Thursday, August 20, 2020

"The Wright Sister"

Patty Dann's novels include Mermaids, Starfish and Sweet & Crazy. The books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Mermaids was made into a movie starring Cher, Winona Ryder, and Christina Ricci. Dann is also the author of The Butterfly Hours: Transforming Memories into Memoir, The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss, and The Baby Boat: A Memoir of Adoption. Dann's articles have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, O, The Oprah Magazine, and numerous other publications. She teaches writing workshops at the West Side YMCA in New York. Dann is married to journalist Michael Hill and has one son and two stepsons.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Wright Sister, and reported the following:
Page 69 of The Wright Sister is a diary entry of Katharine Wright (an imagined diary entry - all this is fiction).

Katharine would be delighted by this challenge!
September 23, 1927.

September Storms

It is two am., and a raging thunderstorm is clapping down on us with jagged lightning zigzagging the sky like Orv's socks, but Harry is sleeping through it.

I think thunderstorms are one of the few times I actually pray for people who are in the air.
Here Katharine has been married less than a year, to journalist Harry Haskell. She often has trouble sleeping, so she sits in the bathtub, sometimes naked and writes in her diary. She has moved to Kansas City to live with her husband. This page definitely captures the spirit of Katharine - she is often at once thinking of her husband and her brother, Orville. Even though she and Orville live 600 miles away, she still sends him zig-zag socks she knits for him. Katharine, which she will tell you is spelled with an "A," is keenly aware of weather at all times, as if her brothers are about to set forth in one of their flying machines.
Visit Patty Dann's website.

Q&A with Patty Dann.

--Marshal Zeringue