This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

  3. Not in harmony with the values of South Carolina or the Clemson community.

  . . . Forcing this book on Clemson students now is particularly inappropriate and insensitive given the recent rape and murder of a Clemson student.

  4. Not supported by a majority of Clemson’s faculty and staff.

  A small number of instructors chose this book without the advice or consent from the majority of faculty and staff.

  5. A squandering of University, taxpayer, and student resources.

  In a time of record tuition increases, when many students must borrow tens of thousands of dollars to pay for college, the estimated $50,000 to cover the cost of nearly 3,000 books, the author’s speaker fee and travel expenses is a gross misuse of taxpayer and student funds.

  I was now somehow an accessory to rape, murder, and sexual harassment, and charged with participation in a $50,000 swindle. The ad also included a copy of Mr. Wingate’s original letter to the president of the university, with a suggestion that he “pull the plug” on the author’s lecture. I stood in the dean’s office wishing that someone had been able to do exactly that. Then I went off to meet with seventy-five honors students.

  “This is a very good group of kids,” my escort assured me. “Only one of them refused to read the book on the grounds that it was morally offensive.”

  I wondered if, as a student, I could have opted out of French or math on similar grounds.

  The honors students were easy. Perhaps that was because their numbers were small, or because the room was open and bright, or because they were served cookies, or because they were simply smarter than the other kids. I don’t know. They asked straightforward questions about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, the reliability of memory, how I felt about the protests. They lingered at the door to shake my hand and have me sign their books.

  Maybe my visit wasn’t going to be so bad. That’s what I wanted to believe. The voice of an unpleasant minority had taken center stage. After all, who ever took out a full-page ad to say how thrilled they were about a freshman summer-reading program?

  Clemson’s is a pretty campus with redbrick buildings and old-growth trees. It sweeps along with just the degree of majesty that one looks for in a southern college. The worst thing I can say about the campus is that it was very difficult to find a restroom. When the school first opened its doors to women in 1955, they never did even out the number of bathrooms. So while it’s easy to find a men’s room in the older buildings, the women’s rooms required a great deal of hunting. “Couldn’t they just tack the word ‘Women’ on a couple of the men’s doors?” I asked. How hard could it be to attain equality on this very basic front?

  “Oh, no,” my escort told me in a whisper. “There are urinals in there.”

  And so my sister and I hiked up to the third floor, to a place were we could use the facilities without being disturbed by urinals.

  Next we were off to a luncheon at the president’s house. The faculty and trustees in attendance, as well as the president himself, were in full support of my visit. They had spent the last six weeks on the front line of criticism serving as my tireless defenders. The state legislature had been pressing for more control over Clemson’s curriculum for some time, and the storm over Truth & Beauty had finally pushed the question of who made those choices out into the open. At the long dining room table, everyone seemed more than pleased that I was there to fight the good fight for higher education. The problem was, I was not inclined towards a fight. I hadn’t been paid for one. I had only been brought in to talk to students about a book.

  “If there’s any problem during your speech,” the president told me, “just step away from the podium. There will be someone there to take you off the stage.”

  “A problem?” I asked.

  Over a salad of sliced chicken and fat berries, I was assured that problems were unlikely. Parents and protesters would be watching my speech as it was simulcast to them in an auditorium across campus. Only the incoming freshmen would be in the coliseum. And if a problem arose, I’d have a bodyguard.

  I felt that someone should have mentioned the bodyguard to me sooner, as well as the protesters at their off-site location. It would have influenced my thinking on how to proceed, because while I believe in academic freedom and the right to chose a book without legislative consent, I did not believe in them as much as I believed in my safety, at least not in the state of South Carolina. Maybe I could see laying myself down on the altar of higher education in Tennessee, but as far as I was concerned, South Carolina was on its own.

  I was to address the incoming freshman class of nearly three thousand in the Littlejohn Coliseum, home of the Clemson Tigers. When I arrived, the place had the bristling energy of a rock concert waiting to happen. The arena had been cut in half by a series of high black drapes so that the students would fill every seat, shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the nosebleed section four tiers up. In the middle of the basketball court, near the toe pads of the giant orange paw print that marked the floor, was a boxlike stage, a temporary affair decked out with a few potted palms and a lectern with a microphone. Behind it was a projection screen that would have been a reasonable size in any suburban cineplex. The screen would show a giant movie of my face that could be clearly seen by both the students in the rafters and the angry mob on the other side of campus.

  After the president had made his remarks about all the wonderful things the next four years of a Clemson education would bring, I walked through the pitch-black darkness, climbed the stairs, and stepped into the klieg lights. I received a very healthy round of applause. After all, only seven of the nearly three thousand students present had bothered to show up at the protest. I had never thought that Wingate and his people spoke for Clemson. I only believed he spoke loudly enough to drown out all the voices around them.

  I put a ridiculous amount of effort into the writing of that speech, and no small amount of energy into the delivery. I made an impassioned plea for the right to read, for the importance of going to the primary source to form one’s opinion and not to rely on secondary sources to make the decisions for you. These students were, for the most part, old enough to vote and go to war. They had seen cable television, visited Facebook, listened to rap music. To say that a book could be so potentially corrupting was to say we had no faith in their ability to make decisions for themselves. Would Anna Karenina lead them to affairs and then a tragic death beneath a train? I told them that the people who had tried to protect them from my book and from me thought they lacked the maturity and judgment to make their own decisions, and then I ran through a list of all the other books and authors and classes they would need to be protected from. Goodbye, Philip Roth! Farewell, Lolita. So long, Jay Gatsby. I explained how they could so easily lose science and history and art. On I went, a marvel of civility and common sense, while behind me the giant projection of my head kept pace. There in the blackened arena I raised a mighty cry for the right to read, and implored the students to never let anyone take their books away from them. It wasn’t until later, weeks later, that the stupidity of my argument began to sink in. Anna Karenina? The Great Gatsby? How many of those kids even knew what I was talking about? Was it such a perilous threat to say, Let them take away Truth & Beauty and the next thing you know you’ll lose a really great book like Lolita? Don’t you have to first love Lolita to imagine the magnitude of that loss?

  Back at the basketball court, we were experiencing technical difficulties. The question-and-answer portion of the event was falling apart. The microphones weren’t working at first, and soon students were shouting out questions in the dark: Is there anything you regret about your friendship with Miss Grealy? Do you feel differently about other friends because they’d never measure up to Lucy? Some of the questions had a nasty edge: Lots of people have friends and lots of people have cancer so why should we care about what you have to say? Some of
them were sweetly goofy: Do you have any advice for finding true love?

  One kid found a microphone that was working. He wanted to know how long I’d known my husband.

  “Twelve years,” I told him.

  “Well, after reading your book and hearing you talk, I just wanted to ask you, how many times have you cheated on him?”

  I raised my hands up against the blinding lights. I had no idea where the voice was coming from. What eighteen-year-old asked this kind of question when the lights were up, when you could see him and knew his name? I asked what made him think I would cheat on my husband.

  “Well, you seem to be okay with all that after writing your book.”

  I gave some decent-enough answer about compassion and not judging other people, the kind of answer you later rescript a thousand times in your head, but I didn’t actually understand what he was talking about, not while I was leaving the stage, not during the mockery of a press conference that followed. I didn’t understand him when my bodyguard put my sister and me in a van that had been driven up under the coliseum to speed us to the other side of campus and to my car so that we could get away before anyone figured out where we had gone. The rain, which had started at some point during my talk, was coming down in blinding sheets now, rendering the campus a muddy pit as we made our mad dash for the car. In three steps we were soaked through. We drove away as fast as the weather would allow, and still I didn’t understand him. Not until the middle of the night, when I was back safely in my sister’s guest bed, did I realize that he wasn’t saying I was immoral for not judging Lucy. He was saying I was immoral for the things I had done myself.

  Clemson was kind to provide me with all the documents I needed to write this article. They not only sent me copies of all the newspaper articles I’d ask for, but they also sent me letters that had been written to the president, cries of outrage and revulsion at the thought of my work and my person.

  If Clemson continues to offer pornographic material such as Patchett’s book, my daughter, and my money, will go elsewhere . . . I cannot fathom what led Clemson to build a class around this drivel.

  For reasons I know you are aware of, it was an inappropriate selection. I’ve not read the book, nor do I intend to.

  Surely the university could have picked other subject matter to stimulate the minds of entering freshmen, such as the AIDS epidemic on the continent of Africa, the ongoing Middle East crisis or the flattening of the world in respect to technology’s effect on the global economy. [Why Africa? I wondered. This one was from a state senator.]

  I believe in academic freedom. I believe however it is freedom to do good. After all, what is the basic original founding purposes of the institutions of higher learning in the United States of which I’m sure you are most knowledgeable?

  I guess I am accustomed to hearing about cases like this at liberal havens like Harvard, or even Chapel Hill, but I am shocked that Clemson has now stooped to this. No matter what the supposed motive behind this assignment, it is nothing more than another attempt by liberal academicians, given over to depraved minds, to force a deviant sexual agenda on young students.

  I am very proud of Clemson University for continuing to have a prayer before each football game even with threats of law suits from the ACLU. I do not have the same feelings about this summer reading assignment.

  In 2002, right after 9/11, the University of North Carolina assigned a book composed of selections (or suras) from the Koran for its incoming freshman to read. UNC followed several years later with a socialist tome (Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich). Now Clemson is getting into the act. But instead of religion or politics, Clemson has chosen sex.

  It was this last letter that made me realize the extent to which I had never understood the rules of engagement: if Nickel and Dimed was a socialist tome (albeit a slim one), then Truth & Beauty was pornography. Like beauty itself, pornography turned out to be in the eye of the beholder.

  The only letter I kept was one written in pencil on a sheet of notebook paper. A student had slipped it to my bodyguard, who had given it to me: “Dear Mrs. Patchett, On behalf of the entire state of South Carolina, I am sorry for what happened.”

  After it was over, my sister told me I should look at the online Bible-study guide to Truth & Beauty. She had read it with plans to wage a battle against the Palmetto Family Council, but in the end she changed her mind. “It’s not as bad as you’d think,” she said.

  Not as bad, but still, in my experience there is no equivalent to seeing yourself as a character in a series of Bible-study questions (helpfully accompanied by scriptural references), or in seeing a neat explanation of the suffering and death of your friend.

  Question Five: How would you characterize Ann and Lucy’s friendship? In what ways was common grace exhibited in Ann’s friendship toward Lucy? What is a friend? Describe the qualities.

  Question Six: When Jesus was accused of being a “friend to tax collectors and sinners,” do you think Lucy would have been included in or excluded from His circle of friends? Why? Can you think of instances in which Jesus befriended the “Lucy’s” of His day? How did He deal with them? What do we learn from Him?

  Question Eight: Self-righteousness is an insidious spiritual disease which is a betrayer of the gospel of grace and a great hindrance to evangelism. What is self-righteousness? Why is it such a hindrance to evangelism? How does the gospel of grace enable us to repent of our self-righteousness and free us to share the gospel with compassion?

  Maybe I was all right with it for a while. I read their answers, too, and in those answers Lucy and Jesus walked together as friends. The self-righteous exuded a condescending air of moral superiority that non-Christians are rightly repulsed by. I appreciated that. It was Question Ten that stopped me: “How would you share the gospel with Ann?”

  I looked at that one for a long time, and I knew without checking that the answer sheet and I were no longer in accord.

  In my better moments, I tell myself what happened was a noble battle between freedom and oppression, but I know it is equally possible that nothing so lofty occurred. Some people find sex and suffering and deep friendship between women unpalatable subjects, and seeing this book bearing down on their children, they no doubt felt they had to try and stop it. They didn’t succeed, but I seriously doubt that anyone was harmed by completing the assignment. If I am the worst thing the students of Clemson have to fear, then their lives will be very beautiful indeed.

  (Atlantic Monthly, October 2007)

  The Right to Read

  The Clemson Freshman Convocation

  Address of 2006

  I WOULD LIKE TO thank the people at Clemson who extended this invitation to me, and I’d like to thank them for sticking by it. I am very glad to be here. I would like to thank my supporters for their kindness and my detractors for their patience. When I consider the state of our public education system, the state of health care, the facts of poverty and war that we live with, I would hope that the passions of protesters could be put to greater use, but I didn’t get a vote on this one, so here we go.

  Imagine if you will a very little girl of nine who gets hit in the head with a volleyball one day during recess. She goes to the hospital, and it turns out her jaw is broken. But it won’t heal and it won’t heal and her parents keep taking her back to the doctor, and finally, months later, somebody figures out that her jaw is full of cancer. It’s a Ewing’s sarcoma and it has a five percent survival rate. Nobody tells Lucy this because they figure she’s a child and she’s going to die anyway. Nobody tells her when she’s going into surgery, or all that time after surgery that she has bandages on, that she’s lost half her jaw. When she finally gets out of the hospital, she starts chemotherapy. She’s one of the first children in the country to have chemotherapy, and because chemotherapy then was a much stronger and less refined business than it is now, she described it as being bu
rned alive. She goes in five days a week for a combination of chemo and radiation, and together they last for a total of two and a half years. All but six of her teeth fall out. For all of that time she is bald. When she finally goes back to school, none of the girls will sit with her at lunch. The boys wait for her in the stairwells to bark and scream and chase her. In the course of her life she has thirty-eight reconstructive surgeries. Muscles, bones, tissue, and veins are stripped from every part of her body to try to put her face back together again, but because of the enormous amount of radiation every graft eventually fails. And despite all of this, or because of it, she turns out to be the smartest person you’d ever want to meet, the most widely read, the most intellectually curious, the funniest, the best dancer.

  When she got fed up with people staring at her, Lucy wrote a book called Autobiography of a Face. It’s the story of what happened to her. It’s about her belief that none of us ever really feels we are good enough, beautiful enough, loved and accepted enough. For a while she was a celebrity. She wound up on CNN and Oprah and the Today show. She looked straight into the camera and hoped that someone out there would fall in love with her. You have never known anyone so brave in your life. Not fearless, mind you, she was too smart, too experienced, not to understand how terrifying life could be, but she faced it anyway. I cannot begin to tell you how much I loved her and admired her, and when you love someone, really love them, it would never occur to you not to stick by them.

  I stuck by Lucy after she died, too. Her death, like her life, was the subject of great rumor. I heard she died of cancer. I heard that she had overdosed over a canceled book contract. I heard she jumped from the roof of an apartment building where she no longer lived. I wanted to set the record straight, to tell the truth about what had happened, but that’s really only a small part of what set me writing. Lucy was as complicated as the giant books of philosophy she loved to read; I knew that I would never be able to hold her in my mind exactly the way she was. I knew that every year she was dead her memory would become simpler. She would be easier and sweeter, and I didn’t want that to happen. It was, after all, Lucy’s bravado and her ferocity that I loved so much. I thought that if I wrote it all down, the story of the two of us, the story of friendship and what we had done together, that I could press her between the pages of a book like a maple leaf and keep her.