A Long Write Turn

It had been more than five years since she started writing it, more than a year and a half since she had sold it to a publisher. And there she was, in a Seattle bookstore. And there it was: her first novel.

"The Atlas of Love," published by St. Martin's Press, was released in August.

Perhaps it is proper to describe Laurie Frankel's entry into the literary world as a labor of love. The idea for the book was conceived long ago and the end product comes from a longstanding love of the written word.

 Frankel, who was raised in Columbia, MD, is the daughter of an English teacher at Howard Community College.

"My husband and I joked that we knew she was a writer at about age 4," said Laurie's mother, Sue Frankel. "Most kids learn how to talk in small sentences. Laurie learned to speak in bulk. She's always loved reading and she's always loved writing."

Fittingly, Laurie Frankel, 37, is now a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. She wrote the book during summers, drafting, then editing, and then revising and revising some more.

But that is the plot of a later chapter in Frankel's life. Let us turn the pages back to the beginning.

Like with "The Atlas of Love," Frankel's early writings also went through a rigorous editing process--the result of a mother setting up the skills that would serve a daughter down the line.

"When I was growing up, she was much more worried about my writing than seemed entirely appropriate to me," Laurie Frankel said. "She would make me revise things I felt were just fine, and this is when I was in elementary school.

"And yet by high school I was certainly doing that on my own, revising and revising and revising and making what was no doubt acceptable as good as it could possibly be."

Frankel said her mother also imparted the value of reading and writing and education. After graduating from Wilde Lake High School in 1991, she went on to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., earning her bachelor's degree in English in 1995. A master's degree in English from the University of Delaware followed three years later.

She taught English and women's studies at the Community College of Baltimore County campus in Essex from 2000 until 2004, and then in 2005 made her way to the West Coast and the University of Puget Sound. In the time between those jobs, she started the book.

Though she had been writing for much of her life, this would be a decided change in format.

She had penned articles for the school newspaper at Wilde Lake and then focused on academic writing while in college. On occasion, she had written short stories from the time she was young all the way through college.

And then she had this novel idea.

"I was really interested in the idea of different kinds of families and different ways to be a family, the insistence that families need not be a certain way, need not be in the tradition of man and women get together, have sex and make a baby," Frankel said. "There are other options besides that.

"I had this kernel of a seed of an idea that it'd be interesting to write about three friends raising a baby together," she said. "The whole thing grew together from that."

She wrote what was then titled "Naked Love" during summers, those gloriously free weeks when classes weren't in session and papers didn't need to be graded. The process started way back in the fall of 2004.

"In some ways, it isn't that long," Frankel said. "It's only 10 months or so [of total work]. It really worked for me because I would not be able to do it all year, and then once June rolled around I was so eager to do it that I was really productive."

By 2008, she was ready to send her manuscript out to publishers. Amazingly, Frankel says, it didn't take long.

"I wrote one letter to one agent [New York City-based Molly Friedrich] who immediately said she was interested and wanted a couple of changes before we proceeded. It was totally a shot in the dark. I researched agents and decided that she was the best one there was.

"Once I made the changes, she sold it in about a week. It was actually very fast. It was stunning."

The book was sold to St. Martin's Press in December 2008. Twenty months later, it was on shelves. More than five years after Frankel started work on it, she must have been thrilled, right?

"It was just scary," Frankel says. "The right answer is it was so amazing and gratifying. But the hard copy of this thing kind of terrified me. It's out there in the world now. You can't take it back. That's a strange thing at the end of a long process. You spend a lot of time making all of these decisions and thinking, 'I can fix that later.'

"There is no later."

Indeed, there is no later, not when this chapter of Frankel's live is coming to a close. Turn the pages, however, and another chapter begins.

Another book, this one about technology, death and love, is in the works. About 120 pages are done. The rest, as with so much in life, is still to be written.

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On the Web:

http://www.lauriefrankel.net/About_the_Book.html