L.A. Story

Grad student and novelist Kate Phillips juggles two coasts and two careers

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Kate Phillips is living two lives.

As Kate Phillips, graduate student in the History of American Civilization program, she spends much of her time buried on level C of Widener Library writing a dissertation on 19th-century novelist Helen Hunt Jackson. Her life is quiet, private, and filled with the unremitting, solitary toil of the apprentice scholar.

But the life of Kate Phillips, novelist, is a different story. Her book, White Rabbit (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), has been glowingly reviewed in major newspapers and magazines and has risen to number two on the best seller list in Southern California. The film rights have been optioned by HBO, a paperback version is in the offing, and much of Phillips' scarce free time is now taken up by readings, book signings, and interviews, including one by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio.

"Of course, all this attention isn't the true definition of success, but it's been quite a nice surprise," Phillips said. "One thing all the good reviews have done is make me want to get going on my next book, but I really have to resist that impulse and finish my dissertation."

Managing dual careers as a scholar and a creative writer isn't the easiest of juggling acts, but so far, Phillips has done quite well at it.

Growing up in Claremont, Calif., where her father taught chemical engineering at Harvey Mudd College, Phillips was environmentally, if not genetically, programmed for an academic career. Before composing White Rabbit, her only fiction writing had been in the context of a creative writing course at Dartmouth College, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1988.

"There are no artists in my family," she said. "There aren't even any big readers of fiction."

The decision to break the family pattern and take a serious stab at creative writing did not come until after she graduated and went to Beijing to teach English.

Her year at Beijing Normal University happened to coincide with the Tiananmen Square uprising, an experience she found not as frightening as it was bewildering.

"The real danger wasn't for Americans. There was a sense that you could always get out. But it was such an upheaval, with such strange, random things going on, burning buses, roads blocked off, soldiers marching here and there, and yet in the midst of all this, there were pockets of normalcy."

Phillips had thought of doing some travel writing based on her year in China, but this proved harder than she had anticipated. China did not seem hers to write about, in spite of the tumultuous events she had experienced. The urge to write remained strong, but she felt the need for a more familiar and personally meaningful subject matter.

Phillips decided to go home to the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California and look for inspiration there. In that familiar setting, a story began taking shape in her mind, an account of a single day in the life of an elderly woman loosely based on her grandmother.

The character evolved into 88-year-old Ruth Caster Hubble, a feisty, eccentric woman living with her second husband in Paradise Lagoon, a condominium complex near the Pacific Ocean. The reader follows Ruth through what turns out to be the final day of her life, a day filled, like any other, with struggles and memories.

Ruth pushes herself through her daily exercise routine, browbeats her recalcitrant husband Henry into following her elaborate shopping instructions, cooks dinner for her housekeeper and her young son, and tries to set her granddaughter straight about her errant spouse.

Meanwhile, events from the past elbow their way into this real-time narrative, deepening our understanding of the elderly Ruth by showing us glimpses of Ruth the prim young lady, Ruth the lovestruck bride, Ruth the grieving widow, and Ruth the pragmatic middle-aged woman opting for safety and comfort over passion.

Phillips, who describes herself as a slow writer, started working on the novel while living in her parents' house in 1989. She took the manuscript with her when she began graduate studies at Harvard the following year and worked on it in her spare time.

The first publishers she showed it to commented favorably on her writing but said that no one was interested in reading about elderly people. Phillips switched to an agent who specialized in literary fiction, and soon afterward sold the book to Houghton Mifflin.

Ironically, now that the novel is out, what most readers like about it is that the main character is an older woman. They also find it strange that a woman in her 20s is able to write so convincingly about one in her 80s, but to Phillips what seems like a leap across several generation gaps simply represents fiction's unique power to get inside the skin of another human being.

"I believe that you can sympathize with someone in their sorrow or happiness -- that's the whole purpose of art, to increase human sympathy, to understand other people. I don't agree with the notion that you have to be of a group in order to write about it."

The subject of Phillips' Ph.D. dissertation, Helen Hunt Jackson, would have agreed with this statement about fiction's ability to bridge worlds.

Jackson grew up in Amherst, Mass., and was a friend of Emily Dickinson. After visiting California she wrote her best-known novel Ramona, a dramatic story about the plight of Native Americans.

The book, published in 1884, was very popular in the late 19th century but has relatively few readers today -- except in California, that is, where it is still a cultural icon. Many streets are named for the book's heroine, and in Hemet, Calif., an annual Helen Hunt Jackson pageant has taken place since the 1920s, featuring a dramatization of Ramona that ranks as the longest-running outdoor play in the United States.

Phillips, who remembers going to the pageant as a young girl, is writing her dissertation on Jackson's literary history -- what were the factors that propelled her into nationwide popularity in the late 19th century, then consigned her to the status of a regional curiosity?

But she also recognizes that her decision to study Jackson springs in part from a personal identification with a woman writer whose best known book is set in Southern California.

"I didn't go into the project with this idea, but now I realize that she may be a sort of literary mother figure to me. In a way it seems so personal and self-absorbed to choose a scholarly subject that way, but maybe it's a good thing because it means you have a more passionate interest in the topic."

If you are interested in hearing Phillips read from her novel, you can catch her this evening at 5 p.m. in Burns Library, Boston College. For further information, call 558-1295.

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