Writer discovers accidental celebrity
Everything changed for novelist Elizabeth Searle last month. The Associated Press got wind of her most recent creation, ''Tonya and Nancy: The Opera."
Suddenly, the Arlington resident was in the middle of a media blitz, first ESPN, then MSNBC, and Sports Illustrated, not to mention articles in the Boston Herald and USA TODAY.
Searle, 43, based the libretto for the one-act opera on the notorious attack on Nancy Kerrigan by an ally of Tonya Harding during the 1994 US Figure Skating Championships.
''I was obsessed with that scandal . . . it hit so many nerves," said Searle, a writer of literary fiction who has published three books and is an award-winning short-story writer. ''I think it's kind of a microcosm of our supercompetitive, celebrity-obsessed culture and how it warps people."
She wrote the libretto at the request of the composer, Abigail Al Doory, who is her niece and a composition graduate student at Tufts University, where it will be produced in 2006. Searle used real dialogue, such as Kerrigan's wail, ''Why me? Why me?" and Harding's comment, ''Whip her butt; I'm gonna whip her butt!"
Tonya and Nancy were featured in Searle's 2001 novella ''Celebrities in Disgrace," but ''in a totally different way than in the opera," said Searle. In this version of the story that The New York Times called ''a miniature masterpiece," an ambitious young actress from Lowell yearns to break into the major leagues by winning the television role of Kerrigan, but jeopardizes everything after a one-night sexual encounter that is videotaped.
The publicity has taken Searle on a significant, albeit temporary, detour from her work as a writer of literary fiction, which is often erotic. She says there's ''a strong thread of that running through each of my three books."
Her collection of short stories, ''My Body to You," winner of the 1992 Iowa Short Fiction Prize judged by novelist James Salter, centers on women's bodies. Searle didn't completely agree with the Los Angeles Times reviewer who said that her ''characters test the limits of the sexually possible." But she felt she did accomplish that later in her first novel, ''A Four-Sided Bed," which features a menage a trois.
It was in college that Searle discovered she didn't have any inhibitions about writing about sex. She found that she can ''cut loose a lot on the page."
''But here I am, I'm really a very restrained person in my life. I'm a mom and a wife," she explained, who's been married 20 years to John Hodgkinson, who is always her first reader. ''It's an alter ego kind of thing."
To help others appreciate intelligent, sensual writing, she started the annual Eros Night, serving wine and chocolate while local authors ''read their steamiest prose." It has been cosponsored by PEN/New England, a professional writers organization where she is vice chairwoman, and Newtonville Books. At writers conferences, Searle also teaches other authors how to write ''seriously about sex" in her seminar ''The Erotic Pen."
Born in Lancaster, Pa., to a librarian mother and businessman/freelance political writer, Searle always knew she wanted to do something creative. Somewhat isolated by frequent moves, she and her younger sister developed their own intense, imaginary world, even writing and audio-taping a soap opera when she was around 8 years old.
At 10, Searle wrote a detective novel called ''Blood and Lipstick." She credits her parents' encouragement and her mother's addiction to ''The Young and The Restless," which she still watches, for her literary interest. Discovering writing meant that Searle could continue to ''play pretend for the rest of my life."
Searle started writing seriously when she studied creative writing at Oberlin College as an undergraduate and later in Brown University's master's program. It's an experience she recommends to writers because of the intensive feedback and the chance to work with accomplished faculty, such as her late mentor John Hawkes, who called her ''a writer remarkable for her sheer use of language."
Following professorial advice to get an unconventional job that would help her writing, Searle was surprised when she enjoyed teaching autistic children for several years, as well as working in a human services temporary agency. She's used both to enrich her work with uncomfortable topics: senility, troubled adolescence, retardation, mental illness, and autism.
Searle, who has written more than 30 short stories, teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern Maine. She also has written creative nonfiction and toyed with scriptwriting and editing scripts for Harborside Films.
Luckily, Searle needs only about six hours of sleep each night, allowing her time for both her professional and personal life. With her 7-year-old son, Searle roams the aisles of The Book Rack and the Robbins Library, both in Arlington. Settled in her renovated ranch house, Searle is at home after 15 years in Arlington, whether playing at Spy Pond with her son, shopping at Trader Joe's, or riding on the Minuteman Bikeway, where she's sure she once saw Nancy Kerrigan rollerblading, '' a vision, just beautiful."
Besides her two new novels in progress, Searle has been working with Seattle-based filmmaker Paul Ramsay, who will be filming her novella, ''Celebrities in Disgrace," in 2006. While Ramsay wrote the script, Searle watched how he ''boil[ed] it down just to the bare essentials." She would love to have a bit part in the film, fulfilling college dreams of becoming an actress.
''It's a culture shock," Searle said about the recent flurry of media attention, and who was just asked to appear on the ABC late-night show ''Jimmy Kimmel Live" in mid-November.
''I feel like I . . . accidentally punched through a wall" that surrounds literary writing and opera, into the ''whole larger world."
''Authors Among Us" is an occasional feature profiling prominent writers in the northwest suburbs. 