I told the computer to publish this one on Thursday. I'm not sure how, during the seizures Microsoft "updates" were inflicting on it all day on Thursday, the computer managed to schedule it for a Saturday instead. Anyway, here it is...
I first heard of the author with the unforgettable name during the 1980-81 winter holidays, when someone who wanted to encourage me to be a precocious writer sent me a Writer's Digest annual directory of book publishers. Before the Internet these were big fat hardcover books, information up to date for up to one quarter of the year for which they were published. Anyway publishers usually named a few recent or forthcoming books and Harper Collins was promoting, for 1981, a young adult novel big-name author Paul Zindel had co-authored with picture book author Crescent Dragonwagon, called To Take a Dare.
I was a young adult reader. I liked Zindel's witticisms, if not all of his advice to teenagers. I had to read To Take a Dare. It wasn't just your typical "go get counselling" story, though it did start out with the teenage girl narrator catching gonorrhea and leaving her parents' broken, dysfunctional home. (This was before the fad for "child sexual abuse." The protagonist's father was the one whose distrust had been her excuse for sleeping around with boys, not the source of the gonorrhea. This made her seem much more realistic than so many other fictional characters who lost their virginity before age eighteen in the 1980s and 1990s.) She was old enough to get jobs and rent rooms, under existing laws, and led a reasonably responsible life after putting a thousand miles or so between herself and her parents. Then, especially since she could no longer have children of her own, she wanted to adopt a younger runaway whose street name was Dare, and the story was about her trying not to make the same mistakes rearing him that she thought her parents had made rearing her.
It was edgy. It was plausible in the early 1980s, when social workers hadn't yet succeeded in cutting off all teenagers' hopes of independent, legitimate lives outside of dysfunctional families and/or schools. It was thought-provoking. I liked To Take a Dare very much.
Later in the 1980s Dragonwagon, whose parents had made fairly unusual European names famous in literary circles, so she'd chosen an even more unusual name and set out to make it famous in its own right, wrote her other novel. The Year It Rained was even edgier and more contemporary. The big medical news story of the period was that some cases of schizophrenia seemed to be completely cured by overdoses of vitamins and minerals. Well, some psychotic conditions that seemed to doctors like schizophrenia were turning out to have nothing to do with classic schizophrenia, but the cases that were responding to "megavitamin therapy" really were classic schizophrenia.
"People don't usually notice medical news unless they have, or are concerned about having, a condition themselves. You obviously don't have classic schizophrenia so did you have one of those other conditions that look like it?" Someone to whom I mentioned this book actually asked.
The answer is no. In the early twentieth century people used to fear that being imaginative, reading and writing fiction and especially speculative fiction, was likely to lead to schizophrenia. I'd been warned. And the celiac trait happens to be associated with one of the complex of ten or fifteen genes that, in combination, seem to be involved in classic schizophrenia. The full set of those genes does not run in my family. The celiac gene does. By the time I was born the bulk of the medical evidence was telling my parents and me not to worry too much about older, misleading ideas about what my imagination and my celiac disease might have been leading up to. They weren't, anyway. Though my life did overlap for a few years with the life of a cousin who'd been a noted, not really famous, psychologist in the most fear-ridden and Freudian way, who thought the whole family of "gifted" achievers were repressing and overcompensating and generally at risk, and from time to time a visit with him seemed to motivate one of the active adults in the family to "go on a kick" of pushing me to read less and spend more time outdoors with other children...I don't remember ever spending any time with this cousin, but my life became noticeably smoother and easier when he died.
But in fact I was a writer, my mother was a nurse, and I did pay attention to medical news about conditions that I was at no risk of having, myself, but might have been at some risk of having to live with in Mother's patients. As a teenager I was also interested in Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease and diabetes and epilepsy and, most of all, cardiovascular disease, the one for which Mother was performing "miracle cures." If schizophrenia had turned out to be fully curable we might have had patients with that disease, too, living in our house, or spent time living in their houses, and I might have inherited the ability and the duty to perform "miracle cures" of that too...
But it didn't. Classic schizophrenia is more horrible than that. Over-supplementing with nutrients, to compensate for the nutrients the schizophrenic patient loses the ability to absorb, turned out to buy patients just a few more years of "normal" life. Since classic schizophrenia appears in late adolescence, that might have been enough for a patient like the protagonist of The Year It Rained to get married and have a baby, only to have to be locked up away from the baby.
Anyway, The Year It Rained is a very hopeful novel. The protagonist stops hearing voices and starts writing and even feels physically normal enough to have mind-blowing, fully hormone-enriched sex--with a boy she doesn't really like much, because nobody could possibly like him--and thus experience "normal" adolescent heartache and confusion. She's happy. She wants to help her friends from the psychiatric hospital. If only more people understood how much better megavitamin therapy was than all the other "therapies" that have been tried, and have failed.
But megavitamin therapy would turn out, a few years later, to fail the people on whom the protagonist of The Year It Rained was based. We now know how a sequel to The Year It Rained would go. As a typical classic schizophrenic the protagonist, Elizabeth, would become asexual again. Would start hearing voices that seemed like those of the dead, calling her to come and join them. Would become dangerous to herself and, gentle though she was when sane, to others. A best-case scenario might have left her living with some degree of brain damage, still hearing voices but able to dismiss them as symptoms and lead a fairly normal life. She'd still be ace. She'd still seem strange, though not necessarily dangerous, to other people. Her life might not be altogether miserable, though classic schizophrenics always report feeling bad; her life would always be marked by a rare, incurable disease, of which our understanding has progressed enough that we now recognize the disease as having a physical origin, but not enough that we can really do much about it for very long. At best Elizabeth might have good, pain-free, energetic, capable days in her adult life, in among the days she'd have to suffer through.
Perhaps the most ironic part of the story of classic schizophrenia, so far, is that that best-case outcome is more typical of untreated patients--or of patients treated only with diet!--than of patients who had some of the other "therapies" that were tried in the twentieth century. The hope in The Year It Rained was not entirely unfounded. Elizabeth does get a little more pleasure and less pain out of the short time she has before the disease comes back, and is less likely to be disabled by additional brain damage done in the hope of shutting down the damaged part of the brain (which is still a scattershot approach, at best).
Meanwhile, though classic schizophrenia remains a dramatic, frightening, mysterious disease, it's not as common or as dangerous as the one that threatens our society today--megalomania, the unrealistic belief that other people can't manage their own affairs and need the patient to be their nanny or "gatekeeper" or "planner." Though the United Nations clearly would attract people suffering from megalomania and might simply need better protocols for recognizing and excluding such people, it would be premature to rule out a hypothesis that something about the UN causes or aggravates megalomania...
Right. Back to the books. Dragonwagon's two novels were still a rare thing in their time: novels about young women that were not romances. In the Roosevelt era some social workers had decided that the best way to reduce teen pregnancy was to sell the young the idea of Romantic Love. Talk about an idea that would have come from a crowd recruited from the bottom halves of their classes. Pop culture in the mid-twentieth century was then dominated by the idea that everything sold better with a hint of sex in it. Hello? Sex is all very well in its way, but women, at least, spend more time off heat than on. Women my age at least wanted to reject the idea that people need to be coupled to be happy. I wanted more stories about young women whose adventures ended with them happily single, even before mononucleosis produced my own ace phase. I saw that in real life quite a lot of young women's adventures do have satisfactory resolutions other than romance, and I thought that, in fiction, a better way to market the ideal of Romantic Love might have been more novels about married couples sharing adventures other than cheating and divorce. So Dragonwagon's novels were the kind of thing I was looking for. I liked them.
I particularly liked that the author of these two non-romances was happily married. I think one reason why women haven't written more novels about the adventures of happily monogamous couples is that our husbands don't want us to write about them and, while we're living with them, it is hard to write about men who don't resemble ours in some recognizable way. Easier to write about single women, even if the reason why they're single is that they're sixteen, who accomplish things on their own and don't need men to make them or their stories complete.
Years passed. Dragonwagon stuck to her niches of picture books, for which she'd chosen her name, and cookbooks; she didn't write another novel. There were enough novels to read. As an adult I did, just as the most anti-imagination influences of my youth might have hoped, find less time to read fiction and more things to do in the real world every year.
When I started blogging, Dragonwagon's blog, "Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer," oddly formatted with quotation marks, was one of the first I wanted to follow. Right around the time I started following her earlier blog, which is still on my Blogspot blog list, she abandoned it and set up a different one. I don't follow Dragonwagon.com because it's set up to be followed via Mailchimp, and I've had some gruesome online experiences with people sabotaging Mailchimp. The author still blogs there, though, and I still visit from time to time.
Her blog is more personal than most writers' friends and relatives like our blogs to be. Having spent years conscientiously typing "An older person said" whether I mean "some random person I overheard in the hallway of a hospital," or "a celebrity for whom I used to work," or "my Great-Aunt -- --," I flinch a bit at posts where Dragonwagon mentions the real names of her living friends and relatives, but apparently they don't mind. Maybe it's the quality of her writing...I have asked my friends and relatives to dump an ice bucket over my head if I use the phrase "luminous prose."
It's the computer screen that's "luminous," whatever is typed on it, but the blog's worth visiting for philosophical reflections and recipes, and examples of how to tell a personal story if you really want to tell one.
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