A Novel Island:

This month will see the publication of Sullivan's Island: A Lowcountry Tale, a novel by island native Dorothea Benton Frank. With over half a million copies being printed for the first edition of this paperback original release by Jove (an imprint of Penguin), Frank's publishers are expecting great things out of this book. And why shouldn't they? The South has always been a setting of choice for great American novels, plays and movies. And this Southern novel comes with glowing endorsements by Pat Conroy, John Berendt, Anne Rivers Siddons, and Fern Michaels, which pretty much covers every potential market from romance to mainstream to literary.
We caught up with Dorothea Benton Frank at her New Jersey home as she prepared to tour the country in support of her book. She'll be appearing at the Barnes & Noble in Towne Centre on February 12, with additional appearances scheduled at Chapter Two Bookstore downtown, as well as stores in Savannah, Beaufort and Columbia.
On the morning I called the author from Charleston, Charleston had received its first real snowfall since 1989. A good inch of snow was still resting on cars at ten in the morning. Up North, significantly larger accumulation had cancelled school, and I could hear the sound of kids running around in the background as she answered the phone.

Dorothea Benton Frank: Yes, this is Dottie Frank speaking.

East Cooper Monthly: So it's Dottie and not Dorothea?

DBF: Well Dorothea is my name, but my friends call me Dottie.

ECM: Okay.

DBF: So therefore, if you want to be my friend, you can call me dottie!

ECM: Well, I guess that's what I'll do.

I've read about 300 of the 400 pages of Sullivan's Island, set in 1963 and 1999, and was impressed with how easily the book brings to mind the distinct qualities of the island, and of downtown Charleston as well. The cultural resonance is firm but subtle; it's not a book that tries to jam Southern culture down your throat, but rather lets you experience it through the lives of characters at home in the setting, in this case, fourteen-year-old Susan, a middle child and the creative member of a brood of kids growing up with almost absentee parents, a father whose dedication to building a good school in a black part of the county has earned him some enemies, but whose mercurial temper makes him violent, and a mother who can't handle the weight of half a dozen children and retreats most of the day to her room and pills, all piled together in a century-old beachfront house called The Island Gamble, and still owned and occupied by Susan's grandparents.
What helps save the family is the children's carefully planned demolition of the black housekeeper's outhouse (the grandfather, Tipa, will not allow her to use the family's bathroom) after yet another housekeeper quits, leading to the hiring of Livvie, whose spiritual and emotional strength Susan calls upon thirty six years later, as she's dealing with the the break-up of her marriage and her own daughter's adolescence.

ECM: I'm about three quarters through the book, so don't tell me the ending...

DBF: (laughing) Okay...

ECM: ...but I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. Well, let's start with some biographical information. It's obvious you love Sullivan's Island, and you love this area...

DBF: Very much.

ECM: So what are you doing in New Jersey?

DBF: Oh God! I live here for love. I married a yankee. My husband's business is in New Jersey, so that's why we live here.

ECM: So how long have you been away?

DBF: Well, I moved from Charleston in, what was it, 1973, and I moved to San Francisco and I lived there for a year, and then I moved to New York, and thought, Well I'll live here for a year, and then I'll come home and marry some good old boy, you know, drink beer for the rest of my life and eat oysters I guess, and it just didn't happen like that.
I met my husband and got married, and we've got two children, and you do what you gotta do, right? (laughs) I come to Charleston a lot, though. I am probably on Sullivan's Island four or five times a year, and I bring my children down in the summer and we spend about a month in the summer there.

ECM: It certainly seems like you're up to date on what's going on around here.

DBF: I hope so!

In fact, the book reads very much like an insider's view, enough so that when Pat Conroy passed on the book to Anne Rivers Siddons to read, he told his colleague, "She's one of us." Over the years Frank has done lots of work in fundraising in the New York area, but had not really pursued a career in writing. So where did the idea of a novel come from?

ECM: How did you end up starting to write?

DBF: Oh golly that's a long story, wanna hear it? (laughs) I guess I've always really loved to write, but I never thought about, you know, writing for publication. I've done an awful lot of volunteer work over the years, and I've always seemed to be the one that ended up writing the newsletter...
But five years this past October, my mother passed away. and my sister, who was the executor of the estate, said what are we gonna do with her house, because this house had been in our family for about a hundred years...

ECM: Like the Island Gamble, right?

DBF: Exactly, except it was the Vagabond Villa, at Station 25. It didn't make any sense for me to buy the house, because I couldn't manage it from a thousand miles away. So the house was sold.
And when it was sold, all of a sudden I had lost my mother, and my sense of place.
Then I started to really write, and the next thing I knew I had seven hundred pieces of paper stacked up next to my printer. and I thought, God, this might be a book.
And a friend of mine who was in the advertising business read it, and told me, "Dottie I didn't know you could write," and I said, 'well I didn't know either!' and he asked what he could do to help me get it published. Well, I didn't know anything about the publishing industry...I thought I'd need a mentor, I'd need an agent, a publisher... I didn't know how he could help with that stuff, and I didn't know anything about how it worked.

As it turned out, her friend knew a popular author of romance novels, Fern Michaels, who lives in the Lowcountry. Michaels took Benton, and her first draft, under her wing.

DBF: Fern and I have become just excellent friends. She read my work, and helped me shape it, and really mentored me through the whole process of becoming a writer. And when I finally had something that looked like a reasonably polished draft of the story, we found a woman who used to be an editor, who decided that she wanted to become an agent. And so she agented the book, and had an auction and I sold it in a week.

ECM: Wow, that's great. And in fact, it really is. Rarely do you see a combination of first-time agent and first-time writer go out and secure a contract from one of the nation's largest publishers.

DBF: Yeah. It was crazy!

Crazy indeed. Penguin/Jove determined that by releasing the book as a paperback original, more of the cross-over market could be reached immediately. Still, the initial print-run of 525,000 copies is astounding. And the author herself generated the energy for that decision by seeking out other Southern authors to read the galleys for her. And she started with Pat Conroy...

Finding Pat Conroy

DBF: I went on this campaign, to try and find Pat Conroy, because I love his work. Well everywhere I went, it didn't matter where I was going, I would say, do you know Pat Conroy? And of course mostly they'd say, No.
So I asked about five hundred people if they knew Pat Conroy, and finally I found one who did. It was Gloria Steinem. Anyhow Gloria and I became friends because we were serving on a board together, and when I asked her she said, "Yes, I know Pat Conroy, and he owes me a favor."
And I said, "Oh God, let it be me." (laughs)

Conroy was sent the manuscript. A few months went by. "I was thoroughly depressed," Frank remembers. "It was like, I was taking a bath in the middle of the afternoon because I hadn't heard from Pat Conroy! It was ridiculous." But like so much of her novel's story, something magical was about to happen.

DBF: So one day the phone rings, I'm sleeping, my 14 year old daughter's home, she answers the phone, and comes screaming into the bedroom. "Mama, Mama, get off the bed, Pat Conroy's on the phone!"

She jumped out of bed, not knowing whether to take it seriously: "First of all, this is like when Oprah calls, you think it's a joke, right?" she laughs. But after ten minutes, she realized that she was indeed talking with the author of Beach Music and Prince of Tides; she also realized that he had read her manuscript and liked it.
They talked for over an hour, finding some odd and not-so-odd things in common--her father went to the citadel, Conroy's a Citadel grad; both come "from big crazy Irish Catholic families," and strangely enough, they each own two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, "one the runt and one the pick," Frank says.
Besides his own imprimatur, Pat helped garner an endorsement from Anne Rivers Siddons. "He told me he'd called 'Annie' and said, 'Listen, she's one of our tribe'" according to Frank.
That telephone conversation eventually found its way into the revision, as the main character Susan gets a telephone call from the editor of the Post & Courier about writing a column for the paper.

ECM: Now in the novel, Susan had the advantage of writing under a nom de plume. You have no such advantage. So what I want to know is, what did you have to leave out of this book?

DBF: What did I leave out of this book...(laughing)...well I'd say that the first draft of this book was very very autobiographical. And when I went back to read it I realized that it was boring. My life just isn't that exciting.
So then I had to start makin' stuff up.

What got made up was pretty good. The structure of this is surprisingly smooth for a first novel, tracing in a parallel structure the teenage and middle-aged life of Susan and the changes in her family against the subtle changes of Sullivan's Island. But the book is as much about what doesn't change as it is about what does, about the steady flow of life beneath it all that holds the characters together. Nowhere in the book is it more apparent than in the case of Livvie, the new housekeeper. Frank draws her in realistic and loving fashion, infusing the book with enough Gullah to be understood without losing the reader.

DBF: The first draft had a lot more Gullah in it, but the publishers told me Gullah would never sell...

ECM: In the case of Livvie, though, that language really clicks.

DBF: Yes! I love the character of Livvie.

ECM: Is she based on someone?

DBF: Yes she is. She's based on a woman named Ellah Wright, who raised me. She was just a wonderful wonderful woman, and my whole family behaved better when she was around. You know, she had enormous strength, she was a very spiritual woman, she didn't suffer fools well; neither do I, and neither does anybody in my family. She really taught us all how to behave!

ECM: Most Charlestonians either stay, or they go away and come back... now you've been gone for a while... think you might ever come back to stay?

DBF: (in a conspiratorial whisper) I have been plotting my return for the last ten years.

Dottie Frank currently co-owns a house on Sullivan's with a friend, and has almost finished the first draft of her next novel, entitled Plantation.

That Crazy Catholic Thing

Dottie Frank's website, www.dotfrank.com, includes a soundbite of "what Sister Mary Melanoma said to me when I left Charleston for the big city..." The stern woman's voice warns, "And don't come back... until you've redeemed yourselves!"
"Hey let me ask you a question," I said after our interview was officially over.
"Go ahead."
"...have you redeemed yourself?" I asked in my best Sister Mary Melanoma voice.
"God, I hope so," she laughed. "I had an eighth grade teacher, Sister Miriam, principal of Stella Maris when I was a child. She was just terrifying. She made me feel that if I wore nylon stockings when I was fourteen it was a near occasion of sin...
"It turned out that when my mama died, I guess Sister Miriam was eighty-something years old. It was literally a dark and stormy night, I'm out in the lobby of the funeral home, smoking a cigarette with a girlfriend of mine. and the door opens up and the lightning is crashing all around, and out of the rain and the thunder and the dark who comes in and catches me smoking at my mama's funeral but Sister Miriam! I just wanted to die!
"And she said, 'Oh my darling child, when I heard about your mother I knew I had to come.' And all these years this woman who I thought was so stern, turned out to be the sweetest woman in the whole world.
"So I guess I've redeemed myself at this point. I certainly hope so."
"That Catholic stuff stays with you," I said.
"Oh god, yes."
"And you know what's funny, and you'll understand this where some non-Catholics might not, but, one of the surest signs that a Catholic wrote the novel is the existence of a guy like Roger Dodds in it." Dodds is involved in what Pat Conroy referred to as "the funniest sex scene I have ever encountered." Rich in detail and character as its namesake, Sullivan's Island will be published February 2000.

This article has been re-published in its entirety and originally appeared in "The Best of East Cooper"