When Kaye Gibbons looked all around her, there was plenty keeping the novelist from finding joy in her life — a second divorce, the deaths of several friends, life in a town where telling folks she's a writer always prompts the question, "mysteries or romance?"
So Gibbons found herself returning to Ellen Foster, the title character of her breakthrough first novel, and writing a sequel to the story that mirrored the author's own childhood in rural North Carolina.
"I'm never as happy and content as when I'm writing from her point of view," Gibbons says. "I feel like I know what I'm doing, and I needed that."
The result isn't just the new novel "The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster." It's happiness for Gibbons, who has settled into life with her three daughters and plans to move permanently to New York once the youngest graduates from high school next year.
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"I've got going on what a lot of middle-aged, single women about to have their children leave have," Gibbons says. "I feel like I'm going on to Act 2, and I needed to decide what I was going to do with this next half of my life."
Gibbons wrote "Ellen Foster" when she was 26, the first of eight novels she's published, all still in print. The story was based on her own: Gibbons' mother killed herself when she was a child, and her father was an alcoholic. Her brother and his wife raised Gibbons from the time she was 13. But unlike her latest effort with Ellen, there were no motives behind Gibbons' semi-autobiographical debut — aside from rank ambition.
"I wanted to be William Faulkner. Now that I'm 45, I'm able to say it," Gibbons says. "I wrote that book to write the best literature I could. Catharsis was the farthest thing from my mind."
It was a huge hit. Oprah Winfrey chose Gibbons' debut and a later novel, "Charms for the Easy Life," for her wildly popular book club, and "Ellen Foster" was turned into a TV movie.
But away from the success of "Ellen Foster" and her later works, Gibbons struggled in her personal life. Her two efforts at marriage failed, and she lived with manic-depression — a disease doctors first diagnosed while she was still a student at the University of North Carolina, before the publication of "Ellen Foster."
Today, she's no longer taking the medication doctors prescribed for the illness, and Gibbons is convinced that she never needed it. The bouts of staying up all night for days at a time to write, she said, were simply the reality of having both a deadline and a mortgage. She has lost more than 70 pounds since throwing away her medication, and now the blond, rail-thin Gibbons looks more like the older sister of her three daughters than their mother.
Gibbons also coped with the deaths of several friends, including her longtime editor, Faith Sales, and fellow writer and friend Jeanne Braselton, who committed suicide in 2003. Gibbons rewrote Braselton's novel "The Other Side of Air," which Random House will publish in October, "from the ground up" as a gift to her departed friend. At the same time, Gibbons' anger at Braselton's decision to take her own life kept her from going to the funeral.
"I knew her so well that I just imagined her telling it," Gibbons says. "I knew the book she wanted to write. I knew what she wanted to say. She wasn't able to say it, so I said it for her."
The stress and sadness from her friends' deaths and her second divorce left Gibbons seeking comfort. She found it in Ellen's voice. But it didn't come immediately. Gibbons revised the sequel nine times for one publisher before moving to editor Ann Patty at Harcourt Brace. They went over the last draft one page at a time in a hotel room where Gibbons had barricaded herself to write.
Gibbons promises that "The Life All Around Me," of which Harcourt has published 100,000 copies, will be the first of many Ellen Foster sequels.
However, reviews have been mixed. The novel "lacks the strong story arc of its predecessor, which may make some readers impatient," according to a starred review in Booklist. "But Ellen is still a remarkable creation, and her narrative voice, while it has matured and grown more sophisticated, remains compelling and unique."
The first sequel finds 15-year-old Ellen settled with her foster mother, but trying to leave North Carolina for the Northeast and college at Harvard University. The next book follows Ellen at Harvard.
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