Holding on

Raised by a Yankee father and a Cajun mother, both ex-hippies, on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, Mary McMyne had an unorthodox upbringing that included an eclectic exposure to Lewis Carroll, stories of Woodstock and traditional Chinese art lessons. McMyne is the author of two award-winning, eagerly-anticipated novels: Song of Blackbirds, a family saga set in South Louisiana, and WAIT., a contemporary retelling of the Odysseus myth. Judge Janette Turner Hospital called WAIT. “gorgeously lyrical, culturally hyper-observant, and acerbically intelligent ” when she selected it for the 2007 Evans Harrington Grant for a Novel in Progress.

McMyne has lived in New York City and Prague, but Baton Rouge still affects her writing.

“When I relocated to the New York City area, I realized that this feeling of displacement [I had felt in Baton Rouge] is just part of being a writer—that a certain level of detachment from your experience is necessary for the sort of double-consciousness writing requires,” McMyne says. “And it wasn’t long before I got terribly homesick, before the sirens and perfect geometric order of skyscrapers and concrete became maddening, and I began to love imagining the wild marsh and tangled forest that surrounds my childhood home.”

But New York did inform her most recent project. While teaching The Odyssey at NYU, she became absorbed by the way Odysseus is glorified for his philandering while Penelope stays home for twenty years and weaves. Already writing Song of Blackbirds, she began stockpiling notes for a retelling in which Penelope was not an invented, two-dimensional male fantasy, but a woman with a mind of her own.

Then the 2005 publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad helped her realize a new vision for her second novel. McMyne decided there was no reason her retelling had to be set in Greece. “Grand Isle could be Ithaca,” she says. “Vietnam could be the Trojan War. My father had told me all these crazy stories about that time. I had heard about soldiers who never came home, and once I made that decision, everything started to fall into place.” And so, reconceived, her second novel became WAIT.

WAIT. opens with Penny Odell Leblanc returning a year later to the hotel where she spent her honeymoon. It follows her hallucinatory adventures as she waits for her soldier husband to return. Looking back on her original concept for the novel, McMyne prefers the new version.

“I got to write the story of how Penny endured her own version of Charybdis: Hurricane Camille in Pass Christian in 1969,” McMyne says. “I got to write about her childhood in Pride. I got to give all these epic characters the surnames of people I knew growing up: Teller, Odell, Leblanc. This story is far more compelling and modern. This story is mine.”