Merrill Joan Gerber
Merrill Joan Gerber has written thirty-one books including The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, and her essays in The American Scholar, Salmagundi, and Commentary. She has won an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is now at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
Films that influenced my writing (or at least that I most admire):
Films that telegraph a character’s inner life without long descriptions of who they are and what they’re after, without obvious explanations that pull us toward an opinion, are the most interesting for me.
Think of Billy Elliot—the story of a dancing boy in a poor mining town in England and his desire to join a ballet school! Every scene opens a window for the viewer: the way the boy’s father and brother fear he will turn out to be gay (never stated, but enacted in many ways), the way the boy shows love for his old grandmother and mourns his dead mother, the disdain his father shows for his son wanting to take dance lessons in a class full of girls! The young hero’s own tender affection for a neighbor boy who may turn out to be a “pouf.”
Or consider Little Miss Sunshine where every family member on their way to a beauty contest in Florida reveals his/her inner thoughts by simple actions, the little heroine afraid she will get fat by eating ice cream, her grandfather teaching her dance moves that are wildly sexual and funny, her older brother—a sullen teenager—by sulking and staying silent during the trip, and a bitter uncle, pissed off by not getting an important scholarly award by buying some sex magazines at a gas station which may turn out to be his undoing.
The best scenes in a piece of writing (or a film) cause the reader’s mind to light up with a hot question: What’s going on here? And what’s coming next? I’m in on this.
Which leads me to the first sentence in my new book of essays Revelation at the Food Bank—which is “‘Did you ever have sex with another woman?’ I asked my husband when he was eighty-five and we had been married for sixty-two years’.
I trust the reader will surely read on from there.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
The oddest thing readers have ever asked me—and the most frequent.
“Is it true?”
Is your story true? Did you mother really blow up the house in Brooklyn ( from my book The Kingdom of Brooklyn), Did you really learn how to be a belly-dancer (my book The Lady with the Moving Parts), Did you really ask your husband if he ever had sex with another woman? (Revelation at the Food Bank), “Did you really have breast cancer?” (Beauty and the Breast: A Tale of Breast Cancer, Love and Friendship). How could a writer invent that?
But what can a writer reply? It’s all true! None of it is true! Truth can be most true when it never really happened at all, truth is what an artist does with bits and pieces of a life story that she knits, paints or writes into a work of art.
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
The German sculpture artist, Kathe Kollwitz, created a heartbreaking sculpture after her son Peter was killed in the war. When I was a child, my first cousin, “The Lost Airman,” (essay about him in “Revelation at the Food Bank”) was shot down in WW Two by Japanese Zeros. Bitter grief broke the hearts of his parents and the rest of our family. Kathe Kollwitz spent fifteen years working on her sculpture titled “Grieving Parents,” located in the cemetery for German soldiers in western Belgium where her son Peter is buried. It is composed of two separate sculptures, showing the parents isolated in their despair.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
After I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, and after my chemo and radiation concluded a year later, I joined a painting class at the Cancer Support Community where a talented artist helped us heal from our treatments by offering us painting lessons.
Although he demonstrated techniques for drawing trees, flowers, animals, sunsets and sandy beaches, I painted only images from my childhood photo album, featuring myself as a little girl at the Bronx Zoo with my mother and father, or of my grandmother and aunt holding hands with me, or of my mother at her 8th grade graduation wearing a gold pin for academic excellence, or of my father smoking a pipe while wheeling me in my carriage.
Some years later, the publisher Dzanc Books offered to republish sixteen of my earlier books as e-books, but they were not permitted to use as cover art the original designs from my hardback books. I then selected sixteen of my own paintings to be used as the cover art on my e-books. These images can all be seen under my name, Merrill Joan Gerber, at the Dzanc Books website, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
What brings you great joy?
Seeing my work published! When I was eighteen, and in college, I sent a poem to a contest offered by The Writer magazine—a poem about a squirrel. One day, when I went to the library at the University of Florida to study, I picked from a shelf the newest issue of The Writer, and, as I read through it, there I discovered my own name and my own poem published as a winner of the contest! What a high! The Writer was also going to send me a prize book by the poet Elizabeth Bishop: North and South: A Cold Spring. I was filled with joy. And now, at age 85, having had my 31st book, Revelation at the Food Bank, published by Sagging Meniscus Press and also having had the great good luck to see the title essay of my book also published in Best American Essays 2023, I can say that I seeing my words in print still brings me incredible joy.
