This Writer’s Characters Leaving Her Sleepless

Leslie Lehr Spirson is conflicted on these sultry summer days.

The pool in the backyard of her Woodland Hills home calls out to her, especially on days when her young daughters are off at camp. But these are also the only days when she can write uninterrupted. And, well into a new novel, Spirson is hungry to write.

“I’m on page 136,” she says. “It’s going very well. At night my characters wake me up.”

Earlier this year, Spirson published her first novel, “66 Laps.” Winner of the 1998 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society gold medal for best novella, the book is a tautly written cautionary tale about love, motherhood and infidelity in Southern California, published by Villard, an imprint of Random House.

Like the book’s protagonist, Audrey Hastings, Spirson was a competitive swimmer, back in her hometown of Upper Arlington, Ohio. And she still swims laps, though not as doggedly as Audrey, who uses the pool to dull her alarm at her first gray hairs and her fears that her art director husband has been unfaithful.

Instead of 66 laps (the equivalent of a mile), Spirson says she manages about 20.

“I try not to count. It gets too obsessive.”

The book received glowing reviews, despite dark, even disturbing aspects. Inevitably, reviewers praised its cinematic quality--no surprise, given that Spirson is a graduate of the prestigious USC film school. Although the film school is now handsomely housed, Spirson jokes that when she went there it consisted of a cluster of Quonset huts.

“There was a sign over the door that read: ‘Reality ends here,’ and they were right,” says Spirson.

Although she is a few years older than her 32-year-old protagonist, Spirson is like Audrey in many ways. She has been married for more than a dozen years to a man somewhat older than she is, Jon Spirson.

An art director who works mostly on commercials, Jon Spirson is currently doing what so many other industry workers are doing--watching the family’s bank balance decline as they wait out the current strike by the guild representing actors who make commercials.

Although Hollywood couples like the Spirsons know their income will vary wildly, the months-long strike has taken its toll.

It’s always the same, she says: “When there’s good times, you stockpile your money. When there’s bad times, you just hope it doesn’t last too long.”

As a graduate of one of the most influential film schools in the world, Spirson had big Hollywood dreams. “I wanted to be running a film studio by now,” she says. But family life changed all that. After Juliette, now 11, was born, Spirson had to deal with some of the hard truths that Hollywood mothers, if not wives, inevitably face.

“I considered myself a babe in Hollywood, dressing up and trying to look good,” says Spirson. But then you find yourself in the park with all the other moms, the baby spitting up on you, and keenly aware that your attractive husband goes to work every day with some of the most beautiful and “pneumatic women” in the world.

Spirson’s first response was to start jotting down her observations on being a new mother, often only a paragraph or two.

“I was going baby nuts and writing little things,” she recalls. Her mother, a psychotherapist with a doctorate in child development, assured her that she had the makings of a book.

That first book--a humorous guide to parenting called “Welcome to CLUB MOM,” was published in 1991. Two books for grandmothers followed.

“I never called myself a writer until someone gave me a check,” says Spirson, whose first published work was a poem she wrote in fourth grade that appeared in a children’s magazine.

Now the mother of a second daughter, 8-year-old Caty Joy, Spirson wrote the screenplay for “Heartless,” an indie released in 1997. But “66 Laps” is her first foray into taking aspects of her life and transforming them into fiction.

“It was the first time I used real stuff and twisted it,” Spirson says. At first, she felt she was cheating by mixing autobiographical detail with leaps of the imagination. Then she began to enjoy having her protagonist do things she chose not to do.

“That’s what’s great about fiction,” she says. “You can explore things that you wouldn’t necessarily act on in real life.”

The overlap with her own life is sufficient, however, that she has had at least one friend ask her if she ever cheated on her husband (no, she assured her). And whenever she talks about the book at local book clubs, women inevitably get into such nitty-gritty, real-life matters as whether they would tell a friend if her husband was having an affair and how vulnerable they are, on days when they feel fat and past their prime, to the least interest shown by a good-looking kid behind the counter at Blockbuster.

Winning the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner prize, given annually by a group of Faulkner enthusiasts based in New Orleans, was a huge boost, she says. “I was like Cinderella,” she recalls. The group booked her into a hotel suite with a fabulous view of the Mississippi, and the first night she met writers Shelby Foote and Ron Shelton.

The next night, before she was able to receive her award at a ceremony that was to include best-selling author Anne Rice, the city was evacuated because of Hurricane Georges. The black-tie awards event was canceled.

“I felt like I was back in the pumpkin patch, doing laundry and taking my kids to school,” she says. The group gave her her medal the following year, although, she notes, “I didn’t get the suite overlooking the Mississippi.”

Her work-in-progress is about secrets and the damage they can do. She takes the fact that the characters are waking her up in the middle of the night to tell her what they are going to do next as a good sign. Like “66 Laps,” the new book will have its dark side. But, the next book, she promises, “is going to be very light.”

*

Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.