Finding Barbara Kingsolver
A review of Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn from Red Hen Press and the first installment in my year of small press book reviews
As promised, I’m reviewing one book published by a small press each month in 2025. I’m still taking recommendations and will be doing so all year long, so it’s not too late. Later this month, I’ll put together the list I have so far and put it up as a resource for other folks looking to read small this year. First up, Dear Edna Sloane, by
, from . And thank you for the recommendation.There’s a line in Dear Edna Sloane where the eponymous writer, Edna Sloane, is writing a letter to a young millennial, Seth, who somehow managed to track her down. Edna is sort of the J.D. Salinger of the 80s. She wrote a breakout novel and then…disappeared. Seth becomes obsessed with finding her and then he does and they strike up a correspondence.
In one of these letters, Edna mentions the solitude that is a necessary part of writing. I can’t find the exact quote, of course, because I read most of the novel on the beach and the logistics of having a pencil with me were just too much, I guess. More on the beach, later.
Edna is a writer. Seth wants to be a writer. Maybe he understands what she’s talking about with the solitude. Maybe he doesn’t. But writing is lonely. You can sit next to someone while you’re writing, I suppose. I’ve done that from time to time (okay, full disclosure—I’m doing it now—my husband is sitting next to me, reading on our porch looking out on the beach as I type). It’s not an easy thing to do, though.
When I was planning the conversion of my daughter’s bedroom into my writing space, my lovely husband kept asking me, “But will there be a chair where I can sit and watch you write?” I couldn’t even explain to him why this was not feasible. I mean, Virginia Woolf already did it. There needs to be a room and, ideally, a door to shut. Not a chair. Writing is not performance art. That’s just how it goes. I didn’t make the rules.
Writing involves a lot of solitude. So does life. Why, when Edna Sloane is tracked down by a random millennial whose editor at a Gawker-like publication would like him to do a feature on where Edna Sloane is now, does she start up a correspondence with him? Well, probably because she’s lonely. And nothing makes a writer feel a little less lonely than, you know, another writer. Someone who might actually understand why writing while your husband sits in a chair and watches you is not the most ideal of creative conditions.
I finished reading Dear Edna Sloane on the beach. On Sanibel Island, which is in Florida off the coast of Ft. Meyers, to be exact. Sanibel got destroyed by Hurricane Ian in 2022. The particular hotel where my family had been going for over forty years was leveled to the ground. There was nothing left. This is our first time back since then, staying a ways down the beach at a hotel that survived.
This is not an essay about the increasing pace of environmental devastation we are all facing, but it’s hard not to mention it given that the world is burning now. A friend said to me the other day, “I guess each of us will lose a place we love.” Yes. Yes. That is what is going to happen, if we’re lucky enough not to lose our actual homes and lives. I don’t know what to do about that.
Right before we left to drive down here, I saw a post from the writer
. As soon as I saw the picture, I knew she was on Sanibel. Even after the changes brought about by Ian, there’s something instantly recognizable about the beach. Well, the shells, really. It’s the shells.“Ooh,” I said to my husband. “Maybe we’ll run into Barbara Kingsolver while we’re on Sanibel.”
It is, after all, not a particularly big island. And being back, there aren’t nearly as many people as would normally be here this time of the year. There just aren’t as many places to stay. As I write this, I’m listening to the sound of construction in the distance—beeping and the growl of heavy machinery. The place I’m staying survived only partially. I look out onto a wide expanse of sand which is where their pool and restaurant and a grouping of little Florida-style cabins used to be. All of that is gone.
Nonetheless, my husband and I have made something of a game of looking for Barbara Kingsolver. My husband swore for a few hours that she was staying in the same hotel as us, right next door, but I was skeptical. I saw a woman in a big floppy hat stop and take a picture of the ruined building next to us and something made me think, oh, that is definitely Barbara Kingsolver. Of course she’d wear a hat like that. If a picture of the ruined building showed up on her Instagram, that would seal the deal. It did not.
We thought she was maybe in a booth at the Tex-Mex restaurant where we ate lunch. Or shelling along the beach. We see Barbara Kingsolver everywhere but, of course, everyone looks different at the beach. And authors are only the mildest of celebrities. I had to look up her picture to see what she looks like. So far, we have not found her.
It’s clear in Dear Edna Sloane that Seth believes Edna has some deep wisdom to impart to him. At times it seems he thinks she has some magic formula for how to write a book that makes you into a literary celebrity. Of course, she does not, though she never really comes out and tells Seth that and that’s interesting. Maybe Edna wants someone to talk to or at least to write to and she understands that if she tells Seth that there is no magic formula, he might just lose interest. She is, of course, flattered by the attention. What writer wouldn’t be?
I once assumed that if I had a read a book and loved it, that this would mean I would also love the writer who wrote it, should I meet her. My record was one for one. I read a book about the upper peninsula and loved it. I wrote to the author. We became great friends. We still are.
We’re friends because we share a lot of similar interests. We share in many ways a similar attitude toward the world. We’re also still friends because we can talk to each other about writing. And, sorry, friends, but here’s the truth—no one gets it like another writer gets it.
Since then I have met other writers whose books I loved and I did not love them. Maybe the circumstances were wrong and they’re lovely people. Maybe they’re lovely people who I just don’t want to hang out with. I’ve also met other writers whose books I loved who I did quite like in real person. It is, in conclusion, a crap shoot.
Should I at last find Barbara Kingsolver, what would I say to her? That is always the question. I don’t move in her literary circles. I swim in the shallow end of the publishing pool. I’m fine with that, but it makes for awkward introductions.
Barbara Kingsolver is from Kentucky, so we have that in common. I used to teach her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in my environmental sociology course. If we met, we might stumble along, but probably not end up with a correspondence like Edna and Seth in Dear Edna Sloane.
Because, really, who is Barbara Kingsolver? Who am I? Edna Slone published her break-out novel in the 80s, when publishing was still a world. When there were parties and book tours and big advances. Like Barbara Kingsolver, this was before the age of platforms and social media, but it didn’t mean that Edna Sloane didn’t have a persona. She was young. Sexy. Sleeping with first her writing mentor and then her editor. When she disappeared, she became legend.
Now, years later, she’s trying to explain to Seth why she stopped writing. She’s trying to explain the weird bifurcation between her self as a writer and her…well, what do you call that other self, anyway?
Which self is the true self, Seth? The writer—invisible, silently observing, strange, malformed, not quite of this world, lurking through scenes like a Dickensian ghost? Or the self who lives the life, who everyone sees—the threadbare cardigan picked at in meetings, the shy halting shade of a person who’s no good at parties, who stares too much, who is seen as strange, rude, maybe even snobby?
Oh, Edna, I feel so seen. Strange, rude and snobby. Go ahead and engrave it on my headstone.
Writers, as Edna explains to Seth, are different. Other people are “unbowed by the enormity of meaning—or meaninglessness—in seeing a pigeon in the park peeling at discarded chicken.” Other people “know what is real and [are] satisfied with the ordinary stuff of life.” Writers are not.
Writers are obsessed with what that duck was doing all by itself, swimming in the ocean, a real-life event which plays a prominent part in one of the stories in my collection. Writers walk up to the table of middle-aged men sitting in the lobby of the hotel in Marietta, Georgia, books laid out on the tables in front of them and asks, “What are you studying for?” (the answer—to take a test to be train engineers!). Writers want to know who the kid at the hotel in St. Pete was, young and dressed in all-black sweats and a beanie, like a knock-off Joe Burrow, coming back from the CVS with a bag at night. What was in that bag, though? Why was that kid in St. Pete?
Writers, in other words, are often not very good company. In talking about the frustrations of her marriage, Edna gets why her husband (a dermatologist) had no idea what he was signing up for. He wanted a normal wife. A normal person. Not someone who is in anguish when they’re writing and also in anguish when they are not writing. He did not want a writer for a wife, because a writer is “…someone who always wants more, who thinks regular life is only a veil over the true nature of things.”
Who are Edna and Seth writing to in Dear Edna Sloane, really? Did I mention that it’s an epistolary novel? Or at least a novel of documents. Letters. Slack chats. An edited chapter from Edna’s novel. An op-ed.
Are Edna and Seth writing to each other or are they only writing to themselves?
Over and over again, Edna expresses frustration with the narrative structure of real life. It’s so messy. None of it makes sense. As a writer, we can shape it into something that looks like a story. But it takes effort and imagination and hours spent alone with words. It is, as Edna writes, “expressing the inexpressible.” It’s a hard thing to do.
So how does it end? Do I find Barbara Kingsolver or don’t I? If I do, do we have a conversation? Is it awkward? Is she flattered or just incredibly annoyed to be accosted while on vacation? What makes the better story?
There’s a section of the novel in which Edna’s father reflects on the relationship between writing and reality, suggesting that stories have power to shape events beyond their pages. Edna has told him about the uncanny way in which as a writer, you sometimes write something that then becomes true. It’s a weird, unnerving phenomenon that probably has to do with confirmation bias more than anything else. We pay a lot of attention to the very small ways in which something we write becomes true and ignore all the other things we write which never comes to pass.
Still, it gives you pause when you sit down to craft a story. Do I have the power to shape reality? Should I be a bit more careful? What is my responsibility here? If I write an ending where Barbara Kingsolver and I become best friends, will it come to pass?
Dear Edna Sloane raises a lot of questions in the best way that a novel should. It ends with a new mystery. I guess the question that most haunts me is this--what’s the best way to strong-arm the chaos of this life into something that makes better sense? Or more importantly, how do we tell stories that shape a better world?
Like I said, more small press book recommendations are welcome! Send them all my way!
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So glad you read Edna Sloane! Looking forward to other reviews. 📚
This is so beautiful! I am flabbergasted, honestly, by its beauty. So glad Edna and Seth got to be a part of this. And I too am kind of always looking for Barbara Kingsolver. (I reread Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven recently and remembered how influential these books were on my early writing life!) Anyway thank you for writing this, and for embarking on this lovely and fascinating project! I look forward to following along. 🐚