Free I Can't Complain by Elinor Lipman Page B

example of the world I live in. I tell them that our son came home from school one day complaining, “I’m the
only
kid in third grade who celebrates
only
Hanukkah.”
    “It’s true,” I tell the hostile audience. “That happened. He actually was the only kid . . .” Et cetera. I ask if they don’t see themselves as, well, let’s be frank: prejudiced. No, they don’t. Sometimes I add this, hoping to broaden the topic and get me off the hot seat: A novel about a Jewish family is a Jewish novel. (I name a few.) One cannot bring forth an American novel about the Everyman Family and name them the Shapiros unless the author is making a point. Ethnicity, religion, and race can’t be dropped casually into a novel as if casting a television commercial with a multicultural aim.
    At one particularly bracing night as keynote speaker for the Worcester, Massachusetts, Jewish Federation’s annual banquet, a woman seated next to me at dinner announced that she found my portrayal of Jews in the Catskills more anti-Semitic than that of the anti-Semitic Vermont innkeeper. I gasped. I’d been taught that one is polite to the guests in one’s house, and for that evening the Radisson was this federation board member’s base of hospitality. Of course she had to repeat this later and louder at the Q and A in front of hundreds of women. I was flummoxed. A braver author might have snapped, “I don’t defend the content of my books.” I tried to get across what I used to ask my Hampshire College students, who grumbled when a female character under discussion tossed a salad or burped a baby. “In other words, you should follow the character into a voting booth, then judge the story by what lever he pulls?” No one used to back down in that workshop of the intensely politically correct, and no one gives an inch after I make my case for artistic freedom. “If one Jewish woman ever fell in love with one Lutheran man, are you saying I couldn’t write their story? Can a novel be about Hitler? Are you offended by mysteries that involve murders? Are you mad at Tolstoy and Flaubert for those adulterers they dreamed up?” I quote as best as I can from memory (now from a document I wrote titled “Bring to Book Groups”) what Flannery O’Connor once said, that “everybody approaches the novel according to his particular interest—the doctor looks for a disease, the minister looks for a sermon, the poor look for money . . . If they find what they want . . . then they judge the piece of fiction to be superior.”
    I’ve convinced no one, or so it seems. I have a responsibility, someone repeats. Our shrinking numbers . . .
    Later, during the book signing, there’s always someone who tells me that she converted to Judaism or married a gentile, and it’s working out fine. The funny ones lean in to confide, “I loved this book. Thank you for coming. My husband married a shiksa: me.”
    I laugh. I open their copies to the title page and write gratefully, “To Mary Margaret (or Kathleen or Maureen or Christine), kind soul and brilliant critic, who restored my faith in my People.”

My Book the Movie
    D ECADES AGO, ON AN unseasonably cold and rainy May morning, my phone rang, and it was Hollywood calling. “How would you feel on this miserable day to know that Sigourney Weaver loves your book?” this agent asked. She was talking about my first novel,
Then She Found Me,
and even though I surely knew that books could be turned into movies, I had no idea that mine had been circulated to producers. My husband and I threw an impromptu party to which I wore, aiming for Hollywood-tinged irony, a strapless dress, a rhinestone bracelet, and sunglasses.
    It was 1989, and Sigourney was starring in
Ghostbusters II,
which I’d just seen with my six-year-old son. When I picked him up at school the day the deal was struck, I asked—expecting great excitement—“How would you feel if Sigourney Weaver wanted to make a movie out of Mummy’s