“Can I ask you a question?”
She nodded, knowing what was coming.
“Why’d you stop writing?” he asked.
Ronnie gave what she hoped looked like an indifferent shrug and kept her tone light. “Ran out of stories.” That wasn’t the truth, and she hadn’t ever stopped writing. Just publishing. And she’d never told another living soul why.
Veronica Levy had grown up in Boston, the daughter of a bank manager and a stay-at-home mom who lived a quiet, middle-class life in a quiet, middle-class suburb. She understood, from a very early age, that suburban respectability was attainable and desirable. Fame was not. While her high school classmates were sneaking out of their houses to go to rock shows at the Avalon or the Tea Party, when they were wailing into hairbrushes in front of their bathroom mirrors, imagining themselves as famous singers, Ronnie was happy to stay home, sitting in their knotty-pine-paneled den, watching TV with her parents. While her sister was rolling joints on top of her guitar case and taping an almost life-sized poster of Eric Clapton to the wall of the bedroom they shared, Ronnie was quietly nurturing other dreams—different, but just as impractical. Veronica Levy wanted to be a writer.
Not a famous writer, insofar as such things existed. The famous female writers Ronnie knew of came in two categories. There were the poets—the depressives and the suicides. Then there were glamorous bestselling novelists like Rona Jaffe and Jacqueline Susann, who went on talk shows to trade barbs with Philip Roth. Veronica could not see herself in either category. Her ambitions were more modest and included staying alive. She would publish short stories in literary quarterlies, and maybe even The New Yorker. She’d also get her PhD so she’d be able to support herself as a professor. Combined, these two pursuits would guarantee her a quiet, contemplative, academic life; a life spent in the company of stories and storytellers, in the land of language and words. It was all she wanted; all she’d wanted since her fifth-grade teacher had read her class “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, and every word, every pause, every image, had echoed through her and made her heart feel like a struck gong.
Her parents didn’t know what to make of her. The Levys had taken pains to give their girls the recommended allowance of art and culture. They had a subscription to the Boston Symphony, and they dutifully brought Suzanne and Veronica to the city’s museums. Once a year, there was a trip to New York City for a Broadway show and the Museum of Natural History, but the idea of a child making a living at the arts was utterly foreign, and more than a little frightening.
Ronnie had gone to Smith, where her parents had allowed her to major in English （“she can always pick up a teaching certificate,” she overheard her mother tell her dad）。 After she graduated and announced her intention to pursue a PhD in literature, her parents had exchanged a glance. “Ronnie, are you sure that’s practical?” her mom had asked gently.
“I’ll teach,” she told them, and watched their faces sag, almost comically, with relief. Those expressions warned her to say nothing more. Better not to tell them about the handful of stories she’d placed in the literary quarterlies and chapbooks and the small magazines, the rejection letters she was already beginning to collect from Harper’s and The Atlantic. Better not to tell them how she dreamed of publishing a book of poems, or a short-story collection, or even a novel, and making her living as a writer.
By the time she was twenty-five and had completed her master’s, Ronnie had been rejected by the editors of every prestigious publication still in existence. A few of them took the time to include encouraging notes along with the “Sorry, but this isn’t right for us” form letters, and it was enough to keep her going. In her apartment in Cambridge, she piled them all up, all the rejection letters, attached to all the poems and stories she’d written over the years, the ones where she’d tried to sound like John Cheever and the ones where she’d tried to sound like John Updike and the ones where she’d tried to sound like Kurt Vonnegut or Raymond Carver, only Jewish, or Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, only female.
The summer after she completed her dissertation, on the tension between atheism and a yearning for God in the works of the British poet and novelist Stevie Smith, Ronnie put her stories—hundreds, maybe thousands, of typed pages!—in a plastic milk crate. She put the milk crate in her closet, and gently shut the closet door. Then she pulled out the two-hundred-page lined notebook she’d bought at the drugstore and, in neat cursive, she began to write the story of two sisters, a story loosely based on her grandmother Shirley, and her grandmother’s sister, her great-aunt Anya, and their life as immigrants in America. Her plan was to complete the book, then pay someone to type it, but before that happened, she went on a first date with one of her sister’s boyfriend’s buddies, a shy, thoughtful law student named Lee Weinberg.