ALTHER, Lisa

Born Elisabeth Greene Reed, 23 July 1944, Kingsport, Tennessee

Daughter of John S. and Alice Greene Reed; married Richard P.Alther, 1966 (divorced); children: Sara

Though she was born and grew up in the South, Lisa Alther has spent all of her adult life in the North. She graduated from Wellesley College, married in 1966, and has lived for many years on the edge of a small town in Vermont. Alther has taught Southern fiction at St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont. She identifies herself as a Southern writer, however, because of the influence of storytelling in her home and her early exposure by her English-teacher mother to the works of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers. From her father, a surgeon, she acquired an interest in science, which was reflected in her earliest publications about the environment and her continuing use of scientific metaphors. Her first two novels are set in her native South; the second two in New England. All of them reflect smalltown life and deal with problems of community.

Alther has said she had over 200 rejection slips before her first fiction publication, Kinflicks (1976). The novel was so financially successful Alther has been able to write in her preferred manner, taking several months between multiple drafts and a year between books. Though widely admired for her comic tone, Alther is a serious writer who has focused on the ironies involved in the search for meaning by characters trying to avoid stereotypical, inherited responses to the hostile forces of 20th-century life. Kinflicks deals with the 1960s generation's agonized conflicts over sex, religion, education, and the war in Vietnam. In half the chapters, Ginny Babcock recapitulates her youthful rebellion against her parents' life pattern and goals and savagely rejects religious rationalizations of their greed, racism, and class prejudices. Adolescent sexual initiation rites furnish ironic views of the older generation's hypocrisy about sex, and Ginny's search for alternatives includes experiments with backseat petting, heterosexual and homosexual monogamy, and lesbian communes. In alternate chapters, Alther uses a third person narrator to show Ginny's return home at twenty-seven to the bedside of her dying mother and their reconciliation when Ginny realizes her mother had deliberately played the stereotypical mother role in order to meet her children's need for meaning. Mrs. Babcock's self-awareness frees Ginny from guilt and the necessity of role playing. Kinflicks has been very popular; in the 1990s it was in print. As with all of Alther's books, it was highly praised and also strongly condemned. Most critics praised it for its verbal wit and for the irony with which the sexual escapades target stereotypes, male sexual conquest, and adult sanctimoniousness; many recognized it as serious social criticism. Very few mentioned the serious mother-daughter plot or perceived the female bildungsroman structure of the book.

In Original Sins (1981) Alther juggles the stories of five protagonists who find their small-town Southern environment pernicious. Whereas Kinflicks is picaresque in its emphasis on the journey away, Original Sins focuses on home and its limitations. But as "the Five" mature, their self-awareness, like that of Mrs. Babcock, offers more hope for them than for their parents. Critics agreed the two female characters' sexual experiences are the most vivid aspects of this book. In Other Women (1984), Alther again juxtaposes the lives of two women, a confused nurse who has experimented sexually as had Ginny Babcock in her search for meaning, and an older woman psychotherapist, whose counsel stems from her own tragic experiences. The book is unusual in focusing equally on patient and therapist and offers their relationship as a model of feminist therapy, nonhierarchical and eventuating in friendship. Though friendship between two women that blossoms into love is central to Bedrock (1990), the focus really is on a town in Vermont to which one of them flees in her search for meaning. The 20-year romantic friendship between the two women in Bedrock is loosely based on the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. We see all the hypocrisy and self-delusion of less than admirable characters, but the tone—sometimes almost farcical—is accepting and hopeful. Clea Shawn loses her romantic illusions about a small town, remodels a decaying house, and finds happiness when she recognizes that her long friendship with Elka is the basis of a lesbian relationship.

Five Minutes in Heaven (1995) follows its main character from childhood in Tennessee to adulthood in New York City and Paris. Along the way, Jude has a number of relationships that force her to come to terms with her sexuality. First, she has an attraction to her best friend, Molly. After Molly dies and Jude tries to sort out her feelings about her emerging lesbianism, she begins a relationship and falls in love with a gay man. After losing Sandy, Jude has a passionate love affair with a married woman. After moving to Paris, she finally finds comfort in her sexuality.

Alther explains why she wrote Five Minutes in Heaven: "Three of my best friends died violent deaths—one when we were teenagers, and the other two when we were in our forties. Five Minutes in Heaven, an extended meditation on 'graveyard love' (the kind of love that lasts until you're both dead and buried in the graveyard), is my memorial to them." The book, Alther says, "is an extended meditation on love in all its phases—the longing for it, the contentment of its fulfillment, the pain of its loss, the memories of it that can shape a person's life." Though Alther's books are lauded for her wit and humor, Five Minutes in Heaven is much more serious and rarely gives the reader a reason to laugh.

Alther's works trace the experiences of her generation and continue to be popular. Though critical acceptance of Bedrock was somewhat grudging, her work is now being seriously considered by critics and scholars. Alther's books have been worldwide bestsellers and have been translated into 17 languages including French, German, Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish. Her novella Birdman and the Dancer (1993), is an adult fairy tale based on monotypes by French artist Françoise Gilot. It has been published only in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Many of Alther's reviews and articles have been published in the New York Times, Art and Antiques, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Natural History, New Society, and the Guardian.