Sarah’s Biography

How Sarah Describes Herself

"I grew up in a Catholic Air Force family of eight. Went to five different schools in fifth grade. Spent my happiest years in mostly Mexican-American Catholic schools. Lived with my family and on my own in Japan, Okinawa, France, Spain, the Yucatan Peninsula, and most of the western states, though I've lived the longest in Texas and love New Mexico the most. Degree in anthropology from the University of New Mexico.

Journalism fellowship at the University of Texas. My thesis was a photojournalism project on the vanishing world of old lady beauty shops.

Married to George Jones (not the dipsomaniacal C&W singer). Have one son, Gabriel. Live in Austin in the great state of Texas, number one in prison population! "

Who is Sarah Bird?

Born Dec. 26, 1949 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Bird lived a peripatetic childhood in an Air Force family. She received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1973 and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. Bird was an editor and contributor for the no-longer-active Austin magazine Third Coast. She authored five romance novels under the name Tory Cates before publishing her 1986 comic novel "Alamo House," set on frat row at a Texas university.

"The Boyfriend School" followed in 1989 and "The Mommy Club" in 1991. Both, like "Alamo House," were marked by Bird's sharp wit and sense of the absurd. Bird delved into her own military background with 2001's "The Yokota Officers Club," which novelist Stephen Harrigan called "an unforgettable melding of exuberant wit and deep compassion." And when Kinky Friedman chose his political career over his Texas Monthly column, Bird filled his big boots with some wisecracking of her own.

Biography

A common link in the six novels of Austin writer Sarah Bird is the author's ability to make us laugh even when tremendous tragedy is falling around her characters' heads. Her latest book, "The Flamenco Academy," is no different: a love triangle set against the backdrop of the mysterious world of flamenco music and dance swirls out of control, but the most interesting character is the back-stabbing young woman who steals the love of her best friend's life.

She drifted over to Austin from Albuquerque in the mid-Seventies, with the love of her young life (they met when she was 15). The young love of her life turned out to be a most unreliable boyfriend. She began working as a freelance journalist about 1975 -- "My first big story was about a male-to-female transsexual for the old Austin Sun, for which Jeff 'Nightbyrd' stiffed me." In graduate school at UT, Bird began working on a photo-essay book about "mutant" rodeos: black, women, Mexican, gays, kids. She wrote for Cosmo and had a teen advice column for Seventeen. For People she wrote about boys finding dope money their dad had buried in the back yard. She wrote for what she calls the "Trues": True Confession, True Stories, True Pulp Fiction. "I wrote about kidnapping my own child," she recalls, "and falling in love with a man who'd been a woman."

On April Fool's Day, 1979, she landed a day job, writing an "in-house organ" for Texas Mental Health Mental Retardation at the grand salary of $7,500 per. "And saved money on that in Austin in 1979 when you could buy that chicken fried steak the size of a hubcap at the Stallion for what? Thirteen cents." In August of that year, she met her future husband George at AquaFest, just down from the turkey leg stand.

Some combination of an impossible-to-suppress literary ambition and an innocent notion that writing books earns you money led her to produce a suspense thriller with a fiendish red-and-black cover titled Do Evil Cheerfully for which Avon paid $3,000. They then proceeded to dun her for the portion of the advance that the book did not realize for the next 10 years. The book was a revenge plot based on the UB (unreliable boyfriend) who in real life got involved in Scientology, left to take a "training course" in L.A., and disappeared for seven years. "He ended up marrying Mimi the actress who then left him for Tom who left her for Nicole -- if I'd only had the foresight to cultivate something sexually transmissible, I could have taken out a dynasty," she quips. Then Bird quit the state job with a new belief that "there are worse things than starving to death."

Sarah says, "I was almost 30 and George was 27. We'd been living together for a year or so. I'd quit my job at MHMR and was slowly starving to death in my freelance/baby novelist incarnation when I started having problems with an old back injury I'd gotten skiing. George was working for the city at the time and we decided that the thing to do was get me on his insurance. So we filled in all the applications listing me as "spousal equivalent." The city bounced this social innovation back to us and said they needed to see a license. So one chilly November day I, literally, rolled out of bed and crab-walked up the steps of the courthouse with George. We filled out an informal declaration of marriage which was stamped by a clerk, L. Carbajal, and we were declared married. L. Carbajal told George that would be $7.50 and my new husband whipped out his wallet, carefully extracted $3.75, put it on the counter and asked me, "Where's your half?" I paid up and L. handed over our Honeymoon Gift Pack, which included a sample bottle of Listerine, two regular Tampaxes, a bar of Dove (1é4 cleansing creme), and a sample tube of Crest. It was a deeply romantic moment. I got on George's insurance. My back cleared up and, since neither of us regarded the "ceremony" as much more than leaping a bureaucratic hurdle, we didn't tell anyone that, in the eyes of the state, we were man and wife.

After three years of being secretly married, we decided to go public. I told my friends Nancy Gates, Mary Ellen Nudd, and Judy Osborne, and they thought it was kind of pathetic. A few weeks later, Mary Ellen invited George and me to dinner. Potluck. I was assigned a spinach salad. It was August, or one of the many months in Austin that feels like August. I was getting my period, took a shower at the last minute to try and pull myself together. Had the mandatory PMS fight with George in the car on the way over. So, we're standing at the door, me holding a giant bowl of spinach, hair still wet, cramps coming on, really grumpy -- the door opens and there are 60 of our friends in tuxedos and gowns. There's a giant cake with a bride and groom on top. There are napkins with our names. It was wonderful. Terry Galloway, creator of Jake Ratchett, Short Detective, for Esther's Follies, "married" us, reading from my romance novels. She made George vow to "fondle" all appropriate parts and me to promise to surrender to the "whirling vortex of desire" and for both of us to fill all "aching chasms." A surprise wedding -- it was a great, great evening.

SB's nom de romance was Tory Cates and, writing 10 pages a day, she quickly cranked out four books, although when she went to a romance writers convention in Dallas she met other writers who, like clockwork, produced a book a week. Her first two were Handful of Sky, a rodeo romance, and Where Aspens Quake, the story with a zippy male lead -- a proctologist/acupuncturist. "The last and suckiest of the sucky titles was Cloud Walker, about hot air ballooning" she recalls. "I wanted to call it Blown in a Balloon because the genre discovered oral sex about the time I was writing this one and my editor requested I insert three such scenes. I gave her two but made her beg." We ask about how strict the romance formula was back then. "Not as formulaic as haiku. You get more syllables, but a hell of a lot of them better be moist. Or at least throbbing. When I wrote the first one, set in the 'glamorous' world of rodeo, the editor made me take out any aromas that were not exclusively floral-based. And all drug references -- which eliminated the two major realities of the circuit right there: manure and pharmaceuticals."

By the time the pimiento cheese is gone, SB has demonstrated her go-go moves, dancing barefooted on the kitchen floor, with her eyes closed, to Van Morrison, just like the character Bernie in the new book. Life imitating art imitating life.

Sarah Bird's first "legit" novel was Alamo House, published by W.W. Norton. The book is a dead-on accurate picture of the old West Campus, about the time the Co-ops had really established themselves in territory that in the Fifties had been exclusively devoted to UT fraternity and sorority houses. By the Seventies, some of these relics remained posh and almost dignified, and some were just fake-genteel and beginning to be run down. Bird's attraction to outsiders is evident in the female population of a women's cooperative that was loosely based on the real Seneca House, strategically placed right across the street from the ATOs. The book contrasts the vegetarian, braless inhabitants of the Co-op with the juvenile and swinish frat boys in a way that rings totally true for that neighborhood in the 1980s. The principal subplot involves the protagonist working in the LBJ Library as a clerk, where she archivally processes Luci Baines' wedding cake, and where one of her co-workers is a young man who mainly sleeps on the job and at night leads a rock band called "Little Lyndon and the Great Society." The book immediately won a following for her.

The author's father, John Aaron Bird; when this photo was taken, he was a captain in the Air Force who navigated an RB-50

reconnaissance plane. Unlike Major Root in The Yokota Officers Club, Bird was eventually awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

SB had been drawn to the world of the "alternative" rodeos ever since she had first seen the (late, lamented) Texas Prison Rodeo in Huntsville. When her rodeo photographs were exhibited at the Southwestern Writers Collection in San Marcos, a general favorite was the one of a crusty old character at a Navajo rodeo ostensibly giving her a hug but really slipping his hand down her pearl snap Western shirt. This one became the jacket photo for Virgin of the Rodeo, a book that turned out to be something of a struggle to write and was the only one of her books that was not universally liked by her group of Austin literary pals.

Virgin received many good reviews, but its presentation appeared to be a little confused. Particularly when Bird, driving back to Austin from Albuquerque, pulled into a truck stop in Clovis, walked in and saw a big cardboard display of the hardcover edition of the novel. From its proximity to the paperback porn books ("for the one-handed truckers of America") it was clear that Virgin of the Rodeo, with its somewhat kinky jacket photograph, had taken a deviant path in some markets.

The Mommy Club was conceived around the time Gabriel was. Sarah's one good memory of education as an Air Force child were the two years she spent in Catholic school in San Antonio, and her informed affection for the city just shines through the book. Whether it is the strange old King William neighborhood or the surrogate mother-to-be protagonist hanging out at Schilo's deli, across the street from the San Antonio River, the setting of the book never misses a beat.

But it was impending motherhood that drove The Mommy Club. "I had planned to make my heroine, Trudy, give up her baby at the end because the point of the book, when I started, was that not everyone should be a mother. I finished the book after he was born and spent weeks trying to write the scene where she gives her baby away and absolutely, physically could not do it." A new soulfulness is evident in this book, a quality that Bird quickly acknowledges. "It was as if after I was pregnant and had Gabriel, I became permeable." The Mommy Club also expanded SB's fan base, already large. The new depth in her writing took her out of the category of being a strictly comic novelist and to this day she gets telephone calls from fans of the book, some with complicated childbirth stories to tell her.

Sarah Bird in Hollywood or Santa Monica or wherever the business of screenwriting takes place is not an image that focuses clearly. Show business is young and cocky, and the stereotype of the successful screenwriter is that of a Type A personality who can pitch all day long. Although her novels were admired in some quarters on the West Coast, SB's is a personality further down the alphabet, one who is most comfortable hanging out with her family and friends, sharing private jokes, not participating in group creativity where the style has an edge. One of Bird's great Austin screenwriting friends is Kathleen Orillion, who teaches at UT's Michener Center.

"I think Sarah and I immediately bonded because we recognized in each other the dilemma of being meek, introverted, and testosterone-deprived while trying to eke out a living in the cutthroat world of screenwriting," she says. "Sarah's natural tendency is to be modest and unassuming, but these qualities are not particularly appreciated in Hollywood. Downplaying your ideas doesn't really go over well in a pitch meeting."

Orillion reminisces about some time she and SB experienced this foreign environment together: "I think our friendship was solidified during a stay at a swank hotel in Santa Monica [courtesy of a TV movie gig she had] when we fancied ourselves Career Gals, washing our nylons out in the evenings, a la Eve Arden and Jane Russell, lamenting the humiliations of the day, and bolstering each other for the next day's round of bullets."

The 1990s in literary Austin was a period when the book was abandoned for the script. Talents as diverse as Bud Shrake, Bill Broyles, Larry Wright, and Steve Harrigan seemingly quit their fruitful (but perhaps not monetarily rewarding) fiction and nonfiction writing, all to be seduced by the siren song of Hollywood. There is an old saw in American letters that Hollywood corrupts, but what has happened here since the turn of the millennium appears to belie this, with new fiction produced by Shrake (The Borderland), Wright (God's Favorite), and Harrigan (The Gates of the Alamo).

Harrigan wrote two early novels, then concentrated on nonfiction and then took a long time off while he successfully pursued screenwriting work. Then, he finished his long-awaited novel on the Alamo, a book handsomely published and promoted by Knopf, the country's gold-standard house for fiction. Steve and Sarah are Austin contemporaries (he was born in 1948, she in '49) and The Yokota Officers Club is another midcareer novel by an Austin writer who might be considered midlist (not a big seller). Novelist and television writer Jim Magnuson, director of the Michener Center at UT, draws a parallel between the two.

"Like Steve, Sarah began writing novels, was drawn into the world of screenwriting, and then, after a period of time away, came back with a book that had more soul than ever," he says. "It's a story that defies all the clichés about writers being eaten alive by Hollywood. It's also interesting that her novel is unlike anything you'd expect from a Hollywood screenwriter. There are no flashy tricks, and though it's as funny as Sarah's other books, it's the characters that win you over."

By the time SB had completed the new book, her support group of Austin writers all agreed it was her best book yet. And delighted that it landed at Knopf. Kinky Friedman heard the news right away: "Sarah, congratulations," he wrote her. "Goddamn it, being published by Knopf is like getting into Harvard."

But while finishing the novel, Bird was faced with a personal quandary, that of fictionalizing her family. My final question for Sarah at lunch deals with the memoir vs. fiction. Not only how much "truth" is contained in the new novel, but about the memoir craze of the Nineties, one in which books like Mary Karr's The Liar's Club became huge bestsellers.

"Yes, I was strongly encouraged to do this book as a memoir because they typically sell better than novels," she immediately acknowledges. "For several reasons, however, I chose fiction. The major one was that I wanted to get at something a bit larger than the actual facts of my puny life would have allowed me to.

"Beyond that, I could just never see putting forth my version of events, my version of my childhood, of my family as fact. As anyone who grows up with siblings knows, every member of a family has a Rashomon-like perspective that can be so divergent you wonder if you all really grew up in the same house together eating the same hot dogs, watching the same cartoons.

"It just never seemed fair that simply because I torture the alphabet for a living, I would get to be the one to enter the official version of our family's history. From the beginning, I was very clear that it's way more important to have a family than a book. It is a writer's shibboleth that you can't care what anyone thinks about what you write. I just couldn't sign up for that one."

The toughest questions that the still-shy but back-in-the-limelight girl novelist will be asked again and again as she tours with The Yokota Officers Club will deal with the parallels between the real Bird family and the fictional Root family. The honest truth appears to be that there are many similarities, but that the Birds are not quite so scary or screwy, the mother figure not so depressed and controlling, the tough pilot father an actually garrulous, somewhat dreamy figure.

At the end of our lunch, SB shows me the contents of the shoebox she brought over. Included are some smashing photographs of her parents dressed up to go out to a formal military dance, and, right there in the Okinawa newspaper, a yellowing photograph of Sarah, about the time she won the dance contest, a total babe, a real popular girl.

Adapted from various sources:

Majority of the material sourced from 'How to be a Popular Girl', by Dick Holland, The Austin Chronicle and The Cancer Therapy and Research Centre, Oct 2006 Fundraiser

Photos copyright (c) Duane Osborn, Brett Brookshire, CTRC.net

(Extracted from http://www.sarahbirdbooks.com/about_sarah_bird.html