homework, and spelling lists from the seventh grade. Leafing through them I came upon an English project I had done on metaphors and similes. Reading the piece, I vividly remembered the excitement I had felt on being given this particular assignment, for it was the very first time in my entire career as a student that I had been excited about anything the nuns had ever asked me to do. I read through my discussion of metaphors and similes, and I could feel the thrill of my twelve-year-old self coming off the page, a nascent writer in love with language as if language were a potential lover. I came to a single page that said, in big letters I had printed very, very carefully, “A lonely road is a bodyguard.” It was a metaphor I had invented, and I was pleased with myself for having chosen this powerful image over the more straightforward simile, “A lonely road is like a bodyguard.” I lifted that sentence from my seventh-grade project and put it directly into a song I was writing, “Sleeping in Paris”:
I’ll send the angels to watch over you tonight
And you send them right back to me.
A lonely road is a bodyguard
If you really want it to be.
That song ended up on The Wheel, and whenever I hear it now, or think of it, or sing it, I nod to my little girl self, and she, in the wisdom of her great distance and perspective, looks on with pleasure and the patience of one who has waited a long time to be noticed. This one line, in this one song, is how I know who I am, and how I know I survived.
When I became a student at Vanderbilt in 1976, I declared a double major in English and drama, but I quickly discovered I could not break into the clique of drama students who got cast in plays because I was quiet, extremely shy, and a bit overweight. I also lacked any of the vibrancy or ambition that would have caught the attention of the teacher, whom I found somewhat distant and pontificating anyway. Two other professors, however, did make a great impact on me: Dr. Reba Wilcoxon, a tough and insightful English teacher who gave me the assignment to write a Menippean satire, which was one of the most memorable and exciting writing experiments of my life, and the great Walter Sullivan, eminent professor, authority on Southern literature (particularly the fugitive and agrarian movements), and a wonderfully lyrical author and teacher. When I arrived at Vanderbilt, he had been teaching there for twenty-seven years and went on to teach for twenty-three more, retiring in 2000. In his youth he had been part of a young writers group that included Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren. He was deeply inspiring in his gentle incisiveness, taking my terrible, saccharine, and sophomoric stories seriously, and encouraging me again and again to write “what I know.”
I loved his class, and he made me feel not only important but that I might actually have a future in writing. It was a promise that had been waiting for fulfillment—waiting since I was nine years old and won a poetry contest at school, waiting since I’d had the imaginative daring to conceive of a road as a bodyguard. But despite Professor Sullivan’s mentoring, Vanderbilt just didn’t work. I wasn’t a college girl. I was odd, removed, quiet, intensely lonely, and prone to living inside my own thoughts, often to my detriment and deep emotional disturbance. I didn’t care about the school at all, and lacking any of the natural enthusiasm of young women my age, I had no desire to socialize with my classmates. I wanted to be a writer, but becoming a good writer seemed an insurmountable and confusing task.
After finishing the academic year, I decided to move back to Los Angeles, where I enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. I was impatient with myself as a writer. I couldn’t see that I was getting better, so I thought I would try acting. I got an apartment on Fuller Avenue in Hollywood, close to the Institute, which was on Hollywood
I’ll send the angels to watch over you tonight
And you send them right back to me.
A lonely road is a bodyguard
If you really want it to be.
That song ended up on The Wheel, and whenever I hear it now, or think of it, or sing it, I nod to my little girl self, and she, in the wisdom of her great distance and perspective, looks on with pleasure and the patience of one who has waited a long time to be noticed. This one line, in this one song, is how I know who I am, and how I know I survived.
When I became a student at Vanderbilt in 1976, I declared a double major in English and drama, but I quickly discovered I could not break into the clique of drama students who got cast in plays because I was quiet, extremely shy, and a bit overweight. I also lacked any of the vibrancy or ambition that would have caught the attention of the teacher, whom I found somewhat distant and pontificating anyway. Two other professors, however, did make a great impact on me: Dr. Reba Wilcoxon, a tough and insightful English teacher who gave me the assignment to write a Menippean satire, which was one of the most memorable and exciting writing experiments of my life, and the great Walter Sullivan, eminent professor, authority on Southern literature (particularly the fugitive and agrarian movements), and a wonderfully lyrical author and teacher. When I arrived at Vanderbilt, he had been teaching there for twenty-seven years and went on to teach for twenty-three more, retiring in 2000. In his youth he had been part of a young writers group that included Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren. He was deeply inspiring in his gentle incisiveness, taking my terrible, saccharine, and sophomoric stories seriously, and encouraging me again and again to write “what I know.”
I loved his class, and he made me feel not only important but that I might actually have a future in writing. It was a promise that had been waiting for fulfillment—waiting since I was nine years old and won a poetry contest at school, waiting since I’d had the imaginative daring to conceive of a road as a bodyguard. But despite Professor Sullivan’s mentoring, Vanderbilt just didn’t work. I wasn’t a college girl. I was odd, removed, quiet, intensely lonely, and prone to living inside my own thoughts, often to my detriment and deep emotional disturbance. I didn’t care about the school at all, and lacking any of the natural enthusiasm of young women my age, I had no desire to socialize with my classmates. I wanted to be a writer, but becoming a good writer seemed an insurmountable and confusing task.
After finishing the academic year, I decided to move back to Los Angeles, where I enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. I was impatient with myself as a writer. I couldn’t see that I was getting better, so I thought I would try acting. I got an apartment on Fuller Avenue in Hollywood, close to the Institute, which was on Hollywood
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