To my surprise, she didn’t hesitate. “I would love to, but I want you to be sure.”
“I’ve been sure,” I told her, and immediately set about trying to re-conceive the book as a joint project.
In September of that same year, I was propped in bed watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding over my Big Fat Pregnant Belly. As the character Toula was prevaricating to her date about her family, I felt our baby deliver four hard, even kicks. That was different. I glanced over at the wooden cradle across the room. Earlier that day I’d had a feeling the baby was ready to come, and I’d put clean sheets and a blue blanket on the little mattress.
My intuition was right. Later that night, Ben was born. Motherhood was something I’d always wanted, and I fell in love with it the moment Scott put Ben into my arms, not to mention falling in love with Ben himself.
During his first year of life, I wrote very little, content to concentrate on Ben and my new role as his mother. But slowly the pull to work on the book reasserted itself, and I began the long, classic struggle to balance the tensions between tending Ben and tending my creative life. Finally, when he was two, I enrolled him in a preschool program, allowing me time to write other than during his sporadic naps.
I rarely thought about the rejection letter from the university, though I still keep it in a file folder in my desk, slotted between “Future Trips” and “Hurricane Evacuation Plan.” One day, I hope Mom and I will travel together again—I’ve had an idea of taking a Jane Austen tour of England. As for Greece, I imagine returning with Scott and Ben one day, showing them the place that changed me.
The best part of writing Traveling with Pomegranates was the time I spent with my mother, brainstorming, editing, and veering off sometimes into completely unrelated topics, discussing the books we read or sorting through fabric samples for sofa pillows.
When I told the Virgin in the myrtle tree that I wanted to write a book about my travels, I did not imagine I would run over my seven-year apprenticeship, that it would take eight years from that day in 2000 when I said the prayer at the Palianis convent until this day in 2008, when I sit here at my desk and write the last few lines. But I’ve discovered being a writer is an ongoing apprenticeship, just like everything else in life that matters to me—being a mother, a wife, a daughter, or simply a woman alive in the world, content to be myself. Today at thirty-two, I am glad to wake up each day and begin.
Beyond the window of my study, Scott and five-year-old Ben are playing T-ball in the backyard, our black lab, Luke, chasing after them. Having come to the end of this book, I push back in my desk chair, feeling grateful, and think about the irony of me—the girl who wanted to be invisible—putting my story out there in the world, and aware, too, of the red shoe box beside my desk that holds the collection of images and ideas I contemplate writing about one day. For now, though, I slip on my shoes and head outside.
Sue
Back home from Greece, I happily observed Ann at work on her travel book and concentrated on planning the tour I would co-lead to France in the spring of 2001. I entertained no thoughts of writing about the trips myself—indeed, I was eager to start a second novel the moment some compelling idea occurred to me. During the tour of France, however, while standing with Ann and Mother beside an exalted old Black Madonna in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral, I felt a sweep of wonder at my connection to each of them and at the traveling that had helped me forge those connections. In that moment, I realized I wanted to write about my search for the Old Woman and finding not only her but Demeter, Persephone, the Black Madonna, Ann, my mother, and myself.
The desire to explore that passage of my life and translate it into story did not leave, but the passage was inextricable from our travels and the trips were Ann’s to write about, a reality that brought me a great deal of pleasure, even as I put aside the idea of writing about them myself.
Soon, I was at work on my next novel, The Mermaid Chair, a project that would consume me for the next few years, along with tending the publication of The Secret Life of Bees. The last thing I imagined was that Bees would find the success it did. In fact, I don’t think I realized the popularity of the novel until one evening when I was watching Jeopardy! and an answer that popped on the screen was: “Sue Monk Kidd’s debut novel is about these insects.” I blinked at the television, dumbfounded, before shouting “What is bees?” to the contestant, who luckily did not need my help.
I got a lot of on-the-job-training in learning to be the “contemplative writer” I first envisioned when Ann and I were at Mary’s House in Turkey. As I worked on The Mermaid Chair, I honed a rhythm in which I wandered back and forth between my desk and the marsh, as I’d done the summer I finished Bees. I’ve come to value simply being as much as working, and my hypertension stays away as long as I keep them balanced.
Mary continues to be the primary icon of devotion in my life, functioning as a vibrant symbol of the divine feminine, and also as my muse. In a painting over my desk, the Black Madonna sits enthroned, presiding over my work.
By the time I was fifty-eight, I’d become a grandmother three times over. Not only was there Ben, but our son, Bob, got married the year after Ann, and he and his wife, Kellie, brought Roxie and Max into the world. Grandmotherhood initiated me into a world of play, where all things became fresh, alive, and honest again through my grandchildren’s eyes. Mostly, it retaught me love.
When I finally began work on this book in May 2006, I felt like the stark and beautiful truths I’d met at the turn of my fifth decade had become a deep part of me. Over the next two and a half years, I sat at my desk, trying to render memory and perception into narrative, while several miles away, Ann did the same. We fell into a pattern of writing the first drafts of our individual chapters separately, then reading each other’s work, followed by long sessions during which we reminisced, probed, divulged, discovered, laughed, wept, challenged, commiserated, and encouraged.
So it went.
“We write to taste life twice,” Anaïs Nin wrote, “in the moment and in retrospection.” Living the experiences in this book and then writing them was a privilege and a gift, but what I savored most was doing so with Ann. Tasting life together. Twice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our gratitude to our agent, the amazing Jennifer Rudolph Walsh; to Molly Stern, our fabulous editor, along with all the exceptional people at Viking Penguin who supported this book and worked so hard on its behalf; to Trisha Sinnott and Terry Helwig, who traveled with us; to Leah Monk, extraordinary mother and grandmother in these pages; and to Scott, Ben, Sandy, and our family for the love and happiness they bring.
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