Interview with Dorothy Weil
A Good Woman
Dorothy Weil
Plainview Press (2008)
ISBN 9781891386855
Reviewed by Richard R. Blake for Reader Views (04/08)
Today, Tyler R. Tichelaar of Reader Views is pleased to be joined by Dorothy Weil, who is here to talk about her new book, “A Good Woman.”
Dorothy Weil has been writing stories and drawing since she was four years old, living on a steamboat on the Missouri River at Omaha, Nebraska. She is the granddaughter and daughter of steamboat captains, and a genuine river rat. She now lives in an apartment in Cincinnati with a constantly changing and inspiring view of the Ohio River. She earned degrees at the University of Chicago, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and the University of Cincinnati, where she finished with a doctorate in American Literature. She has taught at the University of Cincinnati and Edgecliff College, creating special courses in women’s literature and black literature. She has also written and co-produced many television documentaries, including a prize-winning series about America’s rivers.
Tyler: Welcome, Dorothy. I’m glad you could join me today. To begin, will you tell us a little bit about the plot of “A Good Woman”?
Dorothy: “A Good Woman” is the story of Mary Lou Friedman, a spunky eighty-six year old whose life slides into chaos when she is threatened by local hoodlums, and her husband becomes terminally ill. As Mary Lou fights for her family and home, she revisits her past as a wild farm girl, a naïve young bride, an inexperienced mother, and a mature woman discovering her sexuality.
Throughout, she copes with the changing expectations and challenges faced by women of the twentieth century, the final hurdle being old age in a world where people live long but receive little respect. Ultimately, Mary Lou is stripped of everything she depends on. Vowing to defend her home, she acquires a gun, with tragic results.
The story takes place in 1991 when Mary Lou and Don, Mary Lou's husband, are eighty-six, having lived through the better part of the twentieth century. Writing the novel was inspired by the number of stories in the press about attacks on older people. As the novel developed and expanded, I found I was trying, not just to arouse compassion for people in a desperate situation, but to dramatize for a young audience, who have new challenges, some of the problems their parents and grandparents faced, and in many cases overcame. Some of these are ongoing, the age-old differences between feminine and masculine attitudes, and many would be revealing to Mary Lou and Don's younger models. Conversations with forebears may communicate some of these differences and similarities, but fiction can deliver insights we are often too busy and hurried to seek out on our own.
Tyler: Will you tell us more about Mary Lou in her youth before she married, when she was a wild girl and then an innocent and naïve young bride?
Dorothy: Mary Lou was born on a farm, had a happy childhood until her mother died, her father remarried and relocated in the city. She loved riding her horse and developed a deep love of nature. She was entirely innocent of any knowledge of sex, only that it was expected of wives to please their husbands. Mary Lou painfully and slowly learns the facts of feminine sexuality.
Tyler: Will you tell us more about the elderly couple’s relationship?
Dorothy: Mary Lou and Don have a rather typical relationship for people of their generation and background, when women were expected to be wives and mothers above all, putting their personal ambitions away. As Mary Lou’s stepmother says “whistling girls and crowing hens always come to bad ends.” Mary Lou marries young, on romantic impulse, and she and Don love one another deeply. They live in somewhat separate worlds, she at home and he at his business. Throughout the Depression, and the many wars and problems they face, Mary Lou looks to Don for strength. As he becomes ill, their roles shift: she must become the strong protective one.
Tyler: What made you decide Mary Lou should buy a shotgun? Is she taking the law into her own hands?
Dorothy: Mary Lou is desperate when she buys a gun. Two local hoodlums have broken into her house and stolen a TV; they have threatened her with harm repeatedly, and the police have been unable to catch them. Mary Lou is urged by her beloved grandson to acquire a gun in order to protect herself if the hoodlums break into her house again and threaten her and Don’s lives.
Tyler: Will you tell us more about the stories in the news of crimes against the elderly that inspired you? Is Mary Lou’s purchase of a gun based on anything you read, or were you trying to dramatize the situation further?
Dorothy: I have read too many stories of old people unable to cope with illness and other problems, resulting in suicide and murder; recently an old couple in Cincinnati was robbed on Halloween of the dimes they were giving out to children, and the man was shot and killed. The buying of the gun by Mary Lou is total fiction, as is the main story; it is not based on any one incident. Here's what Ceil Cleveland, retired editor of Columbia Magazine and a writer says of the scene: "Watch Mary Lou, age 86, buying a shotgun and laugh with her, not at her."
Tyler: What about the hoodlums? Do you reveal to the reader what their motivation is for harassing an elderly couple?
Dorothy: “A Good Woman” is not about the young men, but about the family being harassed by them. We do not go into their motivation or point of view. Surely, there is no excuse for harassing the old. The boys are obviously vicious, at loose ends, and steal Mary Lou's car radio and tires, and her TV set for money.
Tyler: How is the story told? Is it in first or third person and from whose viewpoint? How did you decide on this point of view?
Dorothy: The story is told in the third person, from Mary Lou’s point of view. This is important because the reader must feel with Mary Lou: her fear, her love of her family, her despair and recovery from the deaths of her most beloved family members, her dilemma over how to deal with the forces bearing down on her.
Tyler: Why did you choose the title “A Good Woman”?
Dorothy: The title “A Good Woman” is, I hope, intriguing. What is a good woman? We all want to know. It is also somewhat ironic because Mary Lou does commit a crime. But when we see her life as a whole and how the events unfold, we might still judge her to be a good woman, as her daughter does. She tries to do the right thing throughout her life.
Tyler: Does the definition of what being a “good woman” means change over the course of Mary’s long life?
Dorothy: The definition of a good woman is something the reader should be thinking about, but the author does not pontificate on the subject.
Tyler: How would you define your novel, Dorothy? Is it historical fiction or a family saga?
Dorothy: “A Good Woman” is a novel, I hope, a good one, a good read, and one offering some wisdom, warmth and humor as well as tragedy. I don’t fit it into a genre, though one reviewer has called it a family saga.
Tyler: Dorothy, would you say the novel has a message? What is the impression or feeling you want your readers to come away with?
Dorothy: I hope the novel has what Henry James considered most important: a sense of "felt life"—that is, you believe in the reality of the characters and events and feel you are experiencing something first hand. Something that jumps off the page and becomes part of you. You care about the characters.
There is no message, though I hope that by entering deeply into Mary Lou's thoughts and feelings, readers might gain insight into older people and drop the stereotypes they might have. As Mary Lou says, “Old people are not spent cartridges littering the ground after wars, but are filled with all the feelings other people have and want to be well and happy.”
Stephen Birmingham, the best selling novelist and social historian, described the novel as I would like to think of it: “Tender, Terrific, Terrifying. “A Good Woman” is not about senior citizens but about humans.”
Tyler: Dorothy, I know “A Good Woman” is not your first novel. Will you tell us a little bit about your other novels?
Dorothy: My comic novel “Continuing Education” is about a woman returning to college in mid-life, something I experienced and that many of my students did also. It was bought by Disney Productions and came out in paperback. I have also published a thriller taking place in the world of Ohio River towboats, “River Rats,” a world few can enter and that I’m familiar with from my river background. “Life, Sex, and Fast Pitch Softball” is the story of a teenaged girl coping with the usual adolescent angst and angst and family disruption. She is dragged into playing fast-pitch softball by her father, a sports nut, and her mother who thinks Dad and daughter are spending too much of their “quality time” at the mall, eating pizza and gaining weight.
Tyler: You have also written a memoir. What made you decide to do so and what did you enjoy about writing it?
Dorothy: My memoir “The River Home” is about my family and its many ups and downs. My father, a steamboat captain, my mother, an artist, and my brother and I lived on a steamboat, at a marina, in some dowdy flats, and some swanky hotels. We moved so often and had so many interesting adventures that I needed to recapture the past, to figure out its strengths and weaknesses; it has affected me strongly and continues to, although with the writing of the memoir, the past has less of a grip.
Catharsis is probably one of the central reasons authors write memoirs. In my case, I also wanted to share the experiences and the world of my growing up. I thought my family odd, but I’ve had so many responses in which readers say they feel that they were right there with me, and that my life mirrored theirs in so many ways, I guess we were more typical than I thought. The Great Depression of the thirties was probably the biggest influence on me and my brother and so many ordinary people who have never been heard from.
Tyler: Obviously, rivers have had a huge influence on your life. What was it like growing up on a steamboat as part of your family heritage? How have rivers influenced your writing?
Dorothy: My background on the Missouri and Ohio Rivers is a heritage I’m very proud of. I love the water, the boats, and the people of the river. My years on the river were among the happiest and most interesting of my life. I have traveled a great deal on the inland waterways, on steamboats and towboats, writing articles and creating television documentaries about various phases of river life; on several of the latter, I worked with my brother who became a towboat captain, and who was also a writer and artist.
As to the river’s effect on my writing: life on a steamboat is both confining and liberating. Our cabin on “The Valley Queen,” an excursion boat docked at Omaha through a frigid winter in 1934, was so small, it drew the family together, made our life with each other unusually intimate. With a wood stove for heat and tubs for bathing, it was very old-fashioned. The world outside, the boat and the river, brought my brother and me close to the rolling water, the ice, the weather. We could climb around the boat, walk on the ice, row with our father in a skiff. So we learned to be adventurous and curious, to love nature. The memories of that time and our other periods of living on the water have been definite, dramatic, and are recalled through real things and strong feelings. I think because of this, my writing has been a search for the "objective correlative," that is, emotions embodied in people, events, places and things—never described in abstract language. I use metaphor to clarify, always carefully and accurately as I believe poetry is specific and accurate, not fanciful.
Tyler: Dorothy, what do you enjoy doing besides writing?
Dorothy: Painting—and this relates to the answer above, about trying to evoke strong, emotional pictures. A member of an audience, hearing me read from my work, said, “You are a painter, aren’t you?” An artist herself, she picked up on the visual, and visceral nature of my work.
I also enjoy walking, family get togethers, travel, friends, movies, music—and I read constantly.
Tyler: How does painting influence your writing? Does it make you see things differently than you would otherwise in trying to describe them with words?
Dorothy: I think my painting gives the writing a strong visual element. I have to "see" a scene taking place as in a play, with the setting clear, the atmosphere specific.
Tyler: You mentioned Henry James above. Who would you say are your literary influences and how have they influenced you?
Dorothy: My influences are the Russians, the English and the American classic writers, especially Tolstoi, Dotoyevski, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Melville and Hawthorne. I especially love Shakespeare and Faulkner because they could go from tragic to comic, having a wide view of the world.
Tyler: Thank you for joining me today, Dorothy. Before we go, would you tell our readers about your website and what additional information they can find there about “A Good Woman?”
Dorothy: My website, www.dorothyweil.com has a page about “A Good Woman,” some comments from other writers, and how it came to be written. By clicking on the links, readers can find where and how to order the book. They can also just type my name into Google or whatever they have, and various venues should come up.
Tyler: Thank you, Dorothy. I hope you have many readers and your book makes them question what truly is a good woman.
