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Bonus Material
• Main Page • A Letter from Kaye • Additional Essay by Kaye • Interview • Extended Bio • Read an Excerpt • Kaye’s Web Site Get Your Copy
available at
Also by Kaye Gibbons |
Kaye Gibbons's Extended Biography
In 1997 Gibbons was awarded a Knighthood from the French Minister of Culture for her contributions to French literature. In 2001 she spoke at the Pompidou Center in Paris in what one journalist called "an act of sustained brilliance." She has read and lectured to sold-out audiences from New York to Seattle. With domestic sales of more than 4.2 million copies and numerous worldwide translations, she was designated "one of the most lyrical writers working today" by Entertainment Weekly and was described by one columnist as "a genius-Madonna in a black leather jacket" and by another as "a brilliant woman with old-fashioned star quality, rare…." Kaye Gibbons was born in 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina, on Bend of the River Road. She attended North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying American and English literature. At twenty-six years old, she wrote her first novel, Ellen Foster. Praised as an extraordinary debut, Eudora Welty said that "the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word" mark the work of this talented writer, and Walker Percy said, "Ellen Foster is a Southern Holden Caulfield, tougher perhaps, as funny…a breathtaking first novel." Ellen Foster was recently honored in London as one of the Twenty Greatest Novels of the Twentieth Century. In 1997 the novel won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, the Louis D. Rubin Writing Award, and other major awards. Now a classic, it is taught in high schools and universities, often teamed with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The book has been widely translated, frequently performed in theatres throughout the United States and was produced by Hallmark Hall of Fame for CBS, starring Emily Harris and Jenna Malone. Published in 1989, A Virtuous Woman also received wide praise in the United States and abroad. The San Francisco Chronicle called the work "a perfect gem of a novel." Both Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman were chosen together as Oprah Book Club selections in 1998, leading the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks. In 1989 Gibbons received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a third novel, A Cure for Dreams, which was published in 1991. This novel won the 1990/PEN Revson Award for the best work of fiction published by an American writer under thirty-five years of age, as well as the Heartland Prize for fiction from the Chicago Tribune, and other awards. In the novel she used transcripts from the Federal Writers' Project of the Great Depression. For the first time, she said, she "discovered the voice of ordinary men and women as a pure form of art and force of nature" and realized those voices would carry her through every novel she writes. When Charms for the Easy Life was published in 1993, it became a New York Times bestseller and prompted a Time magazine reviewer to say, "Some people might give up their second-born to write as well as Kaye Gibbons." This novel takes place between 1910 and 1945 in the home of three generations of highly intelligent and forthright women, and was filmed by Showtime Productions, aired in October 2001, starring Mimi Rogers and Gina Rowlands. Sights Unseen (1995) was also a national bestseller and a winner of the Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Chronicle. The following year, G. P. Putnam's Sons published her sixth novel On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, "a book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure," said one reviewer. Readers agree that it is "another cause for accolades" and many regarded it as her most brilliant to date. Most recently, she was invited to become a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a most significant honor. She has received the Oklahoma Homecoming Award and was made a member of the YWCA Academy of Women. She was also chosen to write the introduction to the 2000 Modern Library Edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Other Stories. She has completed a posthumous novel, The Other Side of Air which was left unfinished after the death of her close friend, the writer Jeanne Braselton, in early 2003. Random House plans to release this novel in the fall of 2004. Currently she is working on journalistic pieces for publication and collection, and a biography. The sequel to Ellen Foster, The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster, will be available January 2006. Gibbons lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her three daughters, Mary, Leslie, and Louise. Divining Women, set during the 1918 influenza epidemic, was due out from Putnam in April of 2004. She recently summed up her philosophy of her success when asked whether she was surprised by everything she has achieved thus far in her career: KG: I would've been surprised had I stumbled blindly into any of it, scratched a lottery ticket and found a prize that would then take me through the rest of my life. I wasn't "lucky" that the books sold. I wasn't "surprised" to learn that they're also taught in literature classes. That sounds arrogant, but it's not. To be able to write literature that sells takes an almost surreal amount of stubborn persistence; imagination; the ability to forego distractions, such as vacations, men, alcohol; and a willingness to lock oneself in a room and submit oneself to constant, ruthless self-criticism. If a writer is any good, he or she will criticize himself so unmercifully that the reader and the reviewer either have to be misguided or wrong to make too much of a complaint. And there's something almost fun about fixing that deal in place. That sounds arrogant, and it may be. But it'd be more arrogant to subject readers, nice, hopeful people, to 250 pages of words I had not tried to perfect, that I'd merely typed, as Hemingway said of meaningless writing. I know when it's being done to me, when clichés are bound or filmed and sold, and I don't appreciate it, the disrespect for this gift of language and for the people we're offering it to. But getting there, to that lucky, sacrificial place, requires long, long stretches of unbroken concentration and more Diet Cokes than most people can or want to tolerate. I love the labor, the sheer manual labor that goes into making these books seem as though they were effortlessly written. I love what has come to feel like a habit of invention. I go about my days stunned that I didn't waste what Walker Percy called a "knack" for writing. And there's the grace that comes when I'm in my daughters' presence. I go about stunned that I didn't drop or misplace my children or cause them to be expelled from school for repeating what they learned at home. You see, I live alone with three smart and sober teenage girls—it has taken skill, patience, stamina, and that same kind of "knack." And like this 40-year custom of reading and writing, the girls are a seriously profound, sustained joy. You see, I love what I do. I raise three human beings, and I do language for a living—it's only as terrifying as it is lovely. Book and essay texts copyright © 2005 by Kaye Gibbons. Photo credits: (sky and fields) © Thomas Wiewandt; Visions of America/Corbis,(house and trees) © Paul A. Souders/Corbis. Used with permission. All rights reserved. |
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