Novelist Cynthia Freeman: It’s Never Too Late

When Cynthia Freeman’s first novel was published in 1970, it never occurred to her to lie about her age; she was 55. Now, 16 years and eight best sellers later, it is, of course, too late.

Not that she wants to lie, or even duck the issue. “If I had written it (“World Full of Strangers,” her first novel) today, people wouldn’t have even asked me my age. All the glamour women are 50,” she said. “People have suddenly discovered that it is perfectly true that a person can be 65 and on, and be sexually active, and eat all the spicy food without reaching for the Alka-Seltzer.”

On the other hand, Freeman resists being slotted into any category. When a friend pointed out she was entitled to pay reduced fare on the Muni, she recalled replying, “I am a senior citizen? You must be joking!” More seriously, she explained “I won’t because I am not indigent--I can afford to put 60 cents into that box. But I do tell my age. It is no privilege to be 65--that is a fact of your life, honey. Sure, I am in touch with my own mortality, but I don’t dwell on it.

“Of course, people on very fixed incomes, especially old people, and anyone indigent, should have benefits, but the truth of the matter is that when you get hooked into (special privileges and facilities), you don’t grow. Those are the demeaning things that set you apart from the mainstream of life.”

Freeman has no intention of moving into the slow lane. “I travel a lot, I go to social functions, and I work because I love it,” she said, adding that she is “hooked” on writing. “It has nothing to do with fame or fortune or celebrity--nothing.”

She lives and works in an apartment on Nob Hill packed with antiques and objets d’art, and with a huge view of the city and the bay. She says the first thing she does in the morning is turn on the stereo, and all day long it plays, whether she is at home or not. Hearing it as she comes in the door is “the next best thing to having someone throw their arms around you,” she explained. Small, blonde and trim, she sees no reason why people shouldn’t look as youthful as they can, although she cautioned that, “what has to stop is women who feel compelled to have their face done after one or two times. The face can stand just so much stress.”

No Writing Courses

Her latest book is “Seasons of the Heart” (G. P. Putnam’s), already a best seller. The paperback edition of “Illusions of Love” (Berkeley) came out earlier this year, and she is about to start the first draft of novel No. 9.

She has never taken any writing courses and said, “I just do what’s comfortable for me. I don’t believe there are any rules--that’s why it is called creative writing. And once you have made your point, you don’t have to walk on the beach for 20 more minutes in the moonlight.” She rejects labeling her books romantic novels. “They have love and romance in them” she said, “but I don’t believe in invading people’s privacy. I write about the human dilemma.”

Usually, her novels have Jewish backgrounds because, she explained, “it is easier for me to write about the Jewish experience. They are Jewish themes, but they could be universal--love, hate, peace, war, cradle, grave, self-hatred.” None of them is autobiographical, she said, “although obviously, there is a part of me in the books.”

Born in New York and brought up in San Francisco, Freeman decided in sixth grade that she had had enough of formal schooling. “I was just totally bored,” she said. “My parents obviously were not thrilled, but my mother, a well-educated English lady, realized what I needed. I had a tutor, and my mother gave me a lot of her time. I was reading Shakespeare at 11.”

At 15, Freeman decided she was ready for college, so she attended UC Berkeley as a non-matriculating student, auditing courses that interested her. “I was a chubby little kid with a lot of moxie,” she recalled. “I just walked in the classes with my books and pleated skirts and argyle sweaters and saddle shoes. I took it all very seriously, though.”

At 18, she married her grandmother’s doctor, Herbert Feinberg, who was 15 years her senior. “I met him when I was about 15,” she recalled. “I thought he was fabulous. We met again when I was 18, and the situation had reversed.” For the next few years she was content to be a wife and mother, but once her children--she had a daughter and a son--were in school, she said “I knew I wasn’t just going to sit around a card table and eat a lot of bridge mix. I wanted to be a person, not just a doctor’s wife, my children’s mother, my family’s daughter.”

‘Adored Beautiful Things’

She decided on a career as an interior decorator because, she said, “I have always adored beautiful things. I don’t have to own them, I just have to see or hear them--I wrote a poem about it once for one of my books, but the publisher cut it.”

But at the time, the late 1940s, she said, the wives of successful men did not go out to work. She repeats the dialogue with her husband when she asked at dinner one night, “Dear, would it offend you if I became an interior decorator?” “Why would that offend me?” he said. “People might think I have to work,” she answered. “That is their problem, if that is what they think,” he replied.

Looking back, Freeman acknowledges that “it is impossible for a woman to wear that many hats and do everything successfully. I compromised, which is what all women have to do. From 10 to 3 I was emancipated. After that, my life belonged to my family.”

Her 25-year career as a decorator ended when she was struck with a rare intestinal disorder, which for five years kept her in and out of hospitals. “I probably never would have turned to writing had I not been critically ill,” she said.

When she recovered, she decided she was no longer up to the physical stress of decorating. So she sat at her $37 portable typewriter and wrote “A World Full of Strangers.” It was based on a story she had started to write 20 years earlier.

When she finished, she said, she “had no idea how to go about publishing it.” So she went to the library and looked up the names of publishers. “Then I learned I needed an agent, so I went back to the library and found a book of agents and wrote the 25 top ones.” It was, she recalled, “a hysterical letter, humble but positive.” Obviously, she still had moxie. It was also effective--she got 19 requests to see the manuscript, at that point a towering 1,450 double-spaced pages.

Personal Tragedies

Since then, more than 10 million copies of her novels have been sold. But along with fame and fortune came a series of tragedies in her personal life: Her husband developed Alzheimer’s disease and eventually she had to place him in a nursing home; her daughter was killed in an accident, and a few months later her mother died. Writing became a kind of escape from pain.

Freeman’s immediate goal, she said, is to write two more novels. The next one is about a woman who “believes in true love and all those corny things called loyalty, motherhood, wifedom--which I just coined,” Freeman said. “She is one of a dying breed (in a time when) marriage seems so unimportant, not worth the effort. People are not pumping any blood into marriages.

“You know, and I know, people don’t communicate ever. One does the talking, and the other doesn’t do the listening.”

Book No. 10 may be a sequel to “A World Full of Strangers.”

After that, Freeman is pondering yet another career change--the lecture tour circuit.

“I think I have been rehearsing for this all my life,” she said.