Kate Feiffer’s delicious new novel, “Morning Pages,” drops us straight into the intimate life and mind of her artfully wry-humored protagonist.
Elise is facing a problem — well, a few of them, truthfully. The novel opens with what seems like a boon. We read a letter informing her that for its 25th anniversary, the Players Playhouse is commissioning five playwrights whose work premiered during its first season to create an original new work. This should be great news for a playwright initially heralded for her daring vision, but whose career has tanked. Unfortunately, the time frame is rather tight. Elise has a mere 65 days, and to make matters worse, she has a severe case of writer’s block, wanting not just to create a good play but an important one. “Everything I write feels shallow and contrived,” she writes.
In an effort to break through, Elise starts writing daily morning pages, a stream-of-consciousness journaling technique meant to nurture one’s inner creativity, coined by Julia Cameron in her groundbreaking 1992 book, “The Artist’s Way.” In these private pages, which Elise refers to as “a safe place for insensitivity,” she writes unedited about her trials and tribulations in a distinctive voice that creates the same immediacy as listening to a bosom buddy with whom you both let it all hang out.
On the first day, Elise pens, “I used to love beginnings — the sloppy adrenaline rush of starting something new, thinking faster than I could type. Not anymore. These days, beginnings feel ravenous and needy. ‘Give us a middle!’ they shout. Middles are hungry for conflict, though, and that’s a problem for someone as conflict-averse as I am.”
In free-association style, Elise next describes receiving a call from the doorman in her mother Trudy’s New York City apartment building, telling her she had gotten stuck in the tub. After Trudy royally curses him out for trying to help, the doorman asks Elise what to do. She archly writes, “I wanted to say, ‘Keep her in the tub.’ The idea of sentencing my mother to the bathtub for the rest of her life is, I’ll admit, somewhat appealing.”
Trudy can be foul-mouthed and overbearing, and, as we find out, she is descending into dementia. She calls relentlessly, forever interrupting Elise when she is attempting to work. Later, Elise incisively writes, “My mother gets under your skin, her needy love, her venomous rage, her lip-smacking snacking, and her haunting beauty.”
Elise attempts to be a loving, attentive daughter, just as she tries to be a tolerant, adoring mother to Marsden, a stoner teenager with zero ambition and equally unwilling to communicate. A self-starter who takes a long time to get started, as she says.
Elise’s pithy recounting of their telltale dialogues conveys far more than any narrative. For example:
ME: How are things? How’s school going?
MARSDEN: OK.
He opened his left hand and looked at something written on his palm.
MARSDEN: Jacob Zuma.
ME: Excuse me?
MARSDEN: Jacob Zuma is the president of South Africa.
ME: You wrote crib notes on your hand for dinner?
MARSDEN: I thought you might ask. You always ask.
ME: But that’s cheating.
MARSDEN: Why?
ME: You can’t have the answers written on your hand. You’ll get expelled.
MARSDEN: From dinner?
We also follow Elise’s complicated relationship with her ex-husband, whom she is not quite over, and her friend Maya, who urges Elise to get over her “divorce virginity.” Oh, and Elise has a mysterious love interest with a handsome man in the elevator, to boot.
Asked about the inspiration for her characters, Feiffer replied in a recent email: “Elise kind of emerged fully formed. There is a good bit of me in her. The characters of Mom (and Grace in the play) were inspired by aspects of my mother, who was smart, glamorous, very sexual, and had a trigger temper. Elise’s remote, pot-smoking son, Marsden, is very different from my daughter. And I’m not going to comment on the inspiration for the handsome stranger in the elevator.”
Inserted within her daily “Morning Pages” are scenes from Elise’s slowly evolving play, “Deja New,” with a main character whose life is a bit of a doppelganger for Elise’s life with her parents. The book’s layout is visually inventive, with the text for the play designed to resemble a script, including Elise’s handwritten scribbles to herself, questioning her writing.
Feiffer says that she did not originally intend to have the play as part of the book, but since she was writing a novel about a playwright, she thought it was important to be able to write a play: “So I took a playwriting class, and I read a lot of plays. I decided to write the play my character was writing as an exercise, and at some point, I had the idea to insert some of the scenes into the book, and that evolved into using the entire play as a story within the story that plays off of the story.”
There is an appealing deadpan humor to Elise’s confessional narrative of her complex outer and internal world. While a delightful romp, “Morning Pages” is also an intriguing read with its deeper themes of love, marriage, divorce, friendship, the nature of creativity, and navigating life sandwiched between having children at home and aging parents.
“Morning Pages,” by Kate Feiffer. Available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes. On Sunday, July 21 from 1 to 3 pm, Feiffer will be signing books at Edgartown Books, and on Monday, July 29, the M.V. Playhouse will have a staged reading of “Deja New”; tickets are available at mvplayhouse.org/theater/box-office.