(Confessions of Madame Psyche is a retelling of the myth o...)
Confessions of Madame Psyche is a retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche set in the Bay Area. This book recreates the Bay Area as it was during the author's childhood and earlier. It is a mystical picaresque novel if such a term can apply - Psyche (soul) as an unschooled, poor, half-breed heroine making her spiritual journey toward the god of love among the marginal people on the underside of Bay Area history.
(From American Book Award-winner Dorothy Bryant, comes thi...)
From American Book Award-winner Dorothy Bryant, comes this timeless story about caring for an aging parent. With complexity, bravery, and dry humor, The Test details the frustrating push and pull between Pat and her eighty-year-old father, who is attempting—for the third and last time—to pass the test to renew his driver's license. Bryant's unflinching gaze sees deep into the hearts of both parent and child, revealing the dramatic, awkward, and universal struggle each faces with aging, memory, and love. Trying to reconstruct memories of her childhood and of who her parents once were, Pat puzzles out the confabulations of family memory: how stories become accepted fact, how facts get twisted in stories, and how some perspectives are lost completely. In a deeply sensitive examination of one woman's coping with the changes of aging, Bryant offers a rare and moving testimony.
Dorothy Bryant was an American novelist, playwright, essayist and feminist writer.
Background
Dorothy Bryant was born on February 8, 1930, in San Francisco, California. She was the daughter of Joseph, a mechanic, and Judith Chiarle Calvetti, a bookkeeper.
Her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all born in Balangero, a village about thirty miles northwest of Turin, Italy. According to her father, the French border was a day’s walk from the village.
Education
In 1947, Bryant entered San Francisco State College. During 1960-63, Bryant completed a master’s degree in creative writing at SF State.
Career
In 1964, Bryant got a job teaching at a community college. She was the first woman to be hired in that English department since the one “token” installed twenty years before when the college was founded.
The disapproval of her relatives was matched by that of most of her colleagues and students when she seemingly turned toward left-wing politics and people. From 1969 to 1972, Dorothy wrote The reviews and articles for Freedom News.
Alternative media in the sixties, like Freedom News, in 1978 to self-publish her books. It had taken four years and a raging feminist movement to get her first novel, Ella Price’s Journal, published and five years for the second, The Kin of Ata. In 1978, her third novel, Miss Giardino, had been bouncing around New York publishers for six years. Two more manuscripts were near completion.
Dorothy's aim in self-publishing was to get a body of work into print and keep it in print, selling well enough to stay in the black and provide some income, if not a living. That she managed to do. From 1978 to 1992, she published nine books. She also reprinted Ella Price’s Journal when it went out of print. Since the mid-1980s, Bryant worked mostly on historical fiction and plays.
Dorothy Bryant died on December 21, 2017, in Oakland, California.
Bryant signed a few petitions, joined a few anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, described in Ella Price’s Journal, made some friends among old socialists and liberals - and that was about it. Her affection for liberal activists finds its way into many of her novels and plays, but real political involvement is beyond her.
Views
Quotations:
“From the age of four I read omnivorously and constantly, but I started writing late, at thirty. I write every weekday morning. The longer I write, the less I feel qualified to say about the process, except to note that it gets harder, but that accepting the inevitability of difficulty makes it also, paradoxically, easier. I guess I agonize less about the difficulty. If I don’t write for a week or two, I begin to come unraveled. This does not mean I am driven by some sort of compulsive if artistic madness. It simply means that I am one of those lucky people who have found their work."
“My readers say that all my novels are so different from each other in subject and form that they can hardly believe the same person wrote them all. I can only say that a story chooses me and demands its only possible form. I write in obedience to these intuitive promptings, then rewrite and rewrite with all the craft I can muster.”
“In 1990, I began writing plays and was fortunate to have my first two plays produced in the Bay Area, to excellent reviews. My first play seemed to just happen - because two of my literary heroes, George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, provided a subject for a vehicle for a friend and favorite actress of mine. I think I’ve found a natural form for me. Dialogue has always been one of my strengths, so the transition to drama was quite natural. The subjects of my plays have so far been literary-historical. Is that because the ex-teacher in me pops up to present history this way? Is it because, now that I’m over sixty, I feel more in touch with previous generations than with contemporary youth? I don’t know why my work has taken this turn, any more than I know how I started writing in the first place.”
“Do not ask a writer if her novel is autobiographical. First of all, the question implies that the book was created by the material, not by the skill and sweat of the writer. Secondly, the question says that books mean less to you than gossip. Thirdly, it’s none of your business.”
Personality
Bryant's 1960s were those of a single mother trying to write and teach and support and live with two angry teenagers, with no moral support from either family or the general community, quite the opposite.
Connections
Dorothy married Louis Ungaretti, on June 11, 1949. The couple had two children: John and Lorri. In 1963, they divorced, and Dorothy married Robert K. Bryant, a photographer, on October 18, 1968.