Books
The Texpatriates
Does absence make the art grow fonder? These days, some of the best writing about Texas is being done by women who don’t live here.
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Kentucky-born but Texas-raised, she married Austin attorney Robert Hearon after graduating from UT. In the late sixties an editor plucked the manuscript of what would be her first novel, Armadillos in the Grass, from the slush pile, and she would eventually publish four more novels as a Texan. In 1981, four years after her marriage ended in divorce, Hearon moved to New York’s Westchester County. She was anxious to put her marriage behind her and to advance her writing career. “I had always heard that you can’t run away from your problems,” she says. “But when I got to Westchester, I thought, ‘That’s not true at all. I was out of there, out of Texas, away from my past.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, you can just get up and go. Yes.’”
Hearon thinks that leaving the state reinvigorated her style; the new idioms and accents she heard up north sharpened her sense of Texas talk. Even more, the move gave her a feeling of homesickness that she believes lies at the heart of novel writing: “All those feelings you have for who you were, for that moment in time when everything came together and it was lovely, or the sense of unfinished business, these provide the emotion for your characters, the longing or fear that drives them.”
Hearon’s novels strike some as multiple restatements of the same premise. Nearly all are first-person narratives by women straining against the bonds of social convention while looking for true love, and usually finding it. One of her best is perhaps the least typical: 1988’s Owning Jolene, in which a nineteen-year-old free spirit is caught between her divorced parents, the famous painter who is her lover, and a new love interest. Set in post-oil-bust San Antonio, where ranchers are learning to grow grapes and carry cell phones, Owning Jolene is witty and endearing, with an accurate ear for the phrases and foibles of the state.
Married to her third husband, Hearon sounds settled and happy in Burlington, where her Texas friends visit her during the winter “to get a taste of the Dr. Zhivago thing.” She’s writing her fifteenth novel, which is set in Austin, her memories of the city sharpened by return visits for the funerals of both her parents in 1995. It’s based on something she overheard when she was living there in the seventies—one woman telling another that she didn’t know a soul north of Thirty-fifth Street. “My story is about one of those longtime Austin women who move out to the northern part of town,” Hearon says, “and all her friends stop at the MoPac overpass there at Thirty-fifth to wave good-bye to her like she’s going to China.”
Janet Peery’s relationship with the state is less ambivalent than Scofield’s or Hearon’s. “I’d have to say I’m more of a Texaholic than a Texpatriate,” she says with a laugh. “I just can’t seem to get enough of Texas. It’s a place like no other. You can go from Kansas to Colorado and the borders just blur, but when I see ‘Entering Texas,’ I feel my soul expand.”
Peery, who teaches writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, comes by her enthusiasm like a religious convert, from the outside looking in. A Kansan by birth, she has never lived here. All her experience of Texas stems from family trips with her former husband, who grew up in South Texas and to whom, it seems, she has conceded the state. Even so, Peery is producing some of the best current fiction about Texas—witness her superb collection, Alligator Dance (in which five of the ten stories are Texas-based), and The River Beyond the World.
It all started, Peery says, with a trip to her husband’s family’s ranch in the Valley. There, she came upon a house in a nearby town that caught her eye. Made of brick, it looked “as if it could be in New England,” she remembers, but was overgrown with bougainvillea, palmetto, and yucca, nearly surrounded by its own private jungle. What really got to Peery, though, was the large graffito on the side of the house—the f-word in Spanish. “I thought, ‘Wow, what’s going on there?’” she says. “I just had to know who lived there, why the house looked that way. I don’t pretend to understand the border or the people there, but what I’ve written comes from a desire to at least encounter what was there, all the incredible contradictions of the place.” This memorable house would later appear in The River Beyond the World.
A stunning brunette in her late forties, Peery came to writing a bit late, working a string of truly odd jobs—cocktail waitress at a supper club for seniors, undercover agent for a fast-food chain, lifeguard—before being discovered in 1988 by novelist Bob Shacochis in a class he was teaching at Wichita State University. She has a wonderful, bubbling-up-from-the-ground laugh, an earthy giggle that may be a legacy of all those jobs in the service sector. Her Texas stories have an authenticity that belies her never having lived here, whether it’s her sharp ear for border talk or her haunting descriptions, like the tattered Christmas star bobbing in the winds of a blue norther over Rio Paradiso’s trashy streets.
Peery’s new novel is set in Oklahoma but involves something, she says mysteriously, that is “coming up from Texas.” “When I was growing up in Kansas,” Peery explains, “Texas was the origin of everything bad, dangerous, powerful, or passionate. If a bunch of Hell’s Angels rode through town, people would say, ‘They’re comin’ up from Texas.’ One time there was a cougar scare, and everybody muttered, ‘Must be comin’ up from Texas.’ So mythically I have a sense of Texas being the source of the wild.”
Perhaps the mystery of the Texpatriate writers, the countering tidal pulls of homesickness and escape, longing and avoidance, that drive these women and their work, can best be explained by a returned native. In 1997, after 23 years in California, New Mexico, Washington State, New Zealand, England, and Italy, novelist Carol Dawson came back to Texas and now lives in Austin on Dawson Street, which is named for her family. Like Porter, she had felt like a “freak” here (as she told this magazine four years ago); like Scofield, she left right after college; like Hearon, she was also leaving a failed marriage—“from the courtroom to the highway,” as she puts it. “I felt that compulsion to get out of Texas,” the 47-year-old writer says over tacos at Güero’s restaurant in Austin. “Maybe I had to get some distance to see the place clearly.”
Why come back now? Perhaps Dawson, who is currently writing a novel about a young woman who inherits a ranch near Alpine (and whose novel The Mothers-in-Law Diary will be published next fall), has simply let her own accomplishments bring her full circle. “I’ve come to think the world is what you make it,” she says. “That what you create for yourself is what you’re gonna get. Which is a very Texas thing, don’t you think?”
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