Not wanting to fall into the trap of writing the same book over and over again, A. Manette Ansay gave herself some new technical challenges in writing her latest novel.
She set “Midnight Champagne”(William Morrow), a fast-paced narrative about love and marriage, in the hours between a Valentine’s Day wedding ceremony and the champagne toast at midnight, and she told the story from nearly 30 points of view.
But “Midnight Champagne” represents a challenge even greater than literary for Ansay, 34, a native of Port Washington, Wis., who has had to reinvent her life several times since she was disabled at age 20 by a rare muscle disorder.
Two years ago the condition began affecting her eyes, and she had to change the way she writes to cope with chronic eyestrain and blurring vision.
“In the old days, I’d sit down in the morning, and other than getting up to ice my elbows and ice my wrists, I could work long blocks of time,” Ansay said during a recent visit to Chicago.
“Now what I have to do is sit and think and get everything aligned, so I can see what I want to say in my head.
“When I sit down at the computer I have to be ready to go because I work for 5, 10, 15 minutes and then I have to stop. Sometimes that’s all I can do in a day.”
On a good day, she said, she is able to work for two short periods with a rest period in between.
“I used to write to discover what I knew, but I don’t have that luxury anymore,” Ansay said. “I have to be better planned. In some ways it takes the fascination out of it. On the other hand, I remember when I first started writing, I was often very frustrated because I didn’t have a sense of what my process was. I just have to remind myself that I’m relearning a process.”
In order to write “Midnight Champagne,” Ansay said she “lined up first sentences of paragraphs” in her mind and memorized them, allowing her to link them up and flesh them out during her brief computer time. She also had the entire plot mapped out ahead of time, and she had to abandon her custom of re-reading her entire novel up to her stopping point each morning and then revising.
“I begin where I have stopped and I have to keep it all in my head,” she said. “I am able to revise but, again, I have to remember it well enough to write it down. I can’t keep going back to the page.”
When Ansay first became ill, the condition affected her arms and then her legs, forcing her to abandon nascent careers as a concert pianist and ornithologist, respectively.
The Wisconsin Department of Vocational Rehabilitation suggested computer work, but Ansay thought she needed a means of transcendence. She set out to be a writer, making a New Year’s resolution in 1987 to write for two hours three times a week.
She earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Cornell University and began teaching writing. In 1992, she won the top prize in the Nelson Algren Awards for Short Fiction (sponsored by the Tribune) for her short story “Read This and Tell Me What It Says.”
She went on to publish a short-story collection bearing the same title as the prize-winning story and the novels “Vinegar Hill” (1994), “Sister”(1996) and “River Angel” (1998).
Last year The Utne Reader heralded Ansay as one of the Top 10 “new faces of fiction — novelists who are changing the way we see the world.”
In Ansay’s view, her changed writing process affected some of the language of “Midnight Champagne.”
“It is less rich and poetic than in the old days when I was building sentences the way a poet might build sentences. On the other hand, I have a situation and characters who would be misrepresented by that kind of language.”
Still, she said her sense of plot is tighter and, all in all, it’s the first of her books that she doesn’t want to wrest from the bookstore shelves and start crossing things out.
“Midnight Champagne” is set in what could be called Ansay country, semirural Wisconsin, and it bears her trademark odd characters who might be grotesque in another’s hands but are rendered fully human by Ansay.
“It was inspired by the weddings I remember from my childhood, which were held at a community center where there was a bowling alley and a stage and a cash bar open to the public,” said Ansay, who now lives in New York City. “There was a separate room where the polka dances were held. We kids would just run wild. It was part of this wild Halloween excitement that bound me and a group of cousins together.”
Ansay, who recently celebrated her ninth wedding anniversary, was looking for a way to mine that gothic vein for years, and then decided to write a book about the expectations that people bring to marriage and the reality of marriage.
“The things that are sweetest about marriage are not anything that you might have imagined before you got married,” she said. “And all the things you thought to expect really have nothing to do with the reality of it. Whenever I see a contradiction like that, or some tension like that, I think, `Oh, this is something for a novel.’ “
One of the main characters in “Midnight Champagne” is Hilda, a grandmother who has found a penny every day of her life. She believes this weird ability is a gift from God and that if she finds a penny everything is fine. If not, then a famous person will die or some other disaster will strike.
On the day of the wedding, Hilda hasn’t found her penny. It’s a source of great anxiety and also part of the plot.
“Hilda is very much like me in that she believes certain rituals keep us all from flying off the planet into space,” Ansay said.
“I like to pick something that comes from the community where I grew up or that comes from a situation that I know very well and then throw it on the fictional page and see where it goes.
“People who know me well know that I write fiction. People who don’t know me well but know me a little think that somehow I’m spying on people and writing facts, because they know just enough about me to recognize the one or two factual things that have gone on the page.
“Of course, it’s fiction. It’s a lie.”
Ansay said her next book might clear things up. It’s a memoir “about disability and imagination and the importance of seeking transcendence in daily life.”
Acknowledging that she is a little young to be penning a memoir, Ansay said: “I wanted to do it because I’ve never read anything about living with a chronic illness where there is no hope of recovery.
“There isn’t even a firm diagnosis. You have a general sense, based on similar cases, of what is going to happen to you, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen and how bad it’s going to get.
“I’ve never read anything about that that doesn’t have an ending in which the person somehow triumphs over their illness.”
There’s a mystical, supernatural thread running through much of Ansay’s work. Indeed her last novel, “River Angel,” explores matters of faith and the effects of what seems to be an angelic miracle in a small town.
In its introduction, Ansay, who grew up in a traditional Roman Catholic family, wrote: “Though I myself am not a believer, I understand the desire to believe. I live every day with the weight of that desire.”
That is also a perspective Ansay intends to bring to her memoir.
“I’ve never read a memoir in which anyone talked about living a life of hope and grace, a very spiritual life as an atheist,” she said. “I think that I’m a moral person. I’m a spiritual person. I am a mostly happy person, although like everyone I have my moments. But I get concerned when a see a society that is too willing to assign its capacity for goodness to an outside source.
“I feel that I have found a way to save myself through writing. I’m very proud of having discovered that. When I think of what has helped me, I don’t think of a deity in the sense of a single entity, God, whatever. I think of my friends, the particular environment that I come from that supported me and helped me and made it possible for me to make decisions that have allowed me to continue on.
“Transcendence can come in the form of religion, but it can also come in the form of art, it can come in the form of raising a child . . . or anything that, for whatever reason, clicks and allows you to live beyond yourself as someone bigger than yourself.”
