North of Eden

The Many Worlds of Helen Benedict and Stephen O’Connor

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, September 28, 2009

Yes, there really is a Medusa, New York. For the past 10 years, it’s been a second home to a literary couple who, while not at all monstrous, do seem a bit superhuman.

A professor of journalism at Columbia University, Helen Benedict has written five novels and five books of nonfiction. In April, Beacon published her wrenching exposé The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of  Women Serving in Iraq, and SoHo Press is about to release The Edge of Eden, an elegant, often wickedly funny novel about a British family’s disintegration in the last-gasp colonial outpost of the Seychelles islands in 1960. Each is a marvel on its own terms; that they come from the same writer’s hand smacks of sorcery.

Benedict’s husband, Stephen O’Connor, is equally protean, publishing short fiction and poetry (Rescue; 1989, Harmony Books), memoir (Will My Name Be Shouted Out?; 1987, Touchstone Press), and nonfiction (Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed; 2004, University of Chicago Press) between teaching gigs at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence. He also writes a hilarious set of driving directions, guiding the uninitiated through T- and Y-shaped intersections, a misleading road sign (“IGNORE IT”), past Camp Medusa (“An Adventure in Christian Living”), and on to a series of winding back roads. Just as the thought dawns that he recently published a story in the New Yorker about the Minotaur, and might have a thing for insoluble mazes, the couple’s pristine Victorian farmhouse comes into view.

They’re a striking pair. Benedict is petite and whippet-thin, with enormous green eyes and a piquant face; born in London to American parents, she has a distinct British accent. O’Connor, broad-shouldered and handsome, grew up in New Jersey, the son of an Irish immigrant father and a French mother. They met as graduate students in a Berkeley writing class taught by Leonard Michaels. Their bond was immediate. “I looked at Steve and thought, ‘Wow!’” says Benedict. “And we were each other’s favorite writers in the class.”

Benedict had just arrived in America, fresh from a job at “a really crappy paper” in England. The pull between fiction and journalism has always been with her. “Fiction was my first love, ever since I was eight, but I wanted to make a living,” she says. “I also have this really political, burning side. Writing nonfiction is more of an activist impulse than anything else.”