About Sue Miller: A Profile

There is something very reassuring about Sue Miller. At forty-nine, she is a strong, vibrantly intelligent woman at the height of her career. The author of three best-selling. critically-acclaimed novels --
The Good Mother, Family Pictures, and the recently released
For Love -- she is poised, confident, and affable. She is a soothing presence, by all appearances an exemplar for those whose authority and trust must be inviolable: teacher, mother, lover, confidant.

Yet she is apt to reveal, without warning or hesitancy, a well of insecurity that you would never expect of her, and to which few authors would publicly admit. In talking about her writing process, for instance, she confesses that she is disorganized, not a daily grinder who can pound out pages at will, and needs to reach a state of boredom and depression before she can face her desk. For she is trying to avoid the quaking, nearly paralyzing anxiety which grips her whenever she begins a new novel: "I think,
I can't do this, I can't go on, my life is worthless, I don't know where to proceed, I don't understand this material, I should have never started this. I get to a certain point where I'm so
sick of myself that I finally just
do it."

Miller has been living in the Boston/Cambridge area for the past thirty-three years, and now splits her time between her South End apartment and a house in the Massachusetts countryside. The second of four children, she was raised in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. Both her grandfathers were Protestant clergymen, and her father, an ordained minister, taught church history at the University of Chicago's divinity school. It was an odd upbringing, restrictive and liberal at the same time. "My parents were very judgmental," Miller says. "But their idea was to lay out the precepts that governed their lives, and then let you make your own decision. You had to be able to defend your standing in the universe against theirs. If you wanted to be bad, you had to have a rationale for being bad." What Miller chose to be was studious and, by her own admission, somewhat "overachieving." She was a bookish kid, preferring to read over most other activities, and after skipping her senior year of high school,
she entered Radcliffe College as a sixteen-year-old.

She remembers those years as being extraordinarily difficult. "I was really unprepared for college. I learned very little, I was so overwhelmed." Part of the problem was that she had no academic or professional direction. In the Fifties, Miller says, the consensus, as understood and transmitted by her mother, was that "you had to be neurotic to be a woman and want a career." Miller knows now that such limitations had made her mother "miserable," yet at the time, her mother maintained that being a housewife was her proper place. Miller herself married upon graduation, and while her husband attended medical school, she supplemented their income with a series of jobs, teaching high school, waitressing, modeling, and pushing rats through mazes as a researcher in a lab. When she was twenty-four, her son, Ben, was born. Three years later, she was divorced.

She worked in day care centers and parent cooperatives for the next eight years, and, as a single mother, hardly had the luxury to do anything else. Writing fiction didn't become a serious goal until she was thirty-five. She had dabbled, of course. As a child, she had composed poetry and short stories for fun. At Radcliffe, where she majored in English literature, she had taken one creative writing course, but hadn't received much attention for her efforts. She had written a novel in her twenties and then another over a long period of time: "It was so tedious and painful a process, by the time I ended it, I could barely remember what it was about." But for most of her life, she had had no sense that writing could actually be an occupation. (By coincidence, the writer Robert Coover had rented a basement room in her family's Hyde Park home when he was a graduate student, but at the time, he was simply the nice young man with whom they had to arrange the bath schedule, since there was only one tub in the
house. Miller recalls being astonished when Coover's first novel was published. "God,
Bob Coover," she had marveled.)

Finally, in 1977, with her life more manageable, she was able to give herself to the notion of writing with real commitment and discipline. She took a course through Harvard Extension. Right away, she was tremendously confident about her work. For one thing, she felt she now had something to say. For another, she had learned through careful and attentive reading how fiction works, how to use narrative and to pace drama. Two stories she produced during the semester would lead to her first publications -- in
Ploughshares and in
The North American Review -- and they precipitated a string of happy acquisitions: a scholarship to Boston University's master's degree program in creative writing, a Henfield Foundation award, a couple of teaching jobs at local colleges, a story in
The Atlantic Monthly, Maxine Groffsky as an agent, and then a residency at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, where she began
The Good Mother.

When she finished the novel, she knew it was good. She thought it would be published and well-reviewed, but she had no expectations of anything more. What happened to
The Good Mother still baffles her: "I always regarded it as kind of an accident." Ted Solotaroff, the venerable Harper & Row editor, enthusiastically purchased the book for a hefty sum; the sales for the paperback and movie rights radically altered Miller's income-tax bracket; the reviews were almost universally effusive in their praise; and the novel sold and sold, and continues to sell -- over 1.5 million copies to date. Miller became a literary sensation. Her collection of short stories,
Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories, which was published a year later, solidified her standing as a serious writer with a commercial draw.

She chose to look at the success of
The Good Mother as a "tenure" of sorts. She now had license to move on to different, more ambitious projects, rather than trying to repeat herself. In her next novel,
Family Pictures, she set out to write a "kind of plotless, shapeless book that was a speculation on the meaning of suffering and the twentieth-century explanations for it -- religion and psychiatry -- and the floundering we do with those traditions." The generational story of the Eberhardt family, however, proved more difficult than she had anticipated. After extensive research and notes, she wrote two hundred pages over two years, and then showed them to her second husband, novelist Douglas Bauer, the author of
Dexterity and the forthcoming
The Very Air. Bauer and her agent both concurred that there was something amiss, the material simply wasn't very strong. Miller has always depended on this pair of readers for guidance, and although often she thinks "they're dead wrong," this time she knew they were right. She spent a few weeks "in the bathtub, weeping and thinking, God, I just don't know if I can do this, maybe I can't," but then began anew. After two more years, she completed the manuscript, and reviewers agreed that she was at the top of her form with
Family Pictures, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award.

Her third novel,
For Love, released this past April, came much quicker and easier, and has been called her best yet. With it, a consistent theme in her work has emerged -- people's expectation of happiness, of fulfilling the American Dream, and the pain inflicted in its pursuit before they are able to accept responsibilities and disappointments and limitations. "I mark myself as an American writer in my time with this preoccupation," Miller says. "It's something that would seem self-evident to Europeans, not even worth establishing, but I think it's pervasive in American

life to see endless opportunities, the possibility of continual rebirths -- politically, pyschologically, physically. To me, it's a very damaging part of the American psyche."

Though Miller has no interest in being prescriptive -- deeming what is right or wrong -- she wants to nudge the reader into speculating about the moral dimensions of his or her life. These convictions sometimes led to frustrations when Miller taught writing. "Often students would be very good writers," she recounts, "but would be clueless as to the importance of tension in fiction, what drama or struggle means." As a frame for discussion, she would cite Flannery O'Connor's belief that every good story is, in some sense, the soul's journey around a dragon. "Although all her stories were Catholic," Miller says, "I do think that stories tend to be about the human spirit, even though they might not be in those religious terms. It seems to me that most writers do, in fact, try to pose a problem for a character that will expose his spiritual crisis, expose him in the moment when he confronts the issues that are central to who he is and what he is doing here on this earth. So I would ask my students: What is the
drama that compels this material? What do you think this character's dragon is? What is he running from? What does he need to defeat in order to become fully human? Do you want him to succeed or fail?"

After a total of eight years at Boston University, MIT, and Tufts University, though, Miller acknowledged that she no longer had the energy to teach on a regular basis. "At a certain point, maybe a particular story
was different than something I'd seen twenty-five times before, but I found myself
saying the same thing I'd said twenty-five times before -- not even shifting my critique over that marginal degree so it was apt to the student's problem, because I'd just gotten lazy." A long hiatus has revitalized her, and she will be teaching next year at Bennington College's new low-residency M.F.A. program, but she still believes that creative writing courses are limited in what they can provide. "You can't help someone who doesn't have it. You can only teach people how to be good editors for themselves. I feel that's what Ted [Solotaroff] has taught me. With each book, I'm a little better at asking myself, What drew me in here? Have I gotten that clearly on the page?"

What is drawing her to the page now? Miller is pensive about the future. She is comfortable with the idea of being out of the literary limelight, having felt somewhat embarrassed by or indifferent to her early celebrity. She has, for instance, never involved herself in the film and television adaptations of her work -- has never, in fact,
seen them. And for her recent
For Love tour, she asked her publicist to reduce her schedule of readings at large venues -- the audiences for which have been diminishing -- opting instead to join in on book groups, intimate gatherings of people who read a work and then discuss it. "It's hard enough to write," she says. "To have to hustle your book on top of that adds to the depression about the way literature is regarded in the universe."

Surprisingly, the possibility of retirement is not inconceivable to her. "I feel at a sort of crossroads in my life," she admits. "I've had a lot of family responsibilities, and those are over now. Before, if I could write and take care of my family, garden, play the piano, do a bit of exercise, and also cook and paint my house and patch the plaster, then that was enough. I've been given this gift of tremendous freedom at this point in my life, and I'm not sure what I want to do with it." She adds, "I'd like to think that there was a particular reason to read each of my books -- a strong one -- and if I felt that I didn't have new territory to write about in some way, I think I would stop."

But one senses that this statement is merely another demonstration of Sue Miller's profound humility. She is a woman in control of her life and her fiction, talented enough to continue providing her many readers with distinctive and beautifully crafted stories -- visions of a world that is both cruel and redemptive -- and strong enough to persevere, even if it means a little more weeping in the bathtub.

-- Don Lee