November 5, 2003

Write of passage

Crafting short stories helped Julie Orringer deal with a death in the family.

by Colleen Dougher

When Julie Orringer arrives at the Miami Book Fair International this week, she will be making a homecoming of sorts. Although the author spent most of her childhood in New Orleans and Ann Arbor, Mich., she had been born in Miami, while her parents were attending medical school at the University of Miami.

By the time she was in sixth grade in New Orleans, Orringer had begun keeping a journal of what was becoming a difficult time in her life. Not only was she trying to sort out the typical issues of growing up, but her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Writing helped Orringer distance herself from her mother’s illness and grasp the reality of it.

“If I could set it down in words, something I could make concrete and try to understand on the page,” she says by phone from San Francisco, “it became less abstract and less frightening even if it was still something that I knew I had no control over, which was terrifying in its own right.”

When Orringer was 20, her mother died. The difficult years leading up to her mom’s death inspired the author, now 30, to write stories such as “Pilgrims,” based on a macrobiotic Thanksgiving feast her family attended after her mother was diagnosed, and “What We Save,” about a cancer-stricken mother’s trip to Disney World to meet an old boyfriend, his wife and children.

Like all the stories in Orringer’s recently published collection, How To Breathe Underwater, “What We Save” is profoundly moving. Orringer initially intended the story to center on a confrontation between a mother and daughter over the former’s mortality. “I didn’t envision that there was going to be a former boyfriend in the story,” Orringer says, “or that what was really going to be coming to light were the things that the mother was leaving behind that the daughter didn’t even know about.”

But the mother in the story is different from Orringer’s own. The author says writing about a real experience can be too painful or feel like a betrayal. “And sometimes, the greater truth is located in the thing that you can make up,” she explains, “because you can look at it more head-on than you can the real and more viscerally painful thing that happened.”

Writing has always played a role in Orringer’s life, though she didn’t consider pursuing it as a career until she was a student at Cornell University, majoring in child development. The turning point, she says, came during a reading by author Dennis Johnson, who discussed his literary training and how writing sustained him in life. Then, Orringer began taking creative-writing classes. After graduating from Cornell with a degree in English, she enrolled in a master of fine arts program at the University of Iowa, where she studied under Frank Conroy, Marilynne Robinson and James Alan McPherson.

In 1996, Orringer moved to San Francisco and worked as everything from a receptionist in a fertility clinic to a sample picker in a fabric warehouse, all the while sending her stories to publishers and magazines. A year later, while she was living with two poets who had been her roommates in Iowa, the Yale Review published “What We Save.”

“I was totally ecstatic,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe that that was going to happen. And then, it was very scary, because that meant that the story was going to be out there and other people were going to read it.”

The story won the journal’s Smart Family Foundation Award for best story of the year. In 1998, her story “When She Is Old and I Am Famous” won the Paris Review’s Discovery Prize. A year later, Orringer was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, which covered a living stipend and workshop tuition while she studied, along with nine other writers, under accomplished authors such as Tobias Wolff, John L’Heureux and Elizabeth Tallent. At this point, Orringer bid farewell to the series of what she calls “crappy jobs” she’d been working and immersed herself in her lifelong passion.

“Suddenly,” she says, “it wasn’t just a matter of trying to put together a couple of hours after a full day’s work. Writing became the day’s work, and that was an incredible liberation.”

Her increased devotion paid off. Two years ago, she received the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for the manuscript of How To Breathe Underwater, which Knopf published this September, the same month University of Iowa Press published Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, a short-story collection written by her husband, Ryan Harty. The couple had met at the University of Iowa and married in 2000.

Two years ago, Orringer also began work on her first novel. Inspired by some of her grandfather’s experiences, the as-yet-untitled book tells the story of a young, Jewish Hungarian man who receives a scholarship to study architecture in Paris in 1937, a time when strict quotas limit the number of Jewish students who can study at Hungarian universities. Soon after he arrives in Paris, the Hungarian government passes regulations that prohibit sending money to Jewish students abroad, and having lost his scholarship, he is forced to figure out how to stay in Paris and continue his studies.

“My hope for the novel,” she says, “is that by the end, he will be able to regain some of the hope that he lost, even though I think that it’s also true that there are losses that can never be made good and things that happen to us that don’t necessarily make us stronger but at least make us better able to understand the scope of pain that exists in the world.”

Vendela Vida, Julie Orringer and Felicia Luna Lemus will read at 11:30 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 9 at the Miami Book Fair International at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus, Northeast Second Avenue and Northeast Sixth Street, Miami. Call 305/237-3258 or visit www.miamibookfair.com.

Read more about Vendela Vida.

Contact Colleen Dougher at 954/356-4948 or cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.