Washington Post : “This Beautiful Life,” by Helen Schulman
August 1, 2011
By Mary McGarry Morris

It’s a brilliant beginning, turning the reader into a viewer, then a voyeur: “Her mouth filled the screen. Purple lip gloss, clear braces.” Giggling, 13-year-old Daisy is filming herself in the lava-lamp-lit privacy of her messy bedroom. Her seductive dance intensifies into an erotic striptease. She lifts up her skirt, “and the next part was hard to watch.”

Daisy e-mails the video clip to 15-year-old Jake Bergamot, a boy she’d “hooked up” with at an unsupervised party in her spectacular Riverdale home, where there’s plenty of booze and empty bedrooms. The brutal, painful fallout that results in this modern-day viral nightmare is all the more chilling because it is so easy…

Because it can happen to anyone. The wrong moment, the impulsive message, one quick touch of a key — and even the most accomplished lives can come tumbling down. Jake and his parents are so skillfully rendered by Helen Schulman that “This Beautiful Life” is as much a bracing novel as a timely cautionary tale.

Liz and Richard Bergamot have struggled past their blue-collar beginnings. Educated at the finest schools and universities, they can provide their two children with lives they never had. Richard has been lured away from Cornell by Astor University in New York City. A devoted husband and father, he’s handsome and “allergic to failure.” Liz, like her husband, holds a PhD, but she’s quirky and never quite comfortable in her own skin. Missing their bucolic existence in Ithaca, she’s both conflicted and beguiled by the pleasures of their new sophisticated city life.

While their son, Jake, attends that fateful party at Daisy’s house, Liz takes her adopted 6-year-old daughter, Coco, to the Plaza Hotel for tea sandwiches with other private school mothers and daughters. The little girls frolic naked in the bubble-filled Jacuzzi, and “all this decadent beauty reminded Liz of the sprites at the Allee d’Eau, at Versailles, the wet, shiny, prepubescent girls flipping and flopping among the bubbles like baby seals, their mothers ringed around the bathroom sipping their champagne and wondering when exactly their own youth had abandoned them.”

It’s a good life, successful and stimulating, in spite of Liz’s uneasy liberal musings. But as long as Liz and Richard keep loving each other and being devoted, understanding parents who enjoy their kids, what could possibly go wrong?

After her sleepless night at the Plaza with Coco, Liz arrives home, looking awful and feeling worse. Jake is hung over and ashamed for going too far with Daisy, a younger girl he couldn’t stand. He’s hoping his mother “could read his mind and instantly forgive him, like she used to.” Instead, the ever-honest Liz admits to a hangover, then “shuffled off to her room to sleep it off.”

Needing a connection, Jake checks his computer and discovers Daisy’s e-mail. Shocked, he watches the video twice, not sure if it’s pornographic or even sexy. “It was like a hot potato. He had to fling it to someone else.” And so he does — to a friend, who instantly forwards it to two other friends. And on and on and on. By Monday, everyone at Wildwood, his exclusive private school, has seen it. News helicopters hover over the school. The New York Post prints a story. Jake’s shameful ostracism has begun. The headmaster calls Jake and his mother into his office. To their horror, he plays the video, forcing them to watch the humiliating ugliness with him. In no time, the video ends up on a popular Web site with millions of viewers.

Of course, we’ve all read stories about sexting in the news. Scandals involving adolescents sending explicit video clips of themselves have become a distressingly common symptom of the Internet age. Police and school administrators around the country are struggling to stamp out a practice that can lead to charges of possessing child pornography, hefty prison terms and shattered lives. Schulman has managed to capture this bizarre of-the-moment tragedy in a novel that remains deeply humane and sensitive.

Aghast at the high-tech witch hunt that ensues, Richard considers “the staggering consequence of a flick of his son’s index finger, the amazing irrevocable reach of his unleashed power — it was sort of stunning, really.” Expulsions, litigation and expensive lawyers follow. Richard’s credibility is compromised, his brilliant career in limbo, his decent son shunned and depressed, his wife reeling, wanting it all to end, so withdrawn that the beloved little girl she’d gone all the way to China for sits alone by the hour playing games on her mother’s computer.

“This Beautiful Life” is a powerful story of a good family in crisis. Schulman vividly portrays the circularity of events and the instantaneous connections of lives caught in a very real world wide web. How like the butterfly’s wings when the mere tap of a key can unleash storms of such unimaginable consequence.

Morris’s eighth novel, “Light From A Distant Star,” will be published in September.

And so, I went back and reread Prose’s brilliant “Scent of a woman’s ink: Are women writers really inferior?” (Harper’s Magazine, June, 1998) and, like Prose, find myself just as irritated and discouraged as I was then. Because she’s right. Not much has changed.

What follows is a blog I wrote in Dec. 2009, but never did post:

Books by women … there’s something about them

Mary McGarry Morris

In a piece by Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times reports that Publishers Weekly’s Nov. 2 issue announced its annual Top 10 list of the year’s best books, fiction and non-fiction. The chosen authors are all men. Cate Marvin, a founder of Women in Letters and Literary Arts, as quoted in the Guardian, says, “The absence left me nearly speechless.”

Itzkoff’s column goes on to raise the prickly question: Should gender be considered when such literary lists are compiled?

Probably not. But the reality is that the work of female writers continues to be dismissed, overlooked if not often denigrated by a chest-thumping bias that would seem to have no place in these more sensitive and informed times – but does. It is a prejudice that is both quotidian and well-entrenched, running deep throughout our culture, though like most prejudice is rarely admitted to.

Recently, at a book-related party, I was having a pleasant conversation with a gentleman who told me he was a great reader. Unsolicited, he said he’d never read any of my novels, though his wife had read them all. Sensing some discomfort, I tried to ease him off the ledge a bit by asking if he preferred non-fiction. No, he said, actually, most of his reading consisted of novels. Fine. I smiled, prepared to let it go. After all, there are countless works of fiction I’ve never read either, authors I’ve yet to discover. But then, in that irresistible pull to the edge and all the wreckage below, his eyes widened, as he felt compelled to confide, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I don’t ever read books written by women. There’s something about them, I don’t know, I just don’t enjoy them.”

Okay. I nodded, said nothing, the abyss before me, too vast. For a brief moment I thought, maybe he just hasn’t found the right ones to read. Or, maybe he thinks female authors are all going to sound like the female characters in the books he reads by male authors. Next, I considering telling him that even among the most distinguished, most celebrated male authors there aren’t many who can create a credible female character, while female authors are pretty often dead-on in their portrayals of male characters.

But, no, that wasn’t it at all, I quickly realized. That’s just the way it is.

                         … women … there’s something about them.

Whenever a writer’s lifetime of work is examined, of course there will be similar qualities, topic, and issues.  That’s only natural – especially given a serious reader’s search for interpretive meaning.  But the starting point for me as writer is always the Story – and in using that word I mean character and plot.  Take an interesting character, put him/her through the paces of a difficult or intriguing situation and the Story begins to evolve.

The hard and most vital part of the process is getting inside the character, discovering who this faceless blur with a name actually is.  Why does the pastor get up in the middle of the night and drive his car to the edge of the boat slip and then just sit there?  Why are the shades always down in the old woman’s windows?  What is it about the beautiful girl’s happiness that seems so desperate?  In trying to answer these questions, the gears are forced to turn, fueling the narrative energy that ultimately becomes the Story.

What may seem to a reader like intentional symbols and deliberate themes often comes as a surprise, a revelation to the writer.  It’s like being caught in a highly detailed, onrushing dream in which one feels not only part of the action, but subject to the dream’s wishes.  With awakening comes the familiar, though unsettling out-of-body release from another reality.  Then, comes reflection, musing, trying to understand what the dream really meant in the context of one’s own life.

The Story, like the curious, inescapable spell of the dream comes first.  Interpretation and understanding follow as natural corollaries of the Story’s power over its reader – and its writer.

The last few weeks before publication are always hectic, and this time is no exception. At this stage the hardest part is putting aside what I’ve been working on in order to give full attention to The Last Secret, a story that has intrigued me for a very long time.

A writer will have countless story ideas through the years. Some are so fleeting they’ll never get past a barely legible note scribbled on a napkin, an eight or ten page treatment, or maybe even a detailed outline. There are always false starts, wonderful characters, and great stories that for whatever reason just won’t come to life. Most drift away forgotten, but then there are those that refuse to stay in the file box or the closet. They trickle into the writer’s thoughts from time to time until the day comes when their particular voices drown out everything else.  For me, that is the moment when the characters inhabit the idea. Once that happens, I am theirs. And the journey begins.

And so it was with this book. It began one day with a vague sense of dread and the chilling thought of some menace from the past arriving in full heat at the door, demanding entrance to one’s comfortably settled life. I knew who the focal characters were, but it would take years before I came to understand exactly who they were. The Last Secret is a psychological portrait of those two polar characters, refined and educated Nora Hammond and sociopathic Eddie Hawkins, a destitute drifter. Their meeting again after so many years will be both explosive and damaging to the lives of everyone around them.

I hope you’ll be as intrigued by The Last Secret as I was in its writing.