What We're Writing: Hallie's getting personal

HALLIE EPHRON: It’s been so exciting, seeing our new group Reds and Readers positively explode. If you’re not a member, please feel warmly invited to join.

Here on Jungle Red Writers I get to wrap up WHAT WE’RE WRITING week with a peek at what I’m exhuming from my computer’s depths (writers remember: NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY!) as I make sense of a lifetime of putting my thoughts and experiences on paper… as opposed to making it all up.

My trip in the way-back machine took me to the first book I tried to write. It was supposed to be a novel. Fiction. Title: Guinea Pig. And finding my earliest version of it, I am shocked to discover: it’s not fiction.

It’s all about ugly-duckling me...

...in junior high. And my best friend (I wanted nothing more than to be her) whose parents were wealthy, oblivious, and (almost) as dysfunctional as mine. And stuff we did.

Here’s the opening. 

GUINEA PIG (written years ago by Hallie Ephron)

Growing up in Beverly Hill was always about shoes—the ones they had and I didn’t. This seems ludicrous in retrospect, because even back then I knew that the right shoes wouldn’t make me fit. And yet, in seventh grade, what I lusted after, dreamed about, was a pair of baby-blue flats with a T-strap low across the instep and three petal-shaped cutouts over the toe.

The Shoes came from Jax, an exclusive women’s clothing store on Wilshire Boulevard, and Maryanne Wasserman and the rest of her clique had them. Sure, you could get knock-offs at Chandlers, a block away, but they weren’t soft and supple, and they didn’t flex like ballerina slippers when you wiggled your toes. Besides, even I could spot wannabe shoes. Might as well be wearing Keds with ankle socks.

I once got as far as the front door of Jax, held my breath, and stepped inside. In the instant before toxic self-consciousness sent me into reverse, I caught a glimpse of a high-ceilinged, narrow interior and a few spare racks of clothing along the side walls. This was no Ohrbach’s where, amid a tumult of tables and racks jam packed with merchandise and people grabbing over your shoulder, you could cloak yourself in anonymity

It wasn’t that we weren’t rich enough. We lived above Santa Monica and below Sunset , smack in the middle of the Beverly Hills’s north-south socioeconomic continuum. My dad, a screenwriter and movie executive, had a bespoke suit tailored by Frank Mariani who would later become slightly famous as the man who made suits for Ronald Reagan. My father forgave Mr. Mariani, whose name was sewn into the silk lining over every inside jacket pocket, though it would have been a whole lot better if Mr. Mariani had gained his reputation making suits for Adlai Stevenson.

The year my sister Jean left for college, I moved out of the room I shared with my baby sister Laura and into Jean’sroom, a sliver of space carved from the side of the house. The room was papered in fat yellow cabbage roses floating on a field of pale gray.

If I stood up from the bed and took giant step, I’d run into the door to the hall. But it was all mine, even if the walk-through closet was still half-full of Jean's clothes.

When Laura came to the door, I could tiptoe up to it and whisper, "Go away."

I had my very own phone beside the bed. I could talk to my best friend, any time of day or night, and nobody could watch me and ask, "What are you doing?" or "Who are you talking to?" 

Problem was, at that moment, I was fresh out of best friends.

When I pulled this out of the past, I was sure I'd be horrified. But overall it was not bad, and it did its job, sparking memories of place and family. 

But as I read on, I was reminded of the fatal flaw in that manuscript: no character arc. Because in real life there rarely is a nice, tidy, before-and-after. 

It was only when, years later, I was able to take "the fiction leap" (aka: make things up) that I managed to write a suspense novel that interested a publisher. That was NEVER TELL A LIE, and buried not so deeply in it are my first pregnancy and all the life changes that precipitated.

It was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark award, adapted for film by The Lifetime Movie Network, and best of all gave me the confidence to write my string of standalone domestic suspense novels.

Today's giveaway are signed copies of that first, every-so-personal novel based ever so loosely on pregnant me, throwing a yard sale, when a one-time (also pregnant) schoolmate shows up and... .  I'm real. The house is real. The one-time "friend" is completely made up. The attic....

So hop over to REDS AND READERS, join if you haven’t, and comment on my post – that’s all you have to do to enter the drawing.

 

And please, share your thoughts about the things in your life that you're glad that you have NOT thrown away.