By Victor Greto
She always was sensitive.
As a little girl huddled in her bed, looking into the darkness and thinking on the impassioned paintings of Vincent Van Gogh.
Or as a puzzled but protective 14-year-old watching the evolution of her mother’s mental breakdown.
Marisa de los Santos always loved the magic of words, compiled lists of them and wondered at their texture and color. The future poet and married mother of two knew they could be as serious, frenzied and thick as a post-Impressionist painting, or as bubbly, joyous and ethereal as love.
“I love the music of language,” Marisa says at the dining room table of her Wilmington home near Wawaset Park. Long, coal-black hair frames her oval face, an unsentimental blend of the Philippines and Europe.
“My first love, though, is books,” she says. “And character. It’s all about character.”
Now, she has written one of her own. Already an established poet whose collection of poetry, “From the Bones Out,” was published nearly six years ago, de los Santos’ first novel, “Love Walked In,” published earlier this month, also was optioned by Hollywood for a possible movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker.
Four publishers bid on her book. She received a sum “in the low six figures” for it. It will be translated into nearly a dozen other languages.
The Hollywood option money was “enough to buy a great new car,” she says. If it’s actually made into a movie (the option lasts 18 months and can be renewed), it will be money “enough to buy a great new house.”
She’s already got a contract for a new book, for even more money than the first one, containing some of the characters in the first novel, that she hopes to finish by next summer.
At 39, her literary and financial success only seemed to have come overnight.
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Some reviewers already have called de los Santos’ novel “chick lit,” a moniker slapped on first-person, single woman-centric novels for several years now, ever since Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” in Britain and Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” in the U.S. were published in 1996.
In its urban, boutique settings, pastel covers, nod toward fashion and concentration on male-female relationships, the genre has aimed for and taken hold of a generation of fiction-reading, post-feminist women who have or want both families and careers.
“It’s contemporary literature reflecting changes in contemporary women’s lives that resonated with readers who see themselves in the characters,” says Suzanne Ferriss of Nova Southeastern University in South Florida, who co-edited a book of essays, “Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction,” on the decade-old literary phenomenon.
“They make their protagonists flawed,” Ferriss says. “These are not heroic women. They’re not gorgeous, over the top. These women are balancing the pressure to find a man, but jobs and friendships and greater complications.”
de los Santos’ novel fulfills some of the “criteria” of chick-lit.
Her main character, 31-year-old Cornelia Brown, owns a coffee shop in Philadelphia, and the novel begins with her meeting a man who will change her life. However, the plot spins quickly toward its main theme: the developing relationship between Cornelia, a grown woman, and Clare, an 11-year-old whose mother is mentally ill.
While Cornelia’s chapters are written in the first person, Clare’s chapters are reported in the third person.
And that is different, Ferriss says. “Chick-lit books usually focus on a single protagonist and only from her point of view,” she says.
There’s a good reason for this anomaly.
Born in Baltimore in 1966 to a Filipino immigrant surgeon and a German-French nurse, Marisa lived there until she entered kindergarten, when her family, including a younger sister, Kristina, moved to Burke, Va., where her father started a practice.
But it was after their move to a small town near Quantico, Va., when she turned 12, that her life changed. A self-described “idyllic childhood” smashed against her mother’s mental breakdown two years later.
As with the fictional Clare of the book, Marisa’s mother’s breakdown developed slowly, she says. Her mother lost weight, hardly slept, went on buying sprees, was more mercurial than usual.
“She was always high-strung,” Marisa says. “She’d clean the whole house in one day, but she never tipped over the edge.”
But when her mother did tip over, Marisa’s childhood ended.
“The evening my father took my mother to the hospital, my sister and I sat together on the back steps dully watching a glassy sky lapse into heaps of color behind the trees in our yard,” Marisa writes in a soon-to-be published essay that discusses her mother’s illness. “I was blank, unbelieving, completely unmoored. I thought, Gone, gone, gone. I thought, Everything is over.”
Although her mother was hospitalized for several weeks and began taking lithium, which aided her recovery, it took a long while for Marisa to understand what happened.
Instead of feeling shame, she found herself protective of her mother in front of gossiping neighbors.
Although her mother was hospitalized for several weeks and began taking lithium, which helped her heal, 14-year-old Marisa didn’t know that.
“I didn’t know she would ever get better, or what was going on,” she says. “It was scary and I had a sense of holding things together and not wanting my sister to be scared.”
She began writing poems about her mother. One, published in her collection, is bluntly called “Monologue of One Returned.”
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“There is a sadness in Marisa’s work,” says Fleda Brown, Delaware poet laureate who has known Marisa for more than a decade. “It’s a part of everything she writes. There’s usually something for most writers, the grain of sand in the oyster, which begins to rub something that makes an irritant and that makes the work richer and better.”
If that accounts for a depth or edge to her novel, it may not be enough for some.
“The two main characters exist for one purpose,” a Publisher’s Weekly review says of her book, “To enact a cross-generational, strong-but-vulnerable-and-loving, screenplay-ready femininity. Chick lit? You bet….”
But pigeonholing a book also is a way of marketing it, acknowledging that most contemporary readers of fiction are 30-something, or middle-aged women, and giving them characters with whom they can relate.
While it seems to have paid off for Marisa, there also is a huge downside.
“It’s an opportunity to be dismissed,” said Juilianna Baggott, a successful writer of four novels and a friend of Marisa’s for eight years. Baggott, a long-time Delaware writer who recently moved to teach at the Florida State University in Tallahassee, has written four novels that also have been pigeonholed as chick lit.
“You can write beautiful, heartbreaking gorgeous sentences about women being single,” she says.
Marisa herself is bothered by the negative connotations of the genre.
“I don’t think this is fluff,” she says. “People love the language. I wanted to write a book about character.”
Marisa says she started the book after hearing the voice of Cornelia in her head.
Yet the difference in de los Santos’ book, the relationship between an older woman and a child, also acts a selling point, says publicist Kathleen Schmidt, who is selling the book for Dutton, the publisher.
“The chick lit audience is getting older, and they’re looking for something a little different,” she says. “It’s not chick lit, it’s great women’s fiction.”
In fact, de los Santos fought to have the cover of her novel changed from an originally pastel-shaded concoction to a more neutral cover.
“It’ll be interesting what happens with Marisa’s book,” Baggott says. “Their decision to change the cover is a smart one.”
But it’s still being marketed toward women, Schmidt says.
“If you look at the jacket, it’s not marketed toward the male audience,” she says. The cover shows the torso, legs and feet of a school-age girl. “It’s women’s fiction.”
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While Marisa wrote the novel, she often argued with her husband, David Teague, as they sat on their living room couch and discussed the development of characters and events.
The arguments centered on the amount of characters introduced at the beginning, says Teague, a University of Delaware English professor. Other issues also came up, including the “too coincidental” death of a character.
Their arguments, vehement at times, occurred because they know and trust each other, he says.
“There was frustration at times, but not hurt feelings,” Teague says. “She knew some things didn’t work, and she may have made changes because of me.”
He has yet to read the finished novel, he says, but read all of it piecemeal as it was being written.
Teague was working on a doctorate at the University of Virginia, and Marisa was attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York when they met in 1989 on a blind date engineered by Marisa’s sister.
After that meeting, Teague saw Marisa often because her family lived in Virginia, and even more when she got a summer job in Charlottesville, where Teague’s university is located.
Teague followed Marisa when she later attended the University of Houston writing program. He worked on finishing his doctoral dissertation, “Literature of the Southwest,” there, and began teaching at the local community college.
They married in March of 1992, and when Teague found a job with the University of Delaware soon after, Marisa followed him to Wilmington. They lived in Trolley Square for several years, but found they were going to Philadelphia so often, that they moved to Center City.
Then, they had children, Charles, now 6, and Annabelle, 3, and decided to return to Wilmington to raise the kids.
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The manuscript of a young adult novel Teague recently finished is now making its way to publishers, he says, with the help of Marisa’s literary agent.
Even though he has the manuscripts of three adult novels gathering dust on a shelf upstairs in the room where they often work together, Marisa’s success has inspired him to work harder on his newer, young-adult fiction, he says.
For the next few weeks, he’ll be staying at home with the kids while Marisa goes on a book tour, that will take her from Seattle, Wash., to Columbus, Ohio to New York City to Raleigh, N.C.
“If I’m still working on this novel ten years from now, then it’ll bug me,” he says of Marisa’s success. “But I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.”
For now, Marisa de los Santos is on her way.
“When people read the book, they’ll be happy with the language,” says Baggott, who wrote a blurb on the book jacket praising the novel. “It’s great when a poet writes a novel. It’s really a beautiful thing.”