Telling Tales: Nicole Galland Finishes Novels at Record Rate
By TOM DUNLOP
How to account for the ferocious pace at which Nicole Galland is
writing books these days?
Book one, begun in college, lies fallow on her hard drive for 14
years, only one-fifth complete. It migrates from computer to computer
without her ever opening it, until the year she turns 36. Living in
California with her boyfriend and suffering her eighth month of
writer's block after writing several unproduced screenplays, she
decides one sleepless night to purge her machine of unfinished work. She
drags the draft to the trash and is about to delete it when she thinks
it might be fun to give it one last look. She reads through the night,
reaching the last page at dawn. She thinks, "I could finish
this," and starts writing that day. The Fool's Tale is
finished 11 months later, and published by HarperCollins in January of
this year.
She begins book two in April 2003, a month after finishing book one.
Set like The Fool's Tale in the Middle Ages, it is finished 17
months later, in October of last year. Tentatively titled Revenge of the
Rose, it will be published in May or June of 2006. Book three -
The Mill of the Gods - sends the Welsh fool from the first book on
the fourth crusade with a knight from Burgundy in the second book, the
one in custody of the other. Book three is started as she finishes book
two last fall, and already the first draft - but for the last act
- is substantially complete.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2005/08/05/content/nicole_galland_sm.jpg" "I feel like I lost a decade of my life," says Ms.
Galland, a 40-year-old Islander who traces her Vineyard lineage back to
the early 1700s. And then she tells a tale of her own, on which the
final dramatic turn of The Fool's Tale pivots, and from which the
undammed freshet of her writing and publishing now comes.
At the age of 26, while enrolled in the first semester of a doctoral
program for theatre academics and directors at Berkeley, Ms. Galland was
mugged and raped at gunpoint. "Almost being killed over the course
of an hour and half was the thing that really screwed me up," she
says, sitting in the sunshine on the back porch of her parents'
home in West Tisbury, arms wrapped around knees, gaze direct, voice full
of color and force, sentences unbroken. She has never told this story to
a reporter before.
"I went into this very passive space where I didn't
inhabit my life for almost a decade," she says. She left Berkeley,
seesawed from coast to coast, writing a bit, working in theatre, and all
in a daze. "When I look back on that decade, I'm amazed that
I got by as well as I did. But I let things happen to me. Crippling
depression. I was hospitalized. It was like I was standing in Crisco,
and I couldn't get my feet to be steady underneath me. Now that
I've found a groove, I'd like to make up for lost time. By
the time I'm 45, I'd like to look back on my life and say I
could have come this far if I hadn't lost that decade. And I
don't blame anybody but myself for it, but I just want to do
something about it."
Nicole Galland (the accent in her last name is on the first
syllable) is the daughter of Karen Goethals Colaneri and Michael
Colaneri. She is also the granddaughter of the late Dr. and Mrs. Robert
W. Nevin of Edgartown. He served 54 years as the country doctor to
Vineyarders all across the Island; she was the owner of a real estate
agency. Both were quiet but widely known benefactors of many Island
causes and individuals. Ms. Galland grew up in West Tisbury, riding at
Pond View Farm, acting in school plays and at Island Theatre Workshop,
writing at the dining room table while the clamor of family life rang
out around her.
She graduated from Harvard with a degree in comparative religion and
moved to California, where she founded a theatre for teenagers and was
awarded a full scholarship in the doctoral program at Berkeley. Then
came the attack and - years later, after life had slowly untwisted
itself from the trauma - also the heart-stopping moment when the
hero of The Fool's Tale must decide whether he wants to live on
another man's terms, or die by his own.
Ms. Galland's assailant, inexperienced and tense, originally
planned only to take her money. He took her from a road down into a
clutch of bushes and, taking his cue from old gangster movies, ordered
her to remove her clothes so that she could not run for help after the
mugging. For an hour and a half, Ms. Galland listened to her attacker
talk about his life from the nighttime shadows, he growing ever more
nervous even as she grew ever more focused and calm, trying to convince
him that she did not blame him for what he was doing. But then he raped
her, and she mistakenly used that word during the act, which enraged
him. "The deal was, you agree with me that this isn't a
rape, and I'll keep doing it and everything will be fine."
She had what she calls her Arthur Miller moment, where - as she
recounts it now in mock-heroic terms - she decided, "I
don't want to win my life back with a lie!" and refused to
call the rape anything but. She thought: "Now I go, but at least I
go on my own terms."
The attacker fled without shooting her, and has yet to be captured,
and Ms. Galland was left with her lost 10 years. But when she was
writing about Gwirion, the eponymous fool in her first book, set in a
turbulent Welsh court fighting for its independence at the end of the
12th century, she came to the scene in which the king, nicknamed Noble,
offers Gwirion - his companion and protector from boyhood, but now
his betrayer - the exact same choice. "Noble says, ‘If
you don't agree with me, I'm going to kill you,' and
Gwirion says, ‘I'm not agreeing with you.' I
didn't realize this until after the fact, but that's an
alchemical take on something that actually happened. Pyschodynamically,
the person with the weapon is saying, ‘I'm going to tell a
lie now, and you have to agree with me, and you get to keep
living.' And the other person says, ‘I can't live a
lie.' "
Ms. Galland has returned to the Vineyard to discuss The Fool's
Tale at the first annual Martha's Vineyard Book Festival on Sunday
in Chilmark, and to read and sign copies of the novel at the Bunch of
Grapes bookstore in Vineyard Haven on August 12. It is an exciting but
rootless time in her life. She left California early this year, but has
no home of her own. Even before The Fool's Tale was released,
HarperCollins agreed to publish her second and third novels, and this
spring sent her for a week to the Hay Festival at Hay-on-Wye in Wales,
the largest English-language book festival in the world, to promote The
Fool's Tale. So far as she knows, the publishers have never done
such a thing with a first-time novelist before.
The second book draws from The Romance of the Rose, a 13th-century
poem by Jean Renart. In Ms. Galland's novel, a fictional Holy
Roman emperor falls in love with the sister of Willem, a knight from
Alsace-Lorraine, whom the emperor must elevate above his station in
enviable ways in order to make the sister worthy of royal marriage. It
is a lighter, more whimsical story than The Fool's Tale, says Ms.
Galland. The Mill of the Gods, the third book, is - for the moment
anyway - intended to introduce the knight from book two to Gwirion
from book one, and send them both on the fourth crusade, which topples
Constantinople. She sees crucial parallels between this crusade -
after Richard the Lionhearted's, before the children's
- and events as they are playing out around the world right now.
Constantinople fell almost exactly 800 years ago, after two wars
spaced 15 years apart, like the first and second wars in Iraq. To Ms.
Galland, the great city seemed at first to stand neatly for Baghdad, the
crusaders for the United States. But now she thinks the city stands for
America too. "It was a huge place that could be attacked, but
everyone knew it could never actually be conquered," she says.
"And it was." The citizenry, living privileged lives and
absorbed in commerce and froth, grew inattentive to their own
government, which itself lost focused on who its adversaries were and
why, and where the real threats were coming from.
"And I'm reading this, going, ‘Wow. This is really
familiar,'" she says.
The medieval focus of her first three books is something of a
surprise to her. Growing up, she was not especially interested in the
era. As a screenwriter, she wrote The Winter Population, a story based
on the illicit love affair that led to the marriage of Dr. and Mrs.
Nevin, her grandparents. In 1998, it won the Massachusetts Film Office
Screenwriting Competition and eventually sent her to Los Angeles, where
she secured an agent and optioned the movie, the one theatrical project
she would still like to direct. For Ms. Galland, book four will bring
things home.
"I want to write about the Island," she says.
"Fiction, but from the point of view of a social historian. I
think the shifts that have happened on the Island in our lifetimes
haven't really been looked at thoroughly or honestly or squarely.
I understand community intuitively, how it operates here more than I
understand how it operates anywhere else, and I want to write about it
while I'm still in this funny position where I feel connected to
it, but I have a slightly outside relationship to it. That's the
time to write about it. And before that part of the Vineyard vanishes.
It's really turning into Martha Stewart's Vineyard. I
don't think I can stop that, but I can capture what was before
that. It's a love song."
Comments
Comment policy »