Defiantly focused on hope

“MOM often compared herself to crabgrass. No matter what you do to it, she pops back the next day,” said Terry Ryan, the author of “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” the true-life tale of her late mother, Evelyn Ryan, married to an abusive drunk, with 10 kids to raise, no money and no profession to speak of.

Evelyn Ryan managed to do it by entering product contests sponsored by ad agencies, and winning. A fad throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, the contests required entrants to write poems, limericks, jingles and sometimes just statements, in 25 words or fewer, about the merits of whatever product the companies were hawking, whether it was Dr. Pepper, Beech-Nut gum, Western Auto products or Purina dog chow, and Evelyn Ryan won more than her fair share.

“She had a batting average of .250,” said Terry Ryan, who calculated that her mother won one contest out of four in some 24 years of competing. That talent netted everything from luggage to TV sets, a car, a freezer, a shopping spree though the local supermarket, and Arthur Murray dance shoes. Her ability to churn out catchy appliance jingles such as “My Frisk-the-Frigidaire, Clean-the-Cupboards-Bare Sandwich” enabled the family to buy a house and later saved that very house from foreclosure.

Like mother, like daughter

IT is the eve of the release of the film adaptation, which opened Friday in Los Angeles and stars Julianne Moore as Terry’s resilient mom and Woody Harrelson as her feckless and offhandedly brutal dad. The 59-year-old Ryan and her 61-year-old brother, Bruce, are sitting in the sunroom of her home atop a hill in San Francisco -- a view of the bay stretching before them, the sounds of children’s voices from the nearby elementary school wafting up from below.

Dressed in a battered blue shirt embossed with faded palm trees, the author is lean and spare, her once dark locks having fallen out because of chemotherapy, leaving gray tufts all over her head. “I like my hair now. I never had the chance to have a buzz cut. This is it,” she said wryly, running her hand through what’s left.

Two weeks after the completion of the film last October, Ryan -- who’d been suffering double vision and balance problems for months -- was diagnosed with brain cancer. There were lesions on her brain and her lungs, most of which have been removed, she said, as she pointed to a scar across her collarbone.

Her missing hair makes her seem less bereft than uncluttered, as if she’s been stripped bare to reveal a kind of buoyant essence, the deep creases in her face only serving to emphasize her toothy Midwestern smile. Still, during a recent screening when she saw herself with hair -- the real Ryan family appears at the end of the movie -- she couldn’t stop looking at its luxuriance.

Her mother’s resilience seems appropriate today, many years later. “I think she had a wonderful acceptance, which she taught us,” said Ryan, who still goes by her childhood nickname, “Tuff.” “You just ignore the buzzing in the background and continue with your own writing or reading or studying or whatever. It was a great lesson for us all. You can live through almost anything.”

“Focus your mind. Just eliminate the noise,” added Bruce, a former lawyer turned massage therapist.

Adapted into a screenplay and directed by Jane Anderson, perhaps best known as the writer-director of the HBO film “Normal,” the film is a witty examination of the contesting phenomenon, one that ironically captures both the peppy and naive consumerism of competitive jingle writing (shot in the black and white of the day, with Moore breaking the fourth wall to address the audience) and the determination, and chutzpah, of a mother ferociously working on her rhymes amid a family watching TV in the living room and a husband bellowing with rage in the kitchen. According to both the book and the movie, the Ryans were so poor that Evelyn was once forced to serve her family a soup that had been invaded by bugs and tried to pretend that the many-legged creatures were simply spices.

“I’ve never seen a piece of literature or a film deal with a housewife in quite this way,” Anderson said. “Usually the pieces I’ve read or seen involving a woman stuck in a household ... those characters succumb to despair or rage. I was astounded to read a piece that goes against every feminist bone in my body.”

Anderson identified with Terry Ryan, who in the film and in real life repeatedly asks her mother why she stayed. “By the time she finished that memoir, she understood that her mother was a woman of independent happiness,” Anderson said. “She intelligently and deliberately found a way to accept her situation and not only to endure it but also to find joy in it. That’s very complex and difficult to understand. It’s Buddhist in nature.”

The film also examines the parents’ relationship as well as the mother’s lack of escape routes -- she was poor and Catholic, with no social service, church or family to support her. While it worked to heighten the drama of the story, the refocusing also helped to attract “a star of Woody Harrelson’s caliber, or he wouldn’t have found enough in the material to want to play a role like that,” said producer Jack Rapke, bluntly summarizing the commercial considerations facing a nongenre production with a female protagonist.

An outspoken vegan known for being anti-violence and pro-environment, Harrelson is nothing like his on-screen protagonist -- an alternately sweet and broken man, a onetime aspiring Irish tenor whose vocal cords had been slashed in a car accident, a twist of fate that relegated him to a lifetime of work as a machinist. “Woody was delightful,” said Ryan. “He would spend his off days in Toronto going from hotel to hotel warning the cleaning crew about the dangers of toxic cleansers. I’m not kidding. And he would ride his Segway all around the lot.”

Ryan and her siblings didn’t watch Harrelson’s on-screen antics with the same point of view as the audience will. “In the movie, one of the first scenes is Dad with the skillet pounding Mom’s new freezer,” said Ryan. “Everyone in the theater was horrified, including the little kids who were in the movie. Bruce and [my sister] and I started to laugh. We just said, ‘That’s our dad.’ ... It’s getting to know a person for who he is and appreciating him for that and not being affected by his behavior anymore.”

“For all of us, as we grew up, we all had our confrontation with the old man,” said Bruce Ryan.

“I had many,” said Terry Ryan. “I was the one who jumped on him when he was approaching Mom more than one time. Before I went to college, I was really big and very muscular.” That came from “working at the Chief [the local supermarket],” she said, flexing her arms in a mock muscleman pose, “and being involved in sports. I managed to throw him against the dining room wall when he was yelling at Mom one time, and he stopped.”

A chronicle of determination

IN the years since she left home and ultimately settled in San Francisco with her longtime partner, Pat Holt, Ryan worked mostly as a technical writer, creating computer manuals for entities such as Fireman’s Fund and cartooning for the San Francisco Chronicle and writing poetry in her off time.

She’d always dreamed of writing her mother’s story, and she started before Evelyn died. Her mother, then suffering from cancer, would sit on the front porch nightly reading what she wrote. Then she would read the whole thing again the next night because she’d forgotten that she’d already read it. “And she was just as delighted the second time as she was the first,” Ryan said.

Evelyn died in 1998, and it was while cleaning out her mother’s house that Ryan discovered a treasure trove of material that enabled her to give the book and movie its specific detail. “Normally a person would find clothes in a dresser, but it was just paper. It was sort of an archeological discovery from present to past of what she had won, what she had written, and what others had written to her. She had used every empty space to store paper. All the contest entry blanks -- she had done copies for herself so she had known what she had sent in. She had a contest notebook for every year she contested, which was like 24 years. Every poem and every jingle she had ever written was in those notebooks,” said Ryan, who ultimately quit her job to write the book, which was published in 2001 and became a national bestseller.

For the last year, while she’s been recovering, she hasn’t written at all in her downstairs office, which is filled with pictures of her mother, a spry, vital figure even late in life. “My fingers keep hitting all the wrong keys,” said Ryan. “Even handwriting is impossible.” She hasn’t been able to read much because of the double vision, so she rests. “I spend a lot of time watching poker on television.”

“She is her mother,” said Anderson, who’s become a close friend. “Terry has a strength I don’t think any of us can comprehend. Like her mother, she has this paranormal optimism. Even in the depths of chemo, she found humor as it was going on. Pat, her partner, said to me that [when she discovered she had cancer] Terry didn’t go through all the various stages of anger and denial. She went immediately to acceptance, which is very Evelyn. She said, ‘Well, my life will never be the same. Now what?’ Move on. What Terry believes is what Lance Armstrong did -- which is to overcome a terrible disease and move on. That’s the theme of the film and Evelyn and Kelly’s life: stamina. And joy.”

Ryan was eagerly looking forward to the film’s debut. She recalled her first meeting with Julianne Moore, who asked her if there was anything she should be doing to play Evelyn.

“ ‘Are you kidding? You’re perfect!’ ” Ryan told her. “She would drop dead to be played by Julianne Moore. She said, ‘I’m sorry about the hair.’ She had a wig, with big hair. My mother always had thinner, curly hair. ‘Are you kidding? Our mother would die to have [that] hair.’ ” Ryan said with a hoot.

“Mom would have loved this,” she added happily. “She always wanted to be a movie star.”