An Evening with Elizabeth Berg

This week I saw Elizabeth Berg at the Troy Public Library in Troy, Michigan. The TPL hosts authors several times a year and was very excited to have Berg, the best-selling author whose book Durable Goods was picked for Oprah's Book Club.

I was fortunate to have read and reviewed her last book, The Dream Lover about George Sand, and also her upcoming novel The Story of Arthur Truluv, coming out in November. I had also read several of her early books when they came out.

My friend Theresa took a writing workshop with Berg and praised her sensitivity and encouragement.

Berg shared the history of her interest in writing, her varied career, and her experience in publishing. Read an article about at
http://www.candgnews.com/news/noted-author-elizabeth-berg-speak-community-center-101278

Berg's novel Durable Goods, published in 1993, was inspired by her experience as an 'army brat' with frequent moves and an adored but abusive father. The book led to a better relationship with her own father. And it ensured financial success as an Ophrah Book Club pick, selling 500,000 copies. She used some of her royalties to buy her father his dream car.

Berg's decision to be a nurse was a sudden revelation based on her desire to care for and love others. Of special interest was how her training as a nurse impacted her ability to create characters. Nurses are instructed to see the whole person and to leave all presumptions and prejudices behind.

I could definitely see how Berg's values and experience resulted in The Story of Arthur Trulov. Arthur has the ability to love wholly, even his difficult neighbor and a runaway teenage girl with a nose ring. I expect the book to be a huge hit, and I hope that the message of the story resonates with readers and changes lives.

The audience was interested in how Berg approaches writing. Berg does not follow a strict routine or schedule but waits for the story and characters to be ready.

I had the opportunity to ask Berg a question. After remarking on her upcoming novel I asked how she came to write The Dream Lover, a historical fiction/biographical fiction novel so unlike her other books.

Her answer was an old one: she became interested in Sand and wanted to read a fictional account of her life but found no one had written one. She first suggested the idea to fellow author Nancy Horan, who wrote Loving Frank about Frank Lloyd Wright and Mame Borthwick (which I have read twice) and Under the Wide and Starry Sky about Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife (which I can't wait to take off my TBR bookshelf). Horan replied that she was too tired, so Berg decided to write the book that she wanted to read.

It was a difficult process and she nearly gave the novel up several times. Then there were the rewrites suggested by her editor. In her career, Berg's editors rarely asked for a word changed. Lucky for us readers, she persisted and the book was completed.

Berg had considered a fictional account of the life of Carson McCullers but realized she did not want to live in that dark world. Instead, she has dedicated to writing books of inclusion and inspiration.

It was exciting for me to hear Berg mention that 'someone compared' The Story of  Arthur Truluv to a parable. Because that is just what I had written in my review to NetGalley and on Goodreads a few weeks previous! I can dream it was my review she was referencing. If not, at least I am not alone in my connection!

The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg: Imagining George Sand

George Sand narrates her life story in two time lines in The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg; one story line starts at the beginning of her life; the other starts when she leaves her husband for Paris where she reinvents herself.

The novel feels 19th c. in language--a time I feel quite at home in. George dominates the book, of course, as does her sensibility, and the reader will feel a knowledge of George. There are many pithy epigrams on life and love.

Berg allows other's viewpoints of George to play out in dialogue. When Franz and Arabella Liszt and George and her children are living together, Frantz warns George of her self-destructive proclivity to chose the wrong men, men who need her maternal care. George confuses being needed and being loved.

The real George Sand has been lost in the many tales and rumors that surround her. Did she have a sexual relationship with her friend the actress Maria Dorval? Berg offers us one liaison between them. Was she a good mother? Was her tough love regarding her daughter Solange justified? Were George's attitudes about sex and love philosophical, an emotional crutch, or a compulsion of need?

George Sand was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin in 1804. Her father married his mistress against his mother's will, but after her son's death she took her granddaughter under her care. She married badly, and left her family to live in Paris. She wore men's clothing to allow freedom to attend the theater for her reviews and smoked a cigar. To be judged equally to male writers she took the pen name of George Sand; George to sound more English and Sand for her lovers last name.
George was notorious for flaunting convention and living a Bohemian life. She wanted equality and freedom, the end of double standards. She had a romantic sensibility and wherever she found a kindred spirit she would fall in love. She was connected romantically with a series of (usually younger) writers, poets, and musicians including Frederick Chopin. At the same time George was very maternal and domestic, educating her children and making jam and needlework.

Balzac, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo were among her friends and literary admirers. Sand wrote several books a year, as well as plays, keeping to a strict writing regime. She was hugely successful in reputation and financially. Yet today we mostly think of her as a cross-dressing iconoclast who went through a lot of lovers.

The Dream Lover will appeal to readers interested in historical fiction, romance novels, and even to those of a literary bent--like myself--who want an introduction to a writer much neglected in our English speaking culture. I have obtained a Guttenberg copy of Indiana to learn more about George as a writer. I have not got far yet, but the novel starts with an charged scene between an emotionally frail wife and her tyrannical brute of a husband who goes out to shot a trespasser. There was a reason why George was an immediate success!

To put George into perspective, 1832 saw the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Roger Malvern's Funeral, Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra,and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott. Honore Balzac published four novels to George Sands' (and Walter Scott's) two, but Edward Bulwar-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Alexander Pushkin published only one novel. Not bad for a single mother of two!

In 1832 Charles Darwin was voyaging on the HMS Beagle; Henry Schoolcraft found the source of the Mississippi River; Andrew Jackson became President; Sir Walter Scott died; and Louisa May Alcott and Lewis Carroll were born.

George has been called the first professional female writer. Not everyone will feel comfortable with her, but one has to be impressed with her achievements.

I requested this book because I had read Elizabeth Berg's early novels and recalled liking them. I received the free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.


The Dream Lover
Elizabeth Berg
Random House
Publication Date: March 31, 2015
$28.00 hardbbound
ISBN:9780812993158

Advance praise for The Dream Lover
“Elizabeth Berg is both tender and unflinching as she explores the heart of the enigmatic writer George Sand. Her lyrical prose caused me to pause and savor the words. With an eloquence of the heart worthy of her subject, Elizabeth Berg gives us a very human portrait of a nineteenth-century legend who dared to live and speak freely.”—Nancy Horan