After making a “wrong turn” into law school, Helen Elaine Lee was able to get back on track by writing a novel. That put her in the prominent company of John Grisham, Scott Turow, George Higgins and the battery of other lawyers who’ve also detoured into fiction writing.
Unlike most lawyer-novelists, however, Lee is preoccupied with family life and death. Her first novel, “The Serpent’s Gift” (Atheneum), follows the path of two black families who are, as she puts it, “joined out of the experience of violence and loss. . . . The book is mostly about how people find light in darkness.”
“The book came out of some really hard times for me,” said Lee, 35, a Detroit native, who arrived in Chicago Wednesday for three days of readings. “My father died while I was writing the book, and I lost a couple of friends.”
Lee’s father was a trial lawyer, a factor that strongly influenced her choice of profession. But she realized it was the wrong choice while studying at Harvard Law School (Class of ’85). “Even then I was working my way out of the law . . . finding ways to take courses in literature and get credit for them.”
Academically and spiritually, she was more in tune with her mother, who recently retired after 40 years as a professor of literature at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. (Lee will be a visiting teacher at the university.)
After Harvard, Lee practiced law for five years in Washington, D.C., though she always considered it “more a job than a career.” She became an “ex-lawyer” in April with the publication of “The Serpent’s Gift,” written in the hours away from her firm.
The years Lee spent practicing law were hardly wasted, she said. From those experiences, she “learned a lot about people and about the way the world works. I also learned about money and how it drives things.”
And even though she calls herself a “disaffected” lawyer, Lee said she has nothing against the law. “Because it wasn’t the right path for me doesn’t diminish in any way the importance of legal work. It’s just not my gift.”
That Lee has a gift for fiction was confirmed by the response from other writers and critics. Novelist Paule Marshall, for one, called “The Serpent’s Gift” a “tour de force . . . an ambitious saga, written with the skill of someone born to the art of storytelling.”
Storytelling was a part of family life, Lee said, almost from the moment of her birth. The books most crucial to her literary education were those that centered on the black tradition, especially works by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
Like Morrison and other black novelists, Lee said she was drawn to “mythic patterns and motifs” for her first novel. The most obvious of these myths is the serpent, known as Miss Snake, that provided the book’s title and is a recurring creature in stories told by one of the characters.
Rather than a traditional symbol of venomous evil, Miss Snake represents the “gift of renewal and rebirth” in her book, Lee explained, “because it sheds its skin and renews itself.”
The serpent, Lee added, has a “pretty bad rep, even in the Bible. But in most cultures, it’s an ambivalent symbol, of life as well as death. An awful lot of Native American cultures see the snake as sacred because it’s closest to the Earth.”
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Helen Elaine Lee will read from “The Serpent’s Gift” at two events Thursday: at 5:30 p.m. at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St. (312-747-4050); and 7:30 p.m. at Women & Children First bookstore, 5233 N. Clark St. (312-769-9299). At 3 p.m. Saturday she will be at Afri-Ware, 2116 S. 17th St., Broadview (708-345-3735).
