On a recent reading tour Janet Desaulniers wowed audiences by telling them how she sold the first story she ever sent out–a semiautobiographical shortie about a college grad who moves back in with her mom–to the New Yorker when she was 25. Then she really shocked them by telling them how long it took for her first book to get into print. First contracted by Alfred A. Knopf about 20 years ago, her story collection What You’ve Been Missing was just published by the University of Iowa Press in October. In New York, she says, audiences audibly gasped: “As if I said I’d lost an arm!”
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Desaulniers’ stories revolve around domestic crises big and small–a teenage girl descending into alcoholism, a woman recalling the death of her son, a boy who fakes stomachaches to get out of school. “The domestic may be all we get, so we better damn well pay attention to it,” she says. “It may be where everything’s happening.” She focuses on matters of the home in her nonprofessional life too, and believes this makes her something of a misfit in the cutthroat New York-centered world of trade publishing. “Lorrie Moore knows how to put out a book in two years,” she says. “Alice Munro knows how to do it in one year. I’m not capable of that. It has to do with the domestic nature of my life: in order for me to raise my son and be really present and enjoy sitting around with my husband, it takes me a really long time to write a book. I’m not competitive, and I’m not in any kind of hurry. When I was in the hands of my New York editors and publishers I felt a real sense of hurry, like ‘What are you waiting for?’ I wasn’t waiting for anything. I was just learning about the craft that I wanted to do.”
The slower pace of the midwest suits her much better, says Desaulniers, who grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Though she’s written constantly since she was a child, she didn’t take a writing class until her last semester at the University of Missouri. “I was afraid I’d be bad,” she says. “What if I was bad at this thing I wanted to do most in the world?”
Then three years ago Desaulniers took her first sabbatical in 21 years of teaching. During her year off, she says, “I got well. I rested, I stopped smoking, I ran, I enjoyed my life. I began to relax. And I began to find joy in my work again.” She wrote a few new stories, then, curious about how they’d work with the old ones, pulled out the book manuscript. “It was so much easier for me to be ruthless this time,” she says. “I threw out some things and put in some of my new work and rearranged the whole thing.”
“People say, ‘Oh, this collection will break your heart,’” she says of What You’ve Been Missing. “But the part that’s not heartbreaking is that the characters get up the next day. They do keep walking. And to me that seems to indicate that they found something worthy.”
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