From listening to her father’s sermons as a young girl to having her novel land on Oprah’s Book Club, one author’s journey to prominence offered aspiring writers insight into producing contemporary literature on Wednesday.
New York Times bestselling novelist Sue Miller spoke to a crowd of about 60 Boston University students, faculty and Bostonians about her life and work as part of the Friends of the Library Speaker Series in the George Sherman Union’s Metcalf Ballroom.
Miller, who has written 11 books and is published in 20 countries around the world, earned a graduate degree from Boston University in 1986. Her novel, “While I Was Gone,” was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2000 and two of her other novels went on to become feature films.
“I’ve always been a storyteller,” Miller said. “Walking to school, these two little girls down the street would wait for me everyday because I would have a continuing saga that I would give them and they wanted the next chapter.”
Miller said she grew up around writers. Her mother was a poet and her father was an ordained minister and a professor of church history at the University of Chicago, she said.
“Through listening to sermon, I became familiar with a more formal way of writing,” Miller said.
Miller said she meticulously plans out every last detail of her book, drawing diagrams and plot lines until the entire framework of the story is laid out in her notebook, though she doesn’t necessarily believe in resolutions.
“That’s the mark of serious fiction – that it asks you to tolerate things that are a little bit unresolved or ambiguous instead of giving you a need to answer,” Miller said.
Miller also discussed her latest novel “The Lake Shore Limited,” which follows a playwright whose latest work entails a terrorist bombing of a train as it pulls into Chicago’s Union Station and a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife, who is traveling on it.
This play is based on the protagonist’s own experience trying to find out whether her lover was hurt in the Sept. 11 attacks, she said.
“Grief has its own particular form,” said Miller, of her latest work. “It’s about the sense that when something enormous and civically disastrous happens, the way individuals respond to it is not necessarily the way we think they should respond. There’s not a large encompassing way to say, “this is what we feel.'”
When writing, Miller said she seeks to make the story both emotionally provocative and keep the reader inquisitive.
“I teetered between two opposing modes of writing: the mode that wanted to make the story emotionally compelling, to make you cry, and the other mode, which was to leave the story open, in some sense, and to make it ask more than it resolved for you,” she said. “I finally was able to write more successfully when I began to merge those two impulses.”
“Anybody who is an aspiring writer could hear about how one person formulated a career as a novelist,” said Vita Paladino, director of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
Miller’s works are on display at the HGARC, located in Mugar Library.
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