Listening for Madeleine

Listening for Madeleine is a pointillist portrait of the Newbury Award-winning author, whose work for both children and adults is among my very favorite. It starts off with a short biography by the editor, but is mostly composed of lots and lots of thoughts by individuals who knew her, gained from letters and interviews. They are divided up by how people knew her: from childhood, as a writer, matriarch, mentor, friend or icon. They include friends from childhood, editors and publishers, writers like T.A. Barron and Mary Pope Osborne, her daughter, granddaughters, and former son-in-law, and lots of people whom she was friends with or mentored over the years. Many people referred to an unflattering profile of L’Engle that was published in the New Yorker in 2004, which I hadn’t read, but which I was able to pull up on Gale’s Biography in Context without any difficulty. (“The Storyteller”, by Cynthia Zarin.) Family members acknowledged the frustration of living with a writer whose published version of their life together – the writer’s perspective, warts airbrushed out – became the version that readers everywhere believed was true; the fictional works inspired by family life felt more true to reality than those published as nonfiction. Outside the family, people were generally horrified that family members were willing to air as much dirty laundry as they did while L’Engle was still alive. But the fact that these discussions are in the book give me the comforting feeling that this isn’t a hagiography, even though most of the people contributing to the anthology cared about her. For all the painful things voiced by her relatives, they were still there caring for her in her increasingly dependent old age. Balancing that were the many, many tales of her writing from the publisher’s side and of her support for young and aspiring writers especially.

The most negative profiles came in the Icons section. These, dealing with L’Engle’s writing, were perhaps ironically tougher for me to read, as a devoted fan of her writing who never met her in person. Jane Yolen, a writer whose work I also love, wrote about her horror at L’Engle’s spoken belief that there is magic in the world, as opposed to Yolen’s use of magic as metaphor in her books. Library professor and lesbian Christine A. Jenkins wrote about how she had to discourage her students from writing about L’Engle because L’Engle fans were almost universally unable to look at her work with anything but uncritical adoration. (Probably guilty as charged, I’m afraid.) She also had understandable problems with L’Engle’s attitudes about homosexuality – which were liberal, I’ve always thought, for someone born in 1918. There was also a final word from Cynthia Zarin, the author of the infamous New Yorker profile, talking about her experience writing the piece, coming at is as a fan but ending up with a piece that many fans found offensive. In any case, fans of L’Engle’s works, critical or uncritical, should enjoy this broad and varied look at her from so many perspectives.