Monthly Archives: January 2012

Ideas can, and do, come from everywhere, but never fully baked. They are only the ingredients, and they cannot blend together without the actual process of writing. A perfect example of this is my most recent novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl. The novel follows a couple, Lynnie and Homan, who have fled from The School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, where their freedom has been cruelly snatched away because they have intellectual disabilities. Lynnie is captured and taken back to the School whereas Homan escapes, and the novel follows each of their journeys, as well as that of the newborn child they have left with a stranger in the short period after their escape.

My sister Beth has an intellectual disability. When she was born in 1960, it wasn’t uncommon for doctors in America to recommend to parents that they place children like my sister in institutions. These were not the more commonly-known psychiatric institutions, but institutions specifically for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. However, my parents never considered that option, and I had little idea about the way people who lived there were treated.

Many years later, I wrote a memoir about my relationship with Beth, Riding The Bus With My Sister, and started getting asked to do public speaking around the country at disability-related conferences. There I met people whose personal or professional experience involved institutions, and who were eager, sometimes tearfully so, to share their stories with me.

Over and over, I returned home, reeling. The reality of institutions had obviously been widespread and affected millions of people just like my sister—yet no one outside of these conferences spoke about such things. In fact, the only institutions most Americans even seemed to be aware of were psychiatric institutions.  I began wondering if I could write something, fiction or nonfiction, that dealt with the material, but the subject seemed so massive, I put the idea to the side.

The material, however, didn’t stop coming my way. One day, as I was wrapping up a talk, I came across a book at a vendor’s table, God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, by Dave Bakke. In 1945, I learned, a deaf, African American teenager was found wandering the streets in Illinois.  No one understood his sign language so no one knew who he was. A judge declared him “feebleminded” and he was put away in one of these institutions.  There he remained, despite the suspicion of many staff that he had no intellectual disability at all, until he died fifty years later. The tragedy of John Doe No. 24 haunted me.

Yet I still couldn’t figure out how I might present such an emotionally fraught topic.

Then in 2007, the creative writing department where I’d taught for over a decade decided to restructure the department and I was let go. Grieving the loss of a job and students I had loved, I set about trying to figure out what to do with my life. I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to keep writing. Though what I wanted to write about, I didn’t know.

In this vulnerable state, I sat down with a blank pad of paper, waiting to see what would emerge. Instantly, there it was. The novel I’d been vaguely thinking about all this time.

It is 1968. Night. A rain storm. An elderly widow is reading a book. Who is she, I asked myself, and without hesitation, I knew: she was a retired schoolteacher, in a state of grief.  Unlike me, her grief was for a child and a bad marriage; like me, she had stayed in touch with her former students. A knock comes to her door. Who is it, I asked myself. Again, I knew. Standing before her is someone who has my sister’s disability—and someone who is like John Doe No. 24. She is the love of his life. Although I don’t know it for another fifty pages, he calls her Beautiful Girl. They have just escaped from an institution—and Beautiful Girl has just borne a baby girl. I continued writing, and the whole first chapter spilled out. When I reached its ending, I was as shocked as my readers have been. I had no idea she would say to the widow: “Hide her.”

That’s where The Story of Beautiful Girl came from. It was only bits and pieces of ideas, but they got alchemized by the process of writing.

When I started meeting people who’d lived in or worked at institutions, I became interested in collecting books and documentaries about the history and reality of those places. I wasn’t actually planning to use them for research so I could write a book; I was simply curious about the material, though I was also sad about how little material I could find, and just how abysmal the conditions turned out to be. Indeed, one of the details that kept sticking in my mind was the connection between low funding from the state and the quality of life, leading to, in one book I read, a situation where the forty residents in each cottage had to share the same toothbrush every morning. Such details made me think I had to do something with this material – but that it would also be about justice and hope and freedom and love.

When I began writing The Story of Beautiful Girl, I created a fictional institution that was a composite of several real places that I learned about from these conversations, books, and documentaries. I also set up a visit at a closed institution a few hours from my house, where a compassionate former staff person drove me around and related memories about the people she’d cared for there and what daily life was like.

Many things surprised me about institutions, and not all of them were horrific. One was that there were devoted, loving staff people, like my guide at that closed institution.  Another was that friendships developed among the residents that went on for decades and helped sustain both individuals. Of course, there were chilling details, like the stories of families who were told to stop visiting their sons and daughters, or the abuse suffered by residents (which, in my book, I decided to keep off-stage). But there were also real relationships that formed and made a huge difference in everyone’s life. This is part of why I created the character of Kate, the dedicated staff person. It’s also why the whole book is a love story between two residents, and their lifelong quest to live ordinary lives where they can be together, living not behind stone walls, but free, unhidden, out in the world.