Novelist A. Manette Ansay did not set out to be a writer. If misfortune had not intervened, she might have been a concert pianist or possibly an ornithologist.
“When I look back on my life,” she says, “it seems that some strange thing will happen and then there will be this synchronicity that will occur. I try not to be afraid of it, and just roll with it.”
Ansay, 31, grew up Catholic in Port Washington, Wis., and started playing the piano at age 2. After high school, she spent two years at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, then was forced to quit when she developed an inflammatory disease that was affecting her arms.
Panicky, she decided she had to learn something besides music so that she could make her way in the world.
“I walked into a library and took the first book that I saw off the shelf. The book was called `The Life of the Tern.’ I did not even know what a tern was. I checked out the book and the next day I saw a flyer saying the Baltimore Aquarium was sponsoring a talk on the common and roseate tern. I thought, `Oh, synchronicity.’ So I went to the talk by a woman who had a project studying terns off the coast of Long Island Sound. After the talk I persuaded her to hire me. I told her I had photography experience, which I didn’t. I just talked and talked and finally she hired me.”
But Ansay had to abandon ornithology when she became so ill that she could no longer walk. She returned home and was cared for by her parents for a year and a half. The Wisconsin Department of Vocational Rehabilitation stepped in and tried to steer her into something she could do sitting down, computer work, but Ansay thought writing would be more interesting.
In 1988, she made a New Year’s resolution to write for two hours a day, three days a week, to see if she could do it. “I thought, `I have to have a secret life. I have to have something transcendent, something that’s going on in my head that I can carry with me.’ “
Ansay eventually finished work for an undergraduate degree at the University of Maine at Orono and then earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Cornell University and began teaching writing.
She says winning the top prize in the 1992 Nelson Algren Awards for Short Fiction (sponsored by the Tribune) for her short story “Read This and Tell Me What It Says” was a turning point. She believes winning the award made Viking more willing to take a risk on her first novel, “Vinegar Hill,” published in 1994. Ansay also published a collection of short stories.
This summer Ansay’s second novel, “Sister” (Morrow) was published. It’s the story of Abby Schiller, a Catholic girl in rural Wisconsin whose family life is shattered when her younger brother, Sam, disappears.
But there were cracks in the facade well before the trouble with Sam. Abby is driven to a nervous breakdown by her domineering father. She abandons a promising music career, loses her religion and flees to New York with the man who would become her husband in an attempt to create a new life. From that perspective, Abby tells the story of the years preceding Sam’s disappearance in 1984.
Life’s fabric cloaks her writing
Like Abby, Ansay also struggled to come to terms with Catholicism.
“I don’t think one ever leaves the Catholic Church,” she says. “It is so much a part of the fabric of your character when you have been raised within a family where Catholicism was part of day-to-day life. There were prayers before meals, prayers after meals, Wednesday night devotions, Mass on Sunday, (praying) the rosary Sunday afternoon with my grandmother, just like the characters in the book.
“It teaches you from such an early age to see and think in metaphor. Like Abby, my struggle has been to determine what of that heritage I want to take with me and what I want to transform and what I want to pass on, because this is a tradition that can be a safe harbor and it can also stand on your throat and stifle you, particularly as a woman.
“There’s a great irony in a male-dominated faith that is supported predominantly by women and yet they’re denied access to power.”
Furthermore, Ansay says that she modeled the father character in “Sister” on “the God of my childhood: `If you do this and this I will love you. If you defy me, you will burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.’ What a strange notion that there is one path and we all must walk it and yet we were all created in such a brilliant display of variety. That’s another contradiction I find very troublesome–that there is only one way to achieve transcendence.”
An animated woman, Ansay gets around on a motor scooter. She can walk, but very slowly and only for short distances.
Her disability, she says, is “an inconvenience more than anything else.” But she has no kind words for modern medicine, having been misdiagnosed and then undergoing unnecessary–and nerve-damaging–surgery on her legs.
“Then I was told (erroneously that) I had multiple sclerosis. I myself finally made the connection between steroid-based cortisone drugs and my health.
“But in the strange way that things work out, I certainly would not have started writing unless something had occurred to slow me down. So in that sense I’m happier than I ever was before.”
Ansay, who teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where she lives with her husband (“he’s a computer geek”), says she currently is reading Michael Ondaatje’s “English Patient,” which she deems “fabulous.”
As a “means of transcendence,” Ansay prefers writing.
“When I write, when it’s going well, I enter this clean, quiet space, and I also find it’s a good way to make a contribution and to sort things out for myself. I don’t take it for granted.”
