Author Carolyn See making rare visit

Carolyn See rarely travels from California to the East Coast, so Bucks County Community College has scored a literary coup in luring the award-winning writer to Newtown for a reading tomorrow.

See, author of seven novels and several works of nonfiction, will read from her latest novel, There Will Never Be Another You, as part of the college's celebration of Women's History Month: Reading and Writing Women. See's appearance is co-sponsored by the school's Cultural Programming Committee and the language and literature department.

See is heading East solely for the Bucks County reading.

"I am very excited about Carolyn's appearance," said James Freeman, a former student of See's who is a Bucks County English professor. "We have not had a novelist of her stature in some years. She is just a dynamo of a speaker."

See, a longtime UCLA professor of creative writing who has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and who is also a weekly book reviewer for the Washington Post, will fly to Philadelphia and return to Southern California via Amtrak.

"I'm really looking forward to this," said See, whose three previous trips to Philadelphia did not include a visit to Bucks. "Once I get East, I have a wonderful time, but it takes a little bit of energy to get there."

There Will Never Be Another You alternates between the perspectives of Edith, a hospital volunteer grieving for her husband, who has just died, and Phil, Edith's dermatologist-son, whose family is imploding.

The book opens as Edith is angrily bustling around her apartment, filling trash bags with the boxes of Depends, catheters, antiseptics and other flotsam from weeks of caring for her dying husband, when her son calls.

" 'Turn on the television,' " Phil says. " 'You'll see history being made, I think . . .'

"Buildings on fire. In New York. Then one, incredibly, went down."

And so, See elliptically links a small domestic tragedy with a much larger one. In a novel that is by turns moving and mordantly funny, she explores the unraveling of a family against a backdrop of fear about a possible biological attack in Southern California.

Published in May, the novel made Oprah Winfrey's recommended reading list. The work has earned accolades from authors ranging from former Philadelphia Daily News columnist and novelist Pete Dexter, who called it "as hard as BBs, and as true" to Ursula K. Le Guin, the fantasy and science fiction writer, who muses: "Who else scares you to death while providing motherly consolation?"

And Joan Didion called See's work "a novel alive with wit and love and energy - a book about things falling apart that turns out to be a day at the beach. . . . Pure joy."

See said that, while her works are rooted in family life, she sets them on a larger stage.

"I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I don't write 'women's' fiction," she said, noting that she seeks to explore: "How do we remain human? Rather than write in a fancy way, as if I were a guy, I just keep in that domestic setting and see how it plays out."

See, who is in her 70s, said she drew on elements from her own life for her latest work.

"The woman in question is, of course, a version of me but about 100 pounds lighter and younger," she explained. "I did have a life partner who died at home, and it was tough. People don't write about that. It was 14 months later that the towers fell, but it felt the same way."

It seemed natural to her to open her novel on 9/11.

"When I was 11," she recalled, "the atom bomb was dropped, and three weeks later my dad left. So in my mind that large, terrible disaster got kind of conflated with a tiny personal trauma."

She pointed out that throughout literature, authors, including Shakespeare, have used signs of outward calamity as a device to portend tragedy for characters.

Although See frequently appears at campus conferences, she said most are on the West Coast where her work is better known.

"I love going to community colleges because the people who are there really want to be there," she said.

Freeman said Bucks County Community College had been fortunate to persuade several acclaimed authors to participate in its reading series over the years, including poets Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, and the late Gwendolyn Brooks.

Knowing that community colleges cannot afford their usual rates, authors such as See agree to appear at a reduced rate, Freeman said.

"We have been very lucky in that regard," he said. "We get more yesses than nos."

In addition to reading from her novel, See expects to talk about Making a Literary Life, her 2004 nonfiction guide for first-time novelists.

She will sign books after the reading. Earlier in the day she is scheduled to talk to creative-writing classes and meet students.

"She wants to talk about the whole creative process in hopes that there are some young writers out there in the audience," Freeman said. "She does believe there are answers in books, be they fiction or nonfiction."

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