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As Jo Ann Beard says about the 1970s narrator of her debut novel: She isn't Marlo Thomas's "That Girl," she's "that girl." Lower-case, forgettable, the one standing off to the side. The sidekick.
She's the girl, in other words, who was probably just like us, the girl always observing the other girls who seemed to know what they were doing.
The nameless narrator of In Zanesville is 14, a middle child coming of age in middle America 40 years ago. Zanesville is a fictional town in Illinois that, like Beard's own hometown of Moline, is the farm implement capital of the world, home of John Deere Junior High.
Not that the first-person heroine of In Zanesville is autobiographical, Beard insisted recently in a phone interview from her home in New York's Hudson Valley, where she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. And no, that's not her on the cover either, Beard points out, even though readers assume it is.
This desire to find Beard in every page is a testament to the intimacy and affection with which she has drawn her narrator, and to the spot-on details that chronicle her lurching journey away from childhood. The character is no longer the same little girl who wrote a fan letter to Tramp of "Lady and the Tramp." But she also isn't old enough to feel comfortable when the boy she has a crush on — Kevin Prentiss from detention hall — puts his arm around her.
Our heroine is naïve, curious, a little naughty but usually remorseful about it, a sometimes liar who wants to protect her parents, and sometimes herself, from her own adolescence.
"I wish my mom wouldn't mention bras in front of my father; I don't know how much he knows or doesn't know about certain matters. My mother's own bras are large quilted things that I used to think were funny. Now when I see them on the laundry table, one cup folded into the other, I have a sense of impending doom. It's like being on your way to the Alps and knowing that when you get there you'll have to wear lederhosen."
When her best friend, Felicia, is noticed by a popular boy, the terra incognita of being 14 becomes even more treacherous. "I've never seen that look on Felicia's face before, like she wished I would disappear. It's like you're a balloon and somebody just lets go."
Beard was a painter before she was a writer. Both involve using layers of images and "small marks to create a world," she says. Before she was a novelist she was an essayist, bringing to her nonfiction works a fiction writer's style.
In fact, the essay that put her on the map — the haunting "The Fourth State of Matter" — was published in 1996 in the New Yorker's fiction issue, even though it was memoir. Unlike more formal essayists, Beard doesn't write a continuous, summing-up kind of narrative, notes Paisley Rekdal, University of Utah associate professor of English. Beard's scenes are episodic, often traveling back and forth between then and now, "as if time itself were unfolding before you."
Beard earned a master's degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa, but it was a stint at Utah's Writers at Work conference in the summer of 1991 that was pivotal, she says. By the time the week was over, she'd been discovered by a literary agent. "I felt like a writer who had been in the shadows who was brought into the sunlight," she says. Her acclaimed book of essays, The Boys of My Youth, was published in 1997.
"I think there's something curious and stirring about getting a glimpse of the mind of these overlooked girls," she says about In Zanesville, which may explain why many of the readers who have connected with the book so far are men.
Indeed, this is a book for women, men and teenagers — for anyone who wants to stand off to the side with a master observer and watch.
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