Susan Fales-Hill: From Sitcom Writer to Jane Austen Inspired Author
(When watching the interview below on the Today Show, little did I expect that Susan Fales-Hill would agree to visit with us here at Darcyholic Diversions. I hope you enjoy getting to know her as much as I have. She will be giving away SIX hard back copies of Imperfect Bliss. Your comment is your entry, but be sure to include a contact email. Extra entries as usual. Winners will be announced after December 15th.)
With a couple of notable exceptions, my love affair with “Pride
and Prejudice” is the longest of my fifty years on this planet. It began when I was sixteen, and
already an avid fan of Nineteenth Century French and English novels (my heroine
at the time was Queen Victoria, a symptom of my personality disorder, ADR
-Acute Delusions of Royalty.)
Though I favored the florid language of Dickens and Balzac, Austen’s spare, epigrammatic prose
proved a revelation. Her wry
humor drew me in, as did her sharp yet humane satires of the sillier Bennett
sisters, of the snobbish Miss Bingley and the pedantic Mr. Collins. And then, of course, there was
Elizabeth, the warm, strong, intelligent, intellectually accomplished and
elegant woman I aspired to become.
My Penguin paperback edition quickly became a constant literary
companion, read and re-read whenever the opportunity arose. One summer weekend in college, I read
it aloud to my best friend as we sat by the shores of a lake (such a pastime
seems unimaginable in today’s frantically wired world, but I highly recommend
it over “texting,” or even “sexting.”)
In
my untried youth, I appreciated the book’s literary merits without quite
grasping its warnings about the pitfalls marriage. People think of “Pride and Prejudice” as a romantic tale, and
certainly Darcy and Elizabeth’s union is one of the most moving in all of Western
literature. In Darcy, Austen
has created the ultimate female fantasy: a dark, brooding, sensuous man who is
also emotionally, morally and financially reliable, Heathcliff without the
temper and with a better retirement plan. If one examines the book closely, however, it presents
the reader with only three “marriages of true minds” that of Darcy and
Elizabeth, that of Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle, and that of Bingley and Jane. Every other union is one of unequals,
Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, or based on financial
expediency and impure motives (Lydia and Wickham.) The triumph of Darcy and Elizabeth’s romance, in
which the former overcomes the class prejudice of his day to marry a woman of
lesser social rank, represented a subservice happy ending Austen failed to
experience in her own life.
As a young girl, she fell in love with a member of the landed gentry only
to have her amour ripped away by his family and forced to wed a woman of “equal
standing.”
It
was only as I matured, and experienced marriage myself that the book’s darker
shadings became apparent. In my
dating years, Darcy and Elizabeth’s romance served as my template of the
perfect “happily ever after.”
Given that I spent my twenties and early thirties living in Los Angeles
and writing for sitcoms (“A Different World,” “Suddenly Susan” etc..) this was a less than achievable ideal. Elegant Darcys do not abound in
the entertainment industry so I was condemned to many a Saturday night snuggling
up to Darcy on the page. A
good friend and colleague suggested at one point that I would save myself a
good deal of time and heartache by inviting any potential suitor to my home
before a date and asking him to watch my favorite film adaptation of the book,
the 1938 version starring Lawrence Olivier and the luminous Greer Garson. If the young man in question made
it through the full two hours, my friend’s theory went, we might have a prayer
of finding common ground. I
never did attempt this method of triage because I knew the assorted directors,
actors, executives, rappers and ball players who found their way to my door
would probably not make it past the “Assembly Ball” scene. ( All’s well that
ends well, the man I married undertook to read not only “Pride and Prejudice”
but also, “Madame Bovary,” another favorite.)
Still
the book remained an obsession. At
one point, I developed an idea for a television “dramedy” based on a
contemporary version of the Bennett family. Like many an idea pitched in Hollywood, it landed in
the “round file.” Then, a
good decade later, after I’d finished my first novel, “One Flight Up,” the tale
of a multicultural group of women bound by friendship, an alma mater and
adultery, my agent and editor suggested I return to the notion of updating
“Pride and Prejudice.” The advent
of reality T.V., with its parade of women vying, twenty-five to a hot tub, for
the attentions of an unremarkable yet buff and toothsome young man (“The
Bachelor,” any given season) seemed to provide the perfect fodder for
Austenesque satire and social commentary.
The marriage market skewered by Ms. Austen has found its latest
incarnation in the worlds of the “Real Housewives,” and “The Bachelor” and
“Bachelorette” franchises.
And are not the Kelly sisters, the twin “Tampa socialites” at the center
of the Petraeus scandal modern day replicas of Kitty and Lydia, running to
consort with the local regiment?
And
so “Imperfect Bliss,” the story of a family with four eligible daughters one of
whom is selected to be the star of a reality show I titled “The Virgin” (and
lest my reader recoil in horror, one of the networks developed but then chose
not to proceed with a reality show with that very title…) was conceived. I won’t give too much away, but the
book has its Elizabeth (the Bliss of the title, a divorcee pursuing her PHD in
history and studying the 18th Century Chevalier de Saint Georges,
aka “The Black Mozart”) and its Darcy (you’ll have to read it to guess which
man that is.) Like the masterpiece
to which it pays homage, it is, at bottom, the story of a woman and a man
finding lasting passionate love by learning to “read” others with open hearts
and understanding, as opposed to judgment. The original title of “Pride and Prejudice” was “First
Impressions,” and in that theme lies the key to the eternal appeal of Austen’s
work. Is not the quest to
see and be seen, to love and be loved, truly, madly, deeply the essence of the
human journey? Here’s to reading Austen for another two
hundred years.
