Gail Godwin may have had four novels on the bestseller list and three nominated for National Book Awards, but she gives credit for her success to others.
Speaking to a large audience Tuesday at the Brady Authors Symposium at Catawba College, Godwin recounted powerful forces on her life.
Her mother’s passion for writing and the themes of her writing shaped her, she said. And Godwin credited her best friend since second grade with giving her commercial success.
Quoting Carl Jung, Godwin said each person’s life is the result of “the particular fatal tissue in which one finds oneself imbedded.”
Her own fatal tissue included growing up under the tutelage of a mother who, as a graduate student, wrote and acted in plays at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
One play recently retrieved from university archives told the story of a girl who proclaimed herself an atheist but was persuaded to go to church in order to show off an orchid corsage. A young woman trying to strike out on her own gives in to society’s wishes and demands, Godwin said.
Another was about two talented roommates, one an artist and the other a writer, who both fear never realizing success. The artist, diagnosed with an eye disease, grows distraught one day during a power outage. Believing she has gone blind, she decides she doesn’t want to live if she can’t do her art and jumps from a window to her death.
In these plots, Godwin said, “I see the seeds of what has come to occupy me so much” —the struggles of an artist who is not sure she’s going to make it.
Godwin had several critically acclaimed novels under her belt early in her career, but she did not really break through to the popular market until she published “A Mother and Two Daughters.” And that book might not ever have taken shape were it not for a letter from her best friend, Pat.
When they were growing up in Asheville, Godwin and Pat used to do writing exercises under the instruction of Godwin’s mother, a reporter and romance novelist.
For example, Godwin’s mother would start a story titled, “The Magic Lipstick,” about a woman going into a dressing room at a party. She encounters a tearful girl experiencing a major case of self doubt. The woman offers the girl her “magic lipstick,” and the young woman returns to the party with renewed self-confidence.
Pat continued the story from the woman’s point of view, an ironic, sensible story, Godwin said. Then Godwin wrote from the point of view of the girl, who saw her situation somewhat improved upon using the lipstick but knew it was not going to last.
With that writing background, Pat wrote Godwin a letter in 1979 that got her attention —and that she shared with her audience Tuesday. It described a trip Pat, her sister and mother had taken, during which the sister accused Pat of wanting their father to die so she could have his money.
The family blow-up led to Pat’s eviction from the inn where they were staying and a long-running family feud.
That event became the seed from which “A Mother and Two Daughters” grew, Godwin’s first bestseller. She dedicated it to Pat.
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