Literary Chicago

There is a girl with golden braids in the second-to-last row tonight. She is ten, maybe eleven years old. She listens attentively as Heidi Durrow reads from her first published book, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky. Through a series of passages and asides, she learns that this book is about Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black father, a girl who is forced to struggle with issues of racial and cultural identity, along with loss, when her nuclear family is taken away from her as the result of an unthinkable tragedy and she must go to live with her old-fashioned African American grandmother. “When something starts to feel like hurt,” Durrow reads, “I put it in this imaginary bottle inside me. It’s blue glass with a cork stopper. My stomach tightens and my eyeballs get hot. I put all of that inside the bottle.”

After the reading, the girl with golden braids participates in the Q&A. She asks, “What made you want to write this book?”

Durrow seems to take this question just a bit more seriously than the others, as she should. It’s not every day that you see someone so young at a reading of this nature, one that promotes a book which most, if not all, middle school teachers would deem too mature for their students. “I wrote this book because I have always loved writing. My mother wrote. I remember when I was a kid and my mother sold her first story, back in the ‘70s. She got a check for ten dollars and she was beaming. You could see stars coming out of her head and all around her body. So whenever I think about being happy, I think about writing. And I wrote this book for people like you, for little girls to think about life and new things. So I wrote it for you.”

The braided girl’s back stiffens with what I imagine to be pride. I consider what it might have been like, at ten or eleven years old, to read a book after its author has told me, to my face, and publicly, that it had been written for me. It’s not much of a leap to suggest that Durrow has made a fan for life. (More importantly, she’s helped to make a reader for life.)

Her road to literary success wasn’t always so smooth. Although her novel was only published this January, she began writing it thirteen years ago. “One of the reasons it took such a long time,” she admits, “is because I didn’t know what I was doing.” Like most fiction writers, she attempted to get her foot in the door by submitting to literary journals. She had a master list with first and second “tiers” of publications and shaped each of the chapters in her novel into pieces that could stand alone as short stories. The sting of the negative responses she received seems fresh when she says, “Rejection after rejection. I even got a mean rejection . . . I’m sending her a free copy of the book, signed ‘compliments of the author.’”

So Durrow turned to contests. She stopped copying down contest entries by hand from magazine racks and finally subscribed to Poets & Writers. With persistence, a willingness to revise and to invest in postage and contest fees, participation in a marathon (the actual running kind), and a friend who knew agents, she found that before she had ever been published, she would win grants, fellowships, residencies, short fiction writing contests and, of course, the Bellwether Prize that led to the publication of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky. She tells the audience that she celebrates this success shortly after turning forty years old and then corrects herself, saying, “That’s not true. I just turned 41. But I wrote a coming-of-age story old because I had a lot of growing up to do and I feel like I still do.”

While Durrow limits herself to only two reasons when she answers the braided girl’s question, it becomes apparent in the course of the evening that she had a great many reasons for writing her novel. For starters, its inciting incident is taken from a newspaper article she came across long ago, about a mother who threw herself and her children from the top of a tall apartment building. It said that there was but one survivor, a daughter, and as Durrow puts it, “I just had this haunting obsession with this girl . . . What I hope will happen is that if she finds the book and realizes that, ‘Oh, that news clipping was about me,’ that she will see that Rachel is heroic, and that she’s okay. I hope she’s okay.”

As much as the book is about how Rachel copes with her loss and grief, it is also about how she negotiates the overlapping layers of her identity in a world that largely sees in only black and white. These are not details taken from the real life survivor’s experiences but, rather, from Durrow’s. She built her protagonist with the sometimes painful memories of being a biracial and bicultural girl who grew up overseas as the daughter of a military man. She always considered herself simply “American” until her family moved to Portland, Oregon. “People always wanted to know, ‘What are you?’ And they were never happy with my answer—‘I’m the best speller in my class.’”

Helping to cultivate a more honest, more sophisticated national discourse about race, then, is yet another of the reasons that Durrow had for writing this book. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. As we all saw, even President Obama checked ‘African American’ on his census form.” She was quick to add that she wasn’t “hating on him,” that she understood he had enough to think about right now, but also that she hoped he would reconsider the labels he accepts for himself in the future. Ideally, we would all start talking about race so much that we wouldn’t have to talk about race at all anymore. “People are connected to each other in all sorts of ways and maybe we will one day no longer have to have this conversation.”

Related Blog Posts
Light-skinned-ed Girl (Durrow’s Blog)
My American Melting Pot

EVENT: HEIDI DURROW READING | MONDAY, APRIL 5, 2010 AT 6:30PM | OPEN BOOKS