EllenPall.com - JOURNALISM

My Sister In Disguise

by Ellen Pall

from The New York Times Magazine, March 30, 1997, Sunday

I haven't even opened the book when a hand shoots up from the fourth row. ''Before you start,'' calls a woman in green, ''is this autobiographical?''

As usual, I don't know what to say. I am here to read from my novel, which is about five grown children spending a weekend with their long-lost, dying father at the family's summer house. This never happened to me. My father is the Rock of Gibraltar. Our family has no summer house. The children in the book habitually sharpen their wits on one another's egos; we, perhaps less entertaining, are less cruel.

Still, we were five children and they are five children. We are Jewish and they are Jewish. The book is called ''Among the Ginzburgs,'' and one Ginzburg is a journalist. She and her husband live on my street.

So, how to answer? I want to say that all fiction is fed by underground springs of personal fact. But these springs are obscure, hard to map, surfacing sometimes where least expected.

For example: eight years ago, my older sister, Steffi, died. She had been in terrible health, yet her death, when it came, seemed sudden. She was only 45, a singular woman -- ingenious, talented, beautiful, driven -- who lived with tremendous eccentricity and wound up a near-recluse in the woods outside Augusta, Maine. She left me her papers: letters, journals, 800 poems. That December, my husband and I drove up to look through them and, as Steffi had asked, to bury her ashes in her garden.

Though a month had passed since she died, we found her little house just as she left it. Her glasses lay open on her big desk, and were still even a bit shiny where they had sat on the bridge of her nose. A pile of crumpled Kleenex lay beside them. When I saw her rumpled blankets and her night table crowded with medicines, tears started to my eyes, and I threw myself down on the bed to cry. I jumped up right away. The bed was warm. Her electric blanket had been on for four weeks.

My husband and I spent a horrible weekend in that overheated little cottage, looking hour after hour at papers that ranged from numbingly dull to unspeakably private. Finally, we packed a dozen cartons and drove the papers home.

Even beyond the business of burying her ashes, the weekend had been so intense, so overloaded with painful revelation, that a year later I began to write a novel based on it. I had already tried a nonfiction remembrance. That effort started with Steffi's memorial service, for which I had hoped to come up with a few paragraphs that would conjure her essence, as well as my love for her. Dazed by grief, I fell far short of my aim.

But the impulse to write about her persisted, and I started a series of reminiscences: the way she looked, her several husbands, things she had said. Every attempt failed. So I began the novel, using the weekend in Maine as the germ of a plot. I wanted to work through it in some way that would give it shape, make it less overwhelming -- and, of course, bring Steffi back to life.

But this attempt also failed. Slowly, regretfully, I admitted that I could not write about my sister. I started another book, about an erratic widower. Fatally ill in the first version, he wanted his children to help him die. In the next draft, he died unaided. Finally, I decided he hardly knew his children, having abandoned them years before. This became ''Among the Ginzburgs.''

I based much of the character of the father, Meyer, on what I remembered of an uncle, a brilliant eccentric who had indeed abandoned a wife and child. Yet, central as he was to the story, I wasn't really very interested in Meyer. I had to push myself constantly to make him a vivid presence; privately, I thought of him as a mere occasion for this gathering, an excuse to talk about family, love and the ways people change and do not change through life.

It was not until I finished the manuscript that I realized -- was stunned to realize -- that I had written about Steffi after all. Meyer Ginzburg is eccentric; in my life, it was Steffi who had been eccentric. He is brilliant but erratic, just as Steffi had been. And he abandoned his children, as she, I now felt, had abandoned me. Without ever seeing it, I had inscribed the deep, true loss of my sister into the heart of my book. The woman in green had a good reason to ask her question. ''Among the Ginzburgs'' was indeed autobiographical, though in a way the reader -- in fact, very nearly the writer -- could never guess.

Originally published in The New York Times Magazine, March 30, 1997.