatted for a while, and she told me how my mother’s work had shaped her life and fueled her dreams. Our meeting was not, to say the least, a situation I’d ever found myself in before, meeting a fan for the first time over my mother’s grave, but it suddenly felt familiar when she asked me a question that, once uttered, I coul
d tell she’d been eager to know the answer to ever since we met at the train station:
“What was it like to be Anne McCaffrey’s daughter?” she said.
The scholar was not the first person to ask me that question, and most likely won’t be the last, and if I’d ever been any other woman’s daughter, I might have a clue how to phrase a reply. But the honest-to-goodness truth was that she was just “Mum” to me. She badgered me to brush my teeth or eat my peas, disapproved of boyfriends she thought weren’t good enough, entertained high aspirations for my future, grew exasperated at my lack of tact and abundance of ego, and generally behaved as every parent should—with the best interests of one’s child at heart.
It’s said that the maternal bond is very strong, and some would say that the bond between mother and daughter is by far the strongest. I have to admit that having only ever been Anne McCaffrey’s daughter, I have a limited frame of reference, but during my adult life I’ve come to realize that Mum and I had a very strong bond indeed. This has become even clearer to me since she died and others have graciously recounted aspects of their relationships with their own mothers. Surprisingly, and sadly, more than a few people have told me that their experiences with their mothers were deeply flawed and unfulfilling. One woman admitted that it was a relief when her mother passed away because she no longer had to endure the burden of being a disappointment. Another woman told me that her stepmother means much more to her than her own mother. And my dear, close friend Derval, on whom Menolly was partially modeled, wept deeply alongside me when the woman whom she’d always felt was her “real” mother died peacefully in our arms. The bond between mother and daughter may be the strongest, but that connection doesn’t always need to be biological. What Derval and Mum shared was just as strong.
Dragonwriter Page 21