Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky
Rating:			***
		(Recommended)
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	Courage It takes courage for a novelist to write a memoir. Fans might stop buying the author’s books. Sara Paretsky has the courage to write a memoir titled, Writing in an Age of Silence, and few readers will be surprised by her passion for social justice and her view of the Patriot Act, given that her novels tread this ground. On the pages of this fine book, Paretsky challenges readers not to take our liberty for granted. Along the way, she tells us the story of her life. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, “Not Angel, Not Monster, Just Human,” pp. 51-53: When my room-mate hadn’t returned by eleven, I started calling area hospitals. I finally found her at New York Presbyterian, the hospital attached to Columbia University. Weak from hemorrhaging, she had collapsed on a sidewalk a few blocks from our apartment; some good Samaritan had called for an ambulance. It was June of 1970. New York, where I was working as a secretary, had passed a law legalizing abortion, but it wouldn’t take effect for another six weeks. My pregnant room-mate couldn’t wait another six weeks. The married politician who had impregnated her was abandoning her and she didn’t have the resources, either financial or emotional, to take on a pregnancy and a baby. I offered to go with her to the coat-hanger abortionist she found, but we weren’t friends—I was a stranger who had answered her ad for a room-mate. She preferred to go alone, and she was alone when she almost died. I had gone to New York that summer, hoping to get a job in the world of writing. I didn’t have a fantasy of finding a garret and writing some amazing novel, because in New York even a garret, even in 1970, took serious income to support. Nor could I imagine writing a novel. I knew I was quick with words and could write well enough for other people to like what I said, but in the milieu where I’d grown up, novels belonged to people who were smarter, more interesting, more creative—and more masculine—than me. My ignorance of the writing world was profound. I thought I could show the New Yorker, or New York, or Harper’s, or the dailies, or any of the thousand magazines and papers published there, examples of my unpublished history essays and short stories—what a portfolio!—and they might take me on in some very junior capacity. I didn’t realize then that good journalism was as demanding as good fiction—I just thought, fast turnaround, clever phrases, I can do that. Armed with $200 scraped together from odd jobs and borrowed from a friend, I made the rounds but never got past the front desk. I had no contacts. I was so ignorant I didn’t know you needed a sponsor to get into one of those places. And even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to find one. It’s possible, too, that my skills are not now and weren’t then, best suited for journalism, but I never got far enough in the process to have them evaluated. The only publication that would even talk to me was Time, and they wanted me to be a typist in their accounting department. When I was twenty-three, you could live for a couple of weeks on $200 in New York. But as my short grace period drew to a close and I began to panic about what I might live on, I fulfilled my destiny and became a secretary. It was through my workplace that I found my room-mate. Our paths diverged a few weeks after she left the hospital; I don’t even remember her name after all these years. She entered Columbia’s school of journalism and moved into campus housing. I found new room-mates and continued my job as a secretary. However, when I returned to Chicago that fall, I became active in reproductive politics. I trained with the Rev. E. Spencer Parsons, head of the Clergy Consultation Service on Problem Pregnancies, and became an active part of the women’s liberation movement. On my return to the Midwest, I returned as well to the dissertation I was writing on the nineteenth-century roots of American Christian fundamentalism.’ To support myself, I took a job with a small firm that held conferences on how to implement President Nixon’s executive orders on affirmative action. And in my spare time, I read crime fiction. Paretsky wastes no words on herself. Her writing is straightforward and she never says more than she has to. Writing in an Age of Silence is a fine memoir, and an act of courage by a talented writer. Steve Hopkins, August 25, 2007
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	2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the September 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Writing in an Age of Silence.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com