The literary refuge that a good story offers to its reader is a place free of highlighters, Cliff Notes and pop quizzes'but life can be hard for the college student who loves to read for pleasure. While being put through the paces with standard university-issue Dante or textbook reading, many students long for stories that are more engaging and uplifting, as well as pressure-free.
\Good Harbor"" by Anita Diamant offers such a solution: It is a satisfying, engaging story with fairly simple prose that is also a quick read'it can be completed in two or three short afternoons.
""Good Harbor"" chronicles the development and evolution of the friendship of two middle-aged women who come into each other's lives at precisely the right time' Kathleen has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and is struggling through radiation treatments, as Joyce is struggling with career disillusionment and her increasingly distant relationships with her husband and daughter. When the women meet at their local temple, they immediately form a friendship, and as their lives become frantic, they spend afternoons walking up and down the sandy beach in their cape town in Massachusetts.
During these walks, the women deal with the pains of past losses and the tumultuousness of their chaotic lives, finding comfort and understanding in the friendship created by the resonance of their similar life experiences. Kathleen and Joyce's fluid exchanges are progressively well-developed throughout the novel, and the reader becomes captivated by the unresolved issues penetrating the lives of the women. Diamant leads the reader through the women's conversations and into the culmination of their friendship as one of the women must save her friend from making the mistake that could cost her everything.
Diamant writes from a Jewish perspective and a women's perspective, creating a tangible friendship between Kathleen and Joyce that paints the picture of female friendship as a divine gift of cathartic release from everyday life. Through this friendship, Diamant reminds us that although our lives are experienced separately, we are part of something greater, a support system of humanity in which we find meaning and connection in everyday dramas. This book truly is a good harbor for the busy college student, serving as a reminder of life's simple pleasures and that, sometimes, one cannot help but be in the right place at the right time.
The Daily Cardinal recently spoke with Anita Diamant.
The main characters in this novel are older women'why do you think college students in particular should read this book?
Well, for one thing, I hope that friendship in general is friendship, and that making a new friend is always part of what life is about, whatever your age is. One college student that I talked to who read it said she enjoyed it because it made her understand her mother better. I thought that was a nice comment. I know that for younger women, not necessarily college students, but women in their 20s who have known and who have friends and also have family members and friends who have had to go through breast cancer treatment, this has also been a good book for them in terms of getting a little bit of insight into what that experience is like.
You have done factual writing for many years. Has it been difficult for you to switch from that kind of writing to the freer prose of fiction?
Well, it wasn't hard; it was a different kind of challenge. It is freer, which means that everything is possible and there are lots of options at every turn. You can always choose to go in a different direction when writing fiction. You kind of know where you need to end. And if you're writing for a newspaper or magazines, of course, you know how long it needs to be as well. And [fiction] gives you lots of choices, which can be a little dizzying, but it's also very freeing. It's a mixed bag.
Do you think you would have become the fiction writer you are today without all of your years of experience?
Well, I don't think so. It's like imagining what your life would be like if you were born in a different place. I followed this particular career path and I didn't have novels in me when I started writing. It wasn't until I was around 40 that I decided that I wanted to try fiction, wanted to do something really different.
You've said that you devote two-thirds of your work time to self-editing. Don't you think that it takes away some of the spontaneity of the unconscious process of fiction writing?
Well, no, I don't think so. I think that unconscious writing, that one-third is the hardest part, the creating part. But I think that what makes for really good writing is re-writing. For me, sometimes what I come out with the first time is fine, but usually it can be improved by rewriting and revising many, many times over.
Do you feel that ""Good Harbor"" will be as much of a success, sales-wise or readership-wise, as ""The Red Tent"" was?
I can't make that prediction. I never would have predicted that ""The Red Tent"" would have done as well as it has'that's like asking for a second Cinderella story. So I am really grateful for that success and the book is doing quite well in paperback now, and book groups are picking it up which is really terrific. ""Good Harbor"" will have a different kind of audience; I think it has a really different kind of reaction'it's a really different kind of book.
What value do you feel that book groups have in a community?
I think they're really important, for many reasons. They are a source of community for people'they give people a way to connect and to talk about important things. Certainly they address books and literature, and their interpretations of things, but also they're essential for people to share what's important in their own lives. And I've been to book groups that have been meeting for 30 years! So these people have really been through a lot with each other, and it becomes a kind of'well, it's a real community. It's a friendship network; it's a real kind of extended family for folks.
Many of the sororities here on campus are known for having a large Jewish population'is the importance of friendship between women and a community between women something that is particularly stressed in present-day or traditional Jewish perspectives?
I don't think so. I don't think that's particularly more Jewish than not. I mean, there are certainly Jewish women's organizations but then in a way I think they're patterned on non-Jewish organizations that raise money and raise awareness for various issues, so there's a kind of communal basis for this. But it's pretty recent in Jewish history'it's a phenomenon of the last couple hundred of years.
Are you currently working on a new novel?
Yes, I am. I am working on a third novel. I am still towards the beginning of it and it's set in the early 1800s in Massachusetts. The title is ""Dog Town,"" and it's about a sort of dying community, soon to be a ghost town, so it's sort of the leftover people who are not part of the world at that time.
