No one will ever go hungry at Laura Shaine Cunningham’s table. The author’s summer suppers are the stuff of local legend: cocktails and appetizers by the pool (reclaimed from a 12-foot-deep cistern, its construction hilariously described in her second memoir, A Place in the Country) and entrees on the porch. We’ve been writers group colleagues for over a decade, and while most of us settle for putting out bagels and coffee, a meeting at Cunningham’s house is a three-course affair.
The preternaturally energetic novelist/memoirist/playwright/New York Times columnist divides her time between city and country homes. Her eponymous place in the country is a former inn, tucked away in a quiet corner of Ulster County. A child’s treehouse, a miniature of the original down to its cream-colored paint and black shutters, sits in a maple near the porch, where a black cat sunbathes by a windowbox spilling petunias.
Cunningham makes her entrance in a cloche hat, a white linen jacket and skirt, and jaunty pink sandals. She gives off the warmth of a six-burner cookstove, with an infectious smile and occasional bursts of wild laughter. She’s prepared sole almondine and a Mediterranean tart of feta, heirloom tomatoes, and herbs—an elegant menu from a woman whose childhood meals, detailed in her first memoir, Sleeping Arrangements, included popcorn for breakfast and kosher beef hotdogs kept warm in a thermos.
Sleeping Arrangements has been continuously in print for 19 years, with a host of devoted fans. Their numbers are sure to swell this November, when Cunningham’s memoir takes center stage as the 2008 One Book, One New Paltz reading selection. It’s the first time the One Book committee, which includes representatives from SUNY New Paltz and the community, has picked a book by a local author; previous honorees include Mark Haddon, Edwidge Danticat, and Rudolfo A. Anaya. Committee member Susan Avery, former owner of Ariel Booksellers, says, “I have literally recommended this book to hundreds of people—women, men, girls, boys. There isn’t anyone who can’t find something to relate to and to love.” Planned events reflect this diversity: From November 16 to 23, New Paltz readers will explore Jewish themes, nontraditional families, elders and children, literature, cuisine, theater, and film (see below for details).
Cunningham calls the selection “an honor and a compliment. When I wrote the book, it was ‘One Book, One Apartment,’ so this is bigger than I dreamed. The idea of a whole community reading your book is heady, it’s thrilling. I’d even move to New Paltz, but I like it here.”
The road to her sun-splashed Victorian porch was long and unlikely. Sleeping Arrangements chronicles a nomadic city childhood, made romantic by a loving single mother who could look at the underside of a relative’s dining table, where she and her daughter squeezed in for the night, and convert its dangling tablecloth into a canopy bed. Rosie had an equally fanciful touch with her personal history, giving young “Lily” (Laura’s childhood nickname) a war hero father with his own fighting dog, a boxer named Butch.
“It was a red-white-and-blue story, told to the accompaniment of bugles,” Cunningham writes. “There was only one flaw: While we waited for my hero father to return from battle, this country was not at war.”
Rosie’s fiction frayed quickly. Eventually, she and her daughter found an apartment in the Bronx, so close to Yankee Stadium that the walls were bathed with the glow of twi-night floodlights and shouts of “It’s a homer!” Lily ran wild with her streetwise playmates, and all was bliss until Rosie’s untimely death. But even in tragedy, family love triumphed. Into the breach came two wildly eccentric bachelor uncles: six-foot-six-inch private investigator Len, and Gabe, a dreamer who wrote Jewish gospel songs.
Sleeping Arrangements was a hit even before publication. The New Yorker published an excerpt, and bookjacket quotes arrived from Cunningham’s idols “like fairy dust”: Harper Lee, Anne Tyler, Chaim Potok, Muriel Spark. “It was incredible—people who were in my library, people who were mythical to me, wrote to me.” Cunningham beams.
But the book’s impact went deeper than praise. A magazine writer who’d already published two novels (Sweet Nothings and Third Parties), Cunningham finished most of her manuscript, then set it aside for nearly a decade because she couldn’t bear to write about her mother’s death. “Finally, I sort of dove at it, and wrote it very quickly. I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders,” she recounts. “I remember it was three in the morning, and I walked out onto this porch, feeling literally lighter. This is what memoir can accomplish: You can write your way out, you can write for your life.”
Both of Cunningham’s uncles were writers, as was their mother (and Lily’s eventual roommate), the unforgettable Etka from Minsk. After Rosie’s death, Lily clung to the family tradition. “It was a healing device—write, write, write, read, read, read. I read the way people drink. I would stagger out of the library with 70 pounds of books,” the author recalls. “I quickly got lost in a fantasy world. I’m very lucky that it also became a way to make a living.”
Cunningham’s first paycheck came at 15, when she won a nationwide youth writers contest sponsored by ABC Television. The prize included a check for $200, a huge sum for an illicit 15-year-old (the contest was for 16-to-18-year-olds; terrified she’d be found out, the winner received her award “dressed like I was 40.”)
“The path was set,” Cunningham says, “And now I have a 15-year-old writing ’til 2am and winning contests.” (Daughters Alexandra and Jasmine were adopted from Romania and China, respectively.) After the contest, Cunningham landed a column in Seventeen magazine, and wrote for magazines ranging from true-detective pulps to the Atlantic Monthly. She also wrote plays. One of these, “Beautiful Bodies,” is currently leading a rich double life: as source material for a 2002 novel with the same title, and as a runaway box office smash in the former Soviet bloc.
Cunningham was researching a historical novel about the ill-fated Romanovs when she got a 3am e-mail from a Russian producer who wanted to translate and produce “Beautiful Bodies.” She leapt at the chance. “It felt like a very heavy hand of fate, mysterious and magical.”
“Beautiful Bodies” premiered in 1,000-seat theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg. (“It was a terrible production, but a successful terrible production.”) More productions followed, and Cunningham found herself “Aerofloting around” to premieres in Siberia, war-torn Chechnya (“a beautiful production, very moving”), Bulgaria, Estonia, Romania, and Lithuania. At one premiere, diners washed their hands with vodka between courses of a backstage banquet. “I’ve never had such pure adventure,” Cunningham says. “When you go as a playwright, you’re not a tourist—you’re in back rooms, off the beaten track.”
Not all back-room dealings were savory; Cunningham soon realized royalties were not forthcoming. When all else failed, she brought suit, becoming the first English-language writer ever to win a theft of intellectual property claim in Russian court. She’s currently writing a third memoir, Playing in the Forbidden Zone, about her multilayered connection to Russia. “I’m not a litiginous person. Why did I do it?” she muses. She did win some rubles, but “it was for justice. My family lost everything in Russia in 1905. I was damned if I was going to let it go under again.”
Cunningham just completed her Romanov novel, The Diary of Marie R., which describes the doomed family’s last weeks through the eyes of the czar’s third daughter Marie. She did extensive research, but also felt an emotional immersion she describes as a sort of possession. “ It’s a kind of memoir, only I’m another person, a 19-year-old Russian grand duchess.”
Fiction, Cunningham says, “offers far more freedom than memoir. On the other hand, you’ll never know the material as well.” And since memoir is a booming genre in this reality-fixated age, Cunningham is much in demand as a speaker. Along with the One Book, One New Paltz celebration of Sleeping Arrangements, she’s been tapped for an October 20 appearance at Troy’s Memoir Project—following fellow Ulster County memoirist Da Chen (www.artscenteronline.org)—and for Woodstock Memoir Festival in February 2009. She’s currently writer-in-residence at the Memoir Institute (www.memoirinstitute.org), mentoring promising first-timers and accomplished writers, including a New York Times bestselling author.
“More and more people are turning to memoir, not just to have a book, but to understand their lives,” says Cunningham. “You’re able to retrieve so many memories, and when they’re in written form, the patterns are so much clearer. It’s kind of like psychotherapy. Plus you get a book advance.”
ONE BOOK, ONE NEW PALTZ EVENTS
November 16
Discussion and bagel brunch led by Rabbi Bill Strongin. Jewish Community Center. (11am)
November 17
Dramatic reading of Sleeping Arrangements (the play) by Drama Club students at New Paltz High School. (7pm)
November 18
Discussion on non-traditional families, led by mental health expert Jacki Brownstein. Elting Library. (7:30pm)
November 19
Discussion led by English professor Jan Schmidt. Mudd Puddle, Water Street Market. (10:30am)
Reading and book signing with Laura Shaine Cunningham, McKenna Theater, SUNY New Paltz. (7pm)
November 20
Discussion led by Judy Reichler and Ann Burdett of Lifetime Learning Institute. Elting Library. (10:30am)
Discussion led by librarian Mary Ann Lis-Simmons.
St. Andrews Episcopal Church. (7:30pm)
November 21
Academic panel discussion with professors from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education. Honors Center, SUNY New Paltz. (11:30am)
Interactive social event. Community members share “Uncle food,” stories, and music relevant to Sleeping Arrangements. Unison Arts Center. (6pm)
November 22
Film, A Walk on the Moon (rated R), starring Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, plus film clip about Cunningham revisiting her Catskills summer camp. Elting Library. (7pm)
Sunday, November 23
Discussion led by Cunningham, sponsored by Inquiring Mind bookstore. Muddy Cup coffeehouse. (3pm)
Schedule subject to change. For additional events and
information: www.onebookonenewpaltz.org.
This article appears in October 2008.
