User:Lexham/Paula Sharp

Paula Sharp is an American author whose fictional works focus on the American family and explore themes of social injustice and quirky American politics. Her books include The Woman Who Was Not All There (Harper & Row 1988), The Imposter (HarperCollins, 1991), Lost in Jersey City (HarperCollins 1993), Crows over a Wheatfield (Hyperion 1996) and I Loved You All (Hyperion 2000). She is also the translator of Latin American fiction, including Antonio Skarmeta’s La insureccion (The Insurrection).

Biography

Paula Sharp was born in San Diego, California in 1957. Her parents, nuclear physicist Rodman Sharp and anthropologist Rosemary Sharp, divorced when Sharp was eight. Her mother, a southerner by birth, subsequently relocated the family to Chapel Hill, North Carolina and pursued field work in Mexico and Guatemala. Three years later, the family relocated again to New Orleans. In an interview, Sharp noted: “My southern upbringing and early exposure to Latin American culture pretty much solidified my literary tastes. I was raised on Borges and Faulkner, Cortazar and Tennessee Williams, Octavio Paz and Flannery O’Connor, and thus my view of writing was bound to be a little odd: imagine Flem Snopes cheating Borges out of piece of fatback, only to awaken and discover that Borges and the fatback are a dream, but that Flem Snopes is real. That about sums up the way I grew up thinking about literature – it was a territory full of tantalizing ideas and wild characters.”

Sharp’s family relocated a third time, in 1972, to Ripon, Wisconsin, where she attended high school. At the age of seventeen, Sharp won first place in The Atlantic Monthly’s national contest for high school students, in the categories of both poetry and essay-writing. Sharp subsequently attended Dartmouth College, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize for college students and studied modern German and Latin American literature. After completing a thesis on the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, Sharp obtained her B.A. in 1979, Phi Beta Kappa and with Highest Honors in Comparative Literature. Sharp has related: “My first love was poetry. But by my mid-twenties, I wanted to write fiction, because I fell in love with plot and grew to treasure complicated plots and complex characters.”

At the age of seventeen, Sharp won first place in The Atlantic Monthly’s national contest for high school students, in the categories of both poetry and essay-writing. Sharp subsequently attended Dartmouth College, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize for college students and studied modern German and Latin American literature. After completing a thesis on the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, Sharp obtained her B.A. in 1979, Phi Beta Kappa and with Highest Honors in Comparative Literature. Sharp has related: “My first love was poetry. But by my mid-twenties, I wanted to write fiction, because I fell in love with plot and grew to treasure complicated plots and complex characters.”

Over the next few years, Sharp worked as a secretary; as a parochial school teacher in an inner city school in Jersey City, New Jersey; as a criminal investigator in the Jersey City public defender’s office; and as a Spanish-English translator for Amnesty International. Sharp also translated Latin American fiction, including Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta’s novel, La insurreccion (The Uprising) and stories by Peruvian author Isaac Goldemburg and Cuban writer Humberto Arenal. Sharp thereafter enrolled in Columbia University Law School, earning her J.D. in 1985. While in law school she clerked for Legal Services and the American Civil Liberties Union and co-edited the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. In law school, Sharp also continued to translate and to write fiction; her first short story, “The Man,” was published by the New England Review, and two more stories, “A Meeting on the Highway,” and “Hot Springs” were accepted for publication by the Three Penny Review; the latter two subsequently were anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and “The Man” later would become the first chapter of Sharp’s first novel.

After graduating from law school, Sharp accepted the opportunity to join an anthropological project in Brazil, and she lived for a year in Colider, Mato Grosso in the Brazilian Amazon. While there, she wrote her first novel, The Woman Who Was Not All There. Upon returning to the United States in 1987, she commenced employment as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, where she remained until 1993. Her first novel was accepted by Harper & Row three months after she began legal work. This was followed by four other novels and a short story collection.

Sharp currently lives in New York State with her husband and son. She has taught creative writing previously at Bryn Mawr and Yale, and has been a visiting author at the College of Letters at Wesleyan University in Connecticut since 2003.

Major Works

A comic novel about a single parent raising four children in North Carolina in the 1960’s, The Woman Who Was Not All There'was, featured as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and awarded the Joe Savago New Voice Award by the Quality Paperback book Club for “the most distinctive and promising work of fiction or non-fiction offered by the book club in 1988”. Sharp described the book as “a comic novel about the absurdity of the American family” and placed herself within a southern literary tradition that stresses eccentric characters and the art of storytelling. Carlton Smith of The San Diego Union likened her writing to Flannery O’Connor’s.

While working as a public defender, Sharp produced two more books. The first was The Imposter, a short story collection published by HarperCollins in 1991, also featured as a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection. Carolyn See, reviewing for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that “These wonderful stories are about all of us, and they question whether American family life, ever, at any time, had a chance in hell. They remind us that without a little crime we’d all die of boredom; that the best experiences we have are almost always forbidden, and that all of us are just one or two baby steps from losing it altogether.” Karen Lee Osborne of The Chicago Tribune wrote of the collection, “Each of the nine stories is a small masterpiece; together, they create a tantalizing universe.” Sharp’s second book once again drew comparisons to the works of Flannery O’Connor. American literary scholar Bruce Gentry wrote in the Flannery O’Connor Literary Bulletin that Sharp’s stories echoed “O’Connor’s fascination with our secret desires for trespass and with the mysterious connections between danger and salvation.”

Sharp’s short story collection was followed by Lost in Jersey City (1993), a comic novel about a Louisiana widow, Ida Terhune, who flees north to raise a family on her own. Her destination, Walter Satterwait of the New York Times Book Review wrote, is the unlikely metropolis of Jersey City, “its air stinking of fish and sewage, its gamy streets potholed, its landlords wicked, its cops crooked, its politicians and judges warped by greed and corruption. Ms. Sharp exploits these wonderful possibilities, both comic and tragic, with skill, compassion and zest.” A New York Times Book Review notable book, Lost in Jersey City portrays the American family against an exploration of deeper political issues forming the frayed fabric of American society – slumlords, urban decay and judicial corruption figure prominently in this novel, whose protagonist is a somewhat stuffy and naïve woman who ends up on trial for the murder of her landlord’s son. Chris Goodrich of The Los Angeles Times compared Sharp’s work to Louise Malle and Virginia Woolf. Noting that Sharp’s novel made the odd seem inevitable, Goodrich wrote that “Sharp tends toward the sly and amusing rather than the profound and philosophical, making Lost in Jersey City that rare thing, a comic novel of substance. Virginia Woolf, I suspect, would have loved it -- and perhaps even been a little envious."

After the publication of her third book, Sharp moved to upstate New York with her family, relinquishing her legal career to write full-time. Her third novel, Crows over a Wheatfield, was published by Hyperion in 1996 and departed markedly from her two previous comic novels. Like Sharp’s earlier works, Crows over a Wheatfield focuses on the portrayal of the American family – in this case, a seemingly intact nuclear unit with a father, mother and small child – but in this case, the family’s semblance of normalcy cloaks dangerous undercurrents, and Crows over a Wheatfield explores the gloomy realm of the treatment of domestic violence victims in American family courts. A Publishers Weekly interviewer wrote that “Crows over a Wheatfield strikes quite a different tone. A study in domestic violence spanning a half-century in the lives of two women from rural Wisconsin, it is also a more complex and powerful book than Sharp’s previous efforts … the novel alternates palpable suspense with thoughtful, multifaceted consideration of the heated issues it raises.” Publishers Weekly noted in a starred review that “Sharp’s new novel about domestic violence may seem a radical departure from the warm, often ribald family stories found in her earlier books, Lost in Jersey City and The Woman Who Was Not All There. “The court scenes in this novel bristle with the interaction of the participants’ personalities; they are riveting. From start to finish, this is an emotionally involving story whose powerful message is commensurate with the social problem it illustrates with gripping accuracy.” A national bestseller, Crows over a Wheatfield was an editor’s choice of both The Chicago Tribune and The San Francisco Chronicle; a New York Times Book Review Notable Book; and a Book-of-the-Month club featured selection.

In an interview about Crows over a Wheatfield, Sharp explained that she had avoided writing about legal topics for many years: “I found legal work to be a respite from writing, and writing to be an escape from legal work.” Sharp told Philadelphia Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano, “It’s almost fortuitous that this is a book with legal themes. Because when I start to write, I have characters in mind, a story…. Obviously, as a lawyer, I have very definite views about law and how women are treated. But I exorcised those demons in the course of my profession and I never really felt compelled to write about them.” Sharp has noted, however, that her exposure to the dramas of court life greatly affected her writing: “You spend a lot of time as a criminal lawyer puzzling people together, making sense of their motives and figuring out how their lives’ circumstances led them down the wrong roads, or in some cases why nothing led to where they are but their own questionable selves. Watching trials also had a profound effect on how I perceived the nature of narrative authority in writing, and on my assumptions about truth itself. As a defense lawyer in any case, you have to view a crime from many perspectives – the defendant’s, the victim’s, the prosecutor’s, the jurors’. You’re forced to understand, repeatedly, that a single act has multiple, contradictory meanings. From the day I watched my first trial, I was never able to write the same way again.”

After interviewing Sharp about her fourth book, A Time Out New York wrote: “Sharp didn’t set out to write a novel about domestic abuse, which is perhaps one of the reasons the book is remarkably free of the story of heavy-handedness that has struck many a well-intentioned story.” In affirming the importance of character for her in any work of fiction, Sharp spoke about the trickiness of wrestling with political topics in works of fiction. Sharp related: “Whenever you write a novel of social conscience, you’re always very worried that it will sound polemical.” “You can’t afford to be polemical when you write … because it takes the spontaneity out of a work of art.”

Many of Crows over a Wheatfield’s reviewers commented on Sharp’s penchant for commingling serious subject matter with the unexpectedly comic. Responding to this, Sharp said, “Comedy and tragedy are just flip sides of the same beast. Spanish and Latin American literature, for example, is dense with a sense of the ridiculous – with the absurdity of tragedy, of suffering, of anything and everything human. And so is southern literature.” Sharp elaborated: “You know that O’Connor thinks that sending a bible salesman to steal a girl’s wooden leg is both terrible and funny, and so is O’Connor’s murderer, the Misfit, who philosophically muses to his accomplices that ‘It ain’t no pleasure in life.’ The best humor is a vehicle for depicting heartache and hardship, and of course also a way of making the experience of being human tolerable.”

In her next novel, I Loved You All, Sharp continued to explore the commingling of the comic and serious, while depicting the American family in the context of a modern political dilemma. Film and literary critic David Templeton wrote: “Crows over a Wheatfield, set in the strange world of the family court system, became a bestseller in 1996, in part owing to its author's knack for taking a serious, potentially morose subject (domestic violence) and cramming it with unexpected pockets of laugh-out-loud humor. Now, with I Loved You All, Sharp pulls off an even trickier stunt, producing a riveting comedy about abortion.” Sources as diverse as The New York Times Book Review, The London Times and Salon.com remarked on Sharp’s penchant for rich characterization and described Sharp’s fifth novel marked a refinement of her interest in charting the personal and emotional undercurrents that fuel political ideology. "Paula Sharp's fourth novel is a strangely gentle and funny for a book about the escalating defiance of anti-abortion fanatics in the late 1970's,” Craig Seligman wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Sharp has the born novelist's gift of breathing life into her characters. Even the minor characters seem to get up and step off the page. … Sharp's gifts are enormous."

Amy Rea of The Literal Mind Book Review wrote: "While the abortion movement of the late 1970's plays a pivotal role in I Loved You All, to claim this book is only about abortion is a grave injustice. What Paula Sharp's novel is really about is the Daigle family .. [A]s prominent as the [abortion] issue is in this novel, it's never as important as the characters themselves, and that's how Sharp succeeds where other novelists have failed. The characters are vivid, and Sharp's writing is lyrical and piercing throughout ... I Loved You All is a stunning accomplishment that would have been a mess in less competent hands. One can only wonder what she'll do to surpass this."

External links

Paula Sharp Website