On the day of his appearance at the Chicago Public Library, author T. Coraghessan Boyle was feeling remarkably chipper—a little pumped, even. Not because of the weather—it was a nasty Tuesday, gusty and cold, dark as the center of the earth by 6 PM, when the event was to begin. And not because he’d be back to California anytime soon. No, this was an early stop in the long slog of a book tour that would take him across the country and over the ocean, facing one audience after another, their freshly purchased hard-cover copies of his new novel—The Women, a riff on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright—balanced on their knees, waiting for the main event: the post-talk signing.
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This was a reading, not a lecture, so none of his precious labor had been wasted on preparation. Just a few wry remarks, like a handshake with the crowd, letting them know that it was by accident that he lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, that his wife had found it and forced the purchase, and it was only years later that he went to Wright’s home in Oak Park and to Taliesin (twice) and sat down to write the book. The characters were so amazing, he said. “No novelist could make this up.”
He read about Miriam’s cab ride to Tijuana in quest of morphine—Miriam, the crazed, the addicted, so close to his heart she’d nearly run away with the book as he wrote it, her words sprouting from his fingers, spilling in involuntary whispers from his lips. When he was done, someone asked how hard it was for him to get into a woman’s head like that. “It’s not hard at all,” he said. “I take pride in being able to enter the mind of any character.”
In a recent Boston Phoenix interview, Boyle (who’s also based novels on John Harvey Kellogg and Alfred Kinsey) said he likes “interpreting a story or a life and seeing what it means.” The Women, he claimed, “illuminates” Wright’s personality. He didn’t voice any qualms about substituting his words for things that were actually said, or his presumptions of vanity and desire for the motivations that drove real people and constituted their deepest selves. But one character in The Women does. In the introduction to part one, Tadashi Sato, a fictional student of architecture and the book’s narrator, wonders aloud about Wright, “Did I know him?” It’s a strategy I’m planning to appropriate for my novel about Boyle. When he steps to the mike at the library, there’ll be a fictional acolyte in the audience. She’ll be the one getting into his head, wondering if she’s got it right.
