Family Secrets Are Grist for Her Mill

Twenty-seven years ago, when Merrill Joan Gerber was fresh out of Stanford University’s writing program, she proudly dedicated her first book to her parents.

But after her father read the collection of short stories titled “Stop Here, My Friend,” he complained, “Merrill, why did you have to tell so many family secrets?”

Gerber recalled the painful moment recently, adding, “If you don’t tell what you know--and what do you know so well as family secrets?--then you’re not giving all that you can give.”

Now, 16 books later, the Sierra Madre author is still transforming family secrets into richly invented stories. But despite being an established author whose work is regularly reviewed in national publications, both fame and wide critical acclaim have eluded her.

Often, her stories originate from the Jewish home life that she experienced during the last half-century, in Brooklyn, Miami Beach, Los Angeles. Other times, they come from the suburban surroundings of her tiny hometown in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

A slender woman with short reddish-brown hair, she still speaks with an accent that clearly says that she once lived in Brooklyn.

“I write about being an assimilated but unassimilated Jew,” said Gerber, 53, sitting amid the methodical clutter of her home office. “You’re assimilated because you live in the world with everybody else. But some essence of your psyche is Jewish because it was formed in that caldron of immigrant life.”

At times, the stories are no more dramatic than tales of neighbors who war over a dog yapping the night away, or a trip by two elderly Jewish sisters to see the Phil Donahue show at NBC in Burbank.

Or there is the chronicling of a sudden death that occurs amid the Rose Parade float preparations of a small community much like Sierra Madre or the slow death of a Melrose Avenue antique dealer (in a tale inspired by her father’s leukemia).

Then there are much darker stories: a husband abuses his wife and adopted child, and the Night Stalker casts a killer’s pall across Los Angeles County.

Her titles conjure up a richness of place and characters: “See Bonnie & Clyde Death Car,” “The Blood Pressure Bunch and the Alzheimer’s Gang,” “Chicken Skin Sandwiches” and “King of the World.”

Her latest collection, “Chattering Man,” contains a novella featuring Anna Goldman, a feisty, elderly Jew who lives in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles among the stoop-shouldered, worn-out widows and widowers pulling their wire-wheeled grocery carts along Santa Monica Boulevard.

These old people, Gerber writes, dream their movie-producer children will buy them condominiums with soundproof walls, “with no Armenians, no Russians, no gays, no babies, no aspiring musicians, no noises, no smells, . . . no landladies.”

In Anna, Gerber says, there is bit of herself and of her mother, who lives in a Temple City nursing home.

“My mother always says to me: ‘If you lived this life, you could write a book about it.’ ” Then her mother usually adds, much the way Anna might, “But who would want to read it? It’s about old people.”

Agents and publishers have told Gerber the same thing about some of her stories, though she steadfastly believes her work deserves a wider audience.

Her view of herself as a writer, she said, represents a feeling of both “hope and shame” developed over the last 46 years. When she was 7, she began to observe and write intensely about her surroundings, starting with the customers who came to her aunt’s home beauty shop.

Later, as a writing student, she was nurtured by her University of Florida teacher, Andrew Lytle, a literary review editor, critic and novelist. Later, she became a student of Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who for 25 years directed Stanford University’s writing program.

Her hopefulness, Gerber said, is based on a measure of commercial and artistic success. More than 65 of her short stories have been published in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker and literary quarterlies.

Others have been published in such magazines as Redbook. And therein lies some of her shame, she said. In a 1967 review of her first novel, Time magazine identified Gerber as someone “who writes for women’s magazines.” The suggestion, Gerber said, was that her work was therefore inferior.

But, Gerber says, she has written about what she knows: growing up Jewish and being a housewife and mother. These circumstances, she said, inspire “women’s stories,” not the so-called “big stories” of war and peace and politics, the topics handled by some of her male counterparts.

Among Gerber’s champions is writer and critic Cynthia Ozick, an intellectual heavyweight in New York literary circles. Ozick says the clarity of her prose and her understanding of human nature make Gerber “a very important American artist.”

Indeed, Gerber has won literary awards, including the O. Henry Award in 1986 for a story in The Atlantic, and the Andrew Lytle Fiction Prize for a 1985 story in the Sewanee Review.

Still, Ozick said Gerber “is a profoundly under-recognized writer.”

Ozick herself gave a somewhat unfavorable review of Gerber’s first book in 1965. But after a bitterly intense correspondence, the two women met and became, in Ozick’s estimation, “the closest of imaginable friends.”

It was Ozick who nominated Gerber’s critically acclaimed “King of the World” for a Pushcart Press editor’s award in 1989. The book eventually was chosen for the annual award for “overlooked manuscripts of enduring literary value.”

Feminist author Susan Brownmiller, in her Chicago Tribune review of the book, said: “Stephen King isn’t half as frightening as Merrill Joan Gerber, nor does he get raves from Cynthia Ozick. . . . So sit up and take notice.”

Before the praise, however, there had been five years of rejections by 26 major publishers. Sorely depressed, Gerber gave up trying to get it published and went into therapy. But it was the publication, not the therapy, she said, that ended the depression.

“King of the World” is a raw, powerful account of family violence.

Although it is based on people Gerber has known, she says, it is by no means based on her own marriage to Joe Spiro, a Pasadena Community College history professor. Theirs, she said, has been a happy marriage. They have three grown daughters who Gerber said appreciate the craft of writing and understand that good fiction often encompasses family-inspired stories that don’t always have happy endings.

Still, she said, “The truer the stories are, the darker they get. Probably, finally, when you tell all you know, you are in a pit where there may be a little light showing through--maybe.”

Gerber no longer alerts relatives to her publishing. “All my relatives have taken offense at one time or another because of my work,” she said.

But regardless of complaints from relatives or reviewers, Gerber continues to write because of what she calls a debt to her history. “After I rail and rant, I go back and turn on the computer, and I write something.”