First-Person Account : Author Sue Miller Enlivens a Meeting of a Longtime Book Club

It was no appearance on “Larry King Live,” calculated to sell a zillion books.

Last week, when novelist Sue Miller came to Los Angeles to promote her new book, “For Love,” she took time out from the usual round of bookstore signings to attend a meeting of a 14-year-old book club in a Santa Monica living room.

In fact, the event didn’t result in the sale of a single copy of “For Love.”

Miller’s publisher, HarperCollins, had sent complimentary copies of the book to the club, which has been meeting monthly since 1978 in the home of RAND Corp. consultant Susan Bell.

It was the seventh book-club stop on the current tour for Miller, whose first novel, “The Good Mother,” has sold an astonishing 1.5 million copies since it was published in 1986. (According to Jane Beirn, Miller’s publicist, most first novels sell 5,000 to 7,500 copies.)

In some ways, Friday’s session was much like a regular meeting of the all-female group. The brownies were to die for, and the conversation was as good as you’d expect among well-educated women who read as regularly as they breathe. Filled with more than a dozen regulars, one from as far away as Santa Barbara, Bell’s cove-ceilinged living room was transformed into a cozy boxful of book lovers.

Miller might have been just another member of the well-tended group. The 50-ish author fielded non-hostile questions from women who obviously knew her work and were curious, albeit politely so, about how she made the leap from reading to writing.

As Miller’s expressive fingers toyed nervously with a rubber band, she said she had always written, including a “terrible novel” penned right out of Radcliffe. “There’s a lot of juvenilia that I’ve thrown away.”

She mentioned the birth of her son, a subsequent divorce and the years of scrambling that followed, when there was little time for anything but single parenting and survival jobs, including working in day care. She always read voraciously, she said, but she didn’t begin writing again “in a disciplined way” until she was 35 or 36 and began to take writing classes.

People wanted to know if it had been tough to find her own voice. She conceded that there had been a brief time when she had tried to write like Joan Didion and a few other “depressed people.” She named writers she loved, including the 19th-Century Russian greats: “Tolstoy--those guys. . . . But I can’t really claim them as influences,” she said. “I can’t blame them in any way.”

Miller said she has come to terms with the fact that her personal style is characterized more by clarity than idiosyncrasy. When she finds herself stymied in her own work, she sometimes reads John Cheever or Helen Garner, the Australian novelist who also wrote the screenplay for the film “The Last Days of Chez Nous.” Those writers don’t influence her so much as un-stick her. Garner, she said, “gives me a good swift kick.”

Miller described “The Good Mother” as the most plotted of her books, explaining that, as a new novelist, mastering plotting was the most urgent thing she had had to do. She tried to move on in “Family Pictures,” which she described as denser and almost plotless. She mentioned a new book that was beginning to take shape in her mind but declined to talk about it in detail. Being a writer is such a privileged position, she said, with each book “you try to do the next hardest thing to do.”

Miller said she didn’t know if the film rights of the new book had been sold yet, and, no, she had not seen either the film version of “The Good Mother,” in which Diane Keaton starred, or the recent TV movie based on “Family Pictures.” Yes, she had avoided them on purpose, she said, unwilling to muddy her own vision of the stories.

According to Bell, who has a garden consulting business in addition to her RAND duties, the Santa Monica group formed almost 15 years ago when she and fellow former English majors felt the need to read more books by women. They met at her house “because years ago I was a single mother and couldn’t afford a baby-sitter.” Since then, the women, who have numbered as many as 30, have read more than 150 books, from Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” to Janet Frame’s “Living in the Maniototo.”

Miller’s publicist learned about Bell’s club from Doug Dutton, owner of the Brentwood bookstore that bears his name, where group members buy their books (always paperbacks, for economy’s sake).

Beirn said the decision to have Miller visit book clubs was “exploratory.” The publishing house knew Miller was enormously popular with women readers (the principal buyers of fiction) who respond to such recurrent Miller themes as the price women pay for passion. The outreach to women’s book clubs was an attempt “to tap into a converted audience,” Beirn said. (“We were hoping for media coverage as well,” she acknowledged.)

In organizing the book-club visits, Beirn said she learned the groups were even more popular than she had realized. The Tattered Cover, a legendary independent bookstore in Denver, works with 125 groups. Publishers and booksellers increasingly believe that book clubs can generate the word of mouth that can rescue a book from obscurity and give it cult status, if not a place on the best-seller list.

In citing examples of books that had been boosted by book clubs, Ken Wagner, co-manager of Book Soup in West Hollywood, mentioned Pam Houston’s “Cowboys Are My Weakness.” Wagner said Book Soup regularly orders books for two dozen clubs locally.

Miller told the women in Santa Monica that she had belonged to a book club like theirs for seven or eight years, and because of it, she had read work she would never have read on her own. Each of the clubs she had visited on her current tour had been quite different, she said. The one in New York was very formal, with a paid leader and no frivolous personal chitchat.

The club in Washington was especially fractious. “They love to argue,” she said, deftly shaping her comic account of the argument that broke out between two members over a minor passage in “For Love.” Miller said she thought the wine served at the Washington meeting was a factor. “Wine or no wine seems to make a big difference.”

In Santa Monica, decaf coffee was served.

Someone asked Miller if she didn’t think the presence of the author might keep book-club members from saying exactly how they felt about the book. She conceded that her presence could be inhibitive. “That’s why I leave after an hour and 15 minutes, so people can whale on the book if they want to.”

It was as graceful an exit as you could hope to write.