Rosellen Brown says she always knew she was going to be a writer and a mother.
“I was kind of arrogant to assume,” she says, “that because I wanted this thing to happen it would happen. But it did.”
Brown, 56, is the author of four novels, a collection of short stories and a book-length poem. Her most recent novel, “Before and After” (Farrar Straus Giroux, $21), has been made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson that will be released in February. Her novels are characterized by sensitive investigations into complex family relationships and examinations of the responsibilities of the individual to society.
“When I look back,” Brown says, “I think it was both good and bad that I always knew that I wanted to write because I am doing what I always wanted to do, so I can’t regret it. On the other hand, I feel sometimes as if I neglected a lot of other things along the way.
“I would have liked to have paid more attention to my education, for example. All I was doing in college was writing, and I didn’t really think too much about anything else. And I’m very sorry about that. There were times when I almost protected my writing time and self the way violinists protect their hands. And that’s not always a good thing.
“In some dream world I would have awakened at the age of 30 or 35, having had a really interesting time of it and then said, `Ah, now I’m going to write about it.’ “
Her parents were excited that she was writing and they encouraged it, but, Brown says, “At the same time I have to say that I got a dual message from my mother, who really did think I should be doing nothing but taking care of my kids.
“From her point of view I never seemed to change those diapers frequently enough. I would challenge her to tell me what I could be doing if I weren’t also writing, and she couldn’t really come up with answers to that.
“But I think it made her a little nervous. My mother, who just died at 92, was of an age that didn’t really comprehend why women needed professions once they married.
“You needed to work before you were married, but then why were you not fulfilled having children? And there are plenty of people who are. But I kept telling her that if you give people college educations there’s a good chance they might just want to do something with them.”
When her children (she has two adult daughters) were young, Brown says, she tended to write when they were out of the house.
“I’ll never forget my older daughter came home from school once and caught me working on something. I usually put it away when she got home because it was enough time — when they got off the school bus I was ready to pack it up.
“She stood there watching me, and I said, `Oh, honey, I’m sorry. Please go get some milk and cookies.’ And I was feeling really guilty and I just had one more paragraph to type.
“She just stood there watching. Finally I felt so guilty and I was pleading with her to just give me a minute and she said, `I just want to see you working.’ She just wanted to know what it was I did all day.
“Writing seems like an indulgence,” Brown says. “It only stops being an indulgence when you bring home a lot of money. People think writing only has value when it takes place in the world of commerce, especially when you’re a woman and you don’t have to do it. There are plenty of dual messages being sent to girls.”
Brown believes it was important that her daughters knew that she worked, and she exposed them to other working women.
“So they were never very conflicted about it. But I think this generation, in spite of all the double messages, finds it easier, growing up, to imagine themselves doing something.
“It’s a great shame that people have been pushed into two camps, as if someone who works outside the home has to condemn someone who works `just’ in the home because I don’t think there’s any `just’ about it. I think it’s a pretty difficult job.
“But I think politics ends up polarizing the people who work, as if they’re rebuking the people who stay at home by the very act of going to work. I wish it didn’t have to be that way. I wish people didn’t have to snipe at each other in order to justify their own lives.”
Much of what Brown writes is about intense family relationships, often interwoven with political issues. She keeps up with the news and derives much of her inspiration from actual happenings, even if the stories that result are quite different.
“Before and After,” for instance, was inspired by a story in a Houston paper of the trial of a young man who was accused of murdering a young woman.
“I try to keep abreast of what’s actually happening out there. As for the family stuff, I’m simply interested in the way families operate. I’ve never really gone out of the way to read psychology or anything like that.
“When my husband and I were first going out he was a doctoral student in clinical psychology and he would bring me psychology and sociology books and say, `Isn’t this interesting?’ and I would say, `But any writer already knows this.’ A lot of those studies just prove things that anyone with any sensitivity already knows.”
Brown says she has no idea why she writes so much about teenagers. She didn’t have a particularly interesting or turbulent adolescence, she says, and doesn’t know why she seems to be able to make contact with that age group.
The big political questions in “Before and After” concerning the responsibility parents have to other people’s children come from, she says, a displaced political sense. She says she’d like to be a political activist but really isn’t very good at it because she’d rather be writing.
“I think what I’ve done is try to locate the nexus of a lot of what we do in the world, back home in the kitchen or the bedroom or the living room. I feel that a lot of what happens `out there’ actually begins much closer to our domestic lives.
“I’m very much upset by the sense that what women write is trivial because we don’t write war books or books about tanks and we aren’t rescuing horses on the border. We don’t write about some of the things that are made much of by (male authors), but I think women tend to show us where emotions begin, which is in the family. It’s not necessarily spy stuff or taking place in a law office, but I don’t think it’s trivial.”
Brown bemoans the fact that women’s works are still not taken as seriously as they should be.
“It’s quite fascinating and surprising,” she says, “that if you look at the number of books by women and reviewed by women that show up in, say, The New York Times Book Review, you will discover an incredible discrepancy still between men and women.
“People are very surprised by this, but I’ve been keeping a count for a long time. It’s between 4 to 1 and 5 to 1. You’ll have a week in which 26 books are reviewed and five will be (written) by women and three will be reviewed by women.
“It varies a little bit, but it doesn’t vary a whole lot. What this says to me is that the concerns that women write about just simply are not seen as very important.”
Her husband, Marvin Hoffman, has provided through the years financial and emotional support, Brown says. A professor of education and a high school teacher, he is on a year’s leave, working on a project at the University of Chicago.
Brown also has taken a leave from her teaching job in the writing program at the University of Houston and is spending the year in Chicago. She is working on an as yet unnamed novel and taking the opportunity to talk to students here, as she did recently at the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department.
The number of people who have become interested in her as a writer, Brown says, just because she has sold a book to the movies, illustrates the “commercial-only” value of writing. Entering the world of commerce and popular culture has given the book value in the eyes of many, she says.
“The book is the thing that has value to me. But people aren’t interested in talking about the book once they hear it’s been made into a movie. People are ready to justify your being a writer once they hear you’ve made money. Otherwise, they think you’re just indulging a hobby. Being a poet is even worse.”
A great many of the problems women have in juggling home and work, Brown believes, come from men and the fact that they often still don’t shoulder their share of the household responsibilities.
“I’m very sympathetic to men. I think there are a lot of expectations that are not valued that they have to bear on their shoulders. But if a man had a lucrative job and was a writer and had a family, it would not be the writing that would have to go.
“So what advice can I give?
“Be very careful about whom you marry. I caution my students that if they have a significant other in their life and he or she is not sympathetic to their work, forget it. You’re not going to change them.”
