One True Sentence Before Lunch

Invited to her Woodstock home to interview bestselling author Gail Godwin, I feel like a favored character in one of her 11 critically acclaimed novels: a woman seeking a wiser female mentor for lessons in gentility and grace as well as (in this particular storyline) what it means to lead a writer’s life.

Over a career spanning 30 years, Godwin has also published two short story collections as well as a work of nonfiction and written libretti for ten musical works with her longtime companion, the composer Robert Starer (who died in 2001). Best known for her well-developed characters and liberally sprinkled literary quotes, historical facts, religious references, and allusions to high art, Godwin’s writing makes me want to start a book club, similar to one established by the Southern-gentry ladies in the author’s own A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), her first novel to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

The three-time National Book Award nominee and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grant, and other honors works in a tidy, sun-splashed study, located in the southwest corner of her house, directly opposite where Starer once wrote his musical scores. Lined with reference materials related to the subjects that permeate Godwin’s writing, the room’s bookshelves hold works on psychoanalysis, myth, and the Bible. Godwin’s characters and plots likewise emanate from the circumstances of her own Southern upbringing as well as the intellectual life she later shared with Starer.

Born in Alabama to North Carolinian parents and raised by her mother and grandmother, Godwin (though a lifelong Episcopalian) attended a Roman Catholic school. Her mother supported them as a college English teacher, journalist, and (using a pen name) a romance-fiction writer. Her absent father (who suffered from depression), a half-brother, and an uncle would all commit suicide. Godwin earned an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and both mfa (at the Writers’ Workshop) and PhD from the University of Iowa. This formative personal history plays out in her writing in various permutations. For instance, readers encounter strong, independent yet often struggling (emotionally or economically) female characters, such as the eponymous narrator of Violet Clay (1978), a thwarted artist who earns a living painting covers for Gothic-romance paperback publishers Harrow House. The death of Godwin’s brother inspired the storyline of A Southern Family (1987), while that of her manic-depressive father beget Uncle Ambrose, a failed author who kills himself in Violet Clay. Godwin’s recurring motif of deceased family members explores what the author calls “people starting out with less than the whole package.”

Ministers likewise abound in her books, including Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991) as well as its sequel Evensong (2000), the title a synonym for vespers or an evening song of religious worship. Academics, particularly English PhDs, plopped down in college settings, also recur. Her novel currently in progress, Queen of the Underworld, stars a young female journalist living in Florida, which draws on Godwin’s onetime job, obtained shortly after finishing at unc, as a reporter at the Miami Herald.