WILLIS, Sarah 1954(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1954; daughter of Kirk Willis (an actor and director); divorced; children: Moira, Matt. Education: Case Western Reserve University, B.F.A. (theater arts), 1978; also attended Cuyahoga Community College and Otterbein College, and Cleveland State University; Cooper School of Art, certificate in photography, 1980.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cleveland Heights, OH. Agent—Christy Fletcher, Fletcher and Parry, LLC, The Carriage House, 121 East 17th St., New York, NY 10003. E-mail—spwillis99@aol.com.

CAREER:

Writer. Formerly worked as a photographer, employee of Cleveland Free Clinic, and drugstore clerk. Speaker, presenter at conferences, and visiting writer at Ohio schools.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pushcart Prize nomination for story in Crescent Review; Stephen Crane Award for first fiction, Book of the Month Club, and Cleveland Arts Prize, both 2000, both for Some Things That Stay; Crain's Cleveland Business Women of Note Award, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Some Things That Stay, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2000.

The Rehearsal, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

A Good Distance, Berkley Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Also contributor of essays and short stories to periodicals, including Artful Dodge, Book, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Confrontation, Crescent Review, Missouri Review, Ohio Writer, Riverwind, Rockford Review, and Whiskey Island. Fiction anthologized in Our Mothers, Our Selves: Writers and Poets Celebrating Motherhood, Bergin and Garvey, 1996.

ADAPTATIONS:

Some Things That Stay was adapted as a film, 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A fouth novel.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sarah Willis is a novelist who says she borrows liberally from her own experiences but notes that her books are not autobiographical. For example, she began writing poetry at age twelve in order to deal with the death of her actor/director father; her novels feature fathers who, though alive, have abandoned their families emotionally. Her first two novels also take place in upstate New York, where Willis's real-life family vacationed every summer. "As a novelist, I write things that are true," wrote Willis on the Book-sense Web site. "At least they have to seem to be true. So I steal from my life; the things I've done, the places I've lived, the people I know."

In her first book, Some Things That Stay, Willis offers a coming-of-age story through the first-person narrative of Tamara, whose bohemian family moves from place to place and whose artist father is much more interested in his art than his children. The novel, set in 1954, covers the four months the family spends in a small town in New York, where Tamara's father wants to paint scenes of the countryside. Tamara is well aware that she and her two younger siblings are not very important to their father. He is primarily dedicated to his art and then to his wife; his children come in a distant third. As Tamara turns fifteen, she begins to grapple with questions about life and her oncoming maturity. As with most characters in coming-of-age novels, Tamara must deal with her growing awareness of sexuality, but it is her reaction to her mother's tuberculosis and imminent death that drive the story. Tamara soon finds herself thrust further into adulthood as she must assume greater responsibility within her family, because her father seems unwilling or unable to carry the burden.

In a review of Some Things That Stay for the Los Angeles Times, Susie Linfield commented that Willis is "not entirely successful" in solving the problem of making a teenage narrator either too "insightful and linguistically sophisticated" or "inchoate or cutely naïve." Noting that Willis errs somewhat on the side of the former, Linfield nevertheless said that the novel "resists an easy, sentimental resolution" to Tamara's problems. In the Women's Review of Books, Carol Anshaw remarked that the novel contains anachronisms and Willis sometimes "lets Tamara's voice slide into the register of a sophisticated adult author." "But aside from minor faults like these," the reviewer continued, "Willis has set out a meticulously detailed coming of age narrative that could belong to no one but her protagonist." Joanna Scott, writing in the New York Times Book Review, praised Willis for overcoming the limitations of strictly adhering to moments of the present in the narrative and noted, "But by concentrating on Tamara's experiences over the course of a few months, Willis emphasizes the narrowness of perception and dramatizes the girl's groping, stumbling journey as she tries to make sense of the changes in her life."

In her second book The Rehearsal, Willis again features an "artistic" family and a father whose dedication to his art makes him self-centered and unaware of the needs of his family and those around him. Will Bartlett, the aging head of the Bartlett family, is an actor and director of a small theater company, as was Willis's real-life father. He decides to stage a performance of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in the area of Lake Chautauqua, New York, during the summer of 1972. To make the play a tour de force, Bartlett convinces the actors to come to his family's summer home and spend time living day to day as their characters before the play goes into production. Despite Bartlett's own enthusiasm, his family and children are less than happy about the arrangement. Bartlett's wife, who is younger than her husband and is also a retired actress, feels as though she has sacrificed her career and begins to have an affair with one of the actors. Meanwhile, Bartlett's sixteen-year-old daughter is completely mesmerized by her father. Although hurt by his seeming indifference toward her, she directs her anger toward her mother, whom she plans to poison.

In a review of The Rehearsal, a Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the novel's "potentially combustible ingredients don't come together to create an explosion; the few sparks struck ultimately fizzle." A contributor for Kirkus Reviews disliked the novel's pacing and its "slow, methodical action," although James Polk, writing in the New York Times Book Review, praised it as "a clever, knowing take on obsession and rebellion." Elizabeth Kiem, writing in Book, called The Rehearsal a "novel of careful tempo and innovative voice," while Booklist contributor Michael Spinella remarked that "Willis creates a good story imbued with a great deal of pathos."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book, November-December, 2001, Elizabeth Kiem, review of The Rehearsal, p. 70.

Booklist, December 1, 1999, Peggy Barber, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 686; September 1, 2001, Michael Spinella, review of The Rehearsal, p. 54.

Crain's Cleveland Business, September 24, 2001, "Liberated by Literature," p. 27.

Entertainment Weekly, March 17, 2000, Megan Harlan, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 64.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2001, review of The Rehearsal, p. 1065.

Library Journal, December, 1999, Beth Gibbs, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 1898; July, 2001, Beth E. Anderson, review of The Rehearsal, p. 127.

Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2000, Susie Linfield, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 3.

New York Times Book Review, March 5, 2000, Joanna Scott, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 18; December 23, 2001, James Polk, review of The Rehearsal, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, November 8, 1999, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 46; October 1, 2001, review of The Rehearsal, p. 36.

Women's Review of Books, July, 2000, Carol Anshaw, review of Some Things That Stay, p. 40.

ONLINE

Booksense Web sitehttp://www.booksense.com/ (November 11, 2003), Sarah Willis, "Both Sides Now."