In the gleaming white kitchen of their Lincoln Park apartment, novelists Judith Barnard and Michael Fain, better known by their pen name, Judith Michael, are talking about inspiration. “Our ideas come from a combination of everything,” Michael is saying over a lunch of chicken salad and pasta with pesto sauce. “It’s what we see, what we read and what we hear all filtered through our psyches and our experience–our view of the world and people. We don’t know where an idea came from.”
“Well, wait a minute. That’s not true exactly–excuse me for interrupting,” Judith says. “There are two ways we do this. One is, we start with a fantasy. We always look for a fantasy. And partly we look at this as novelists, so we need to have a theme that will make a good story.”
“The ideas are all around us,” Michael adds. “It’s more a matter of selecting one that we think we can do something with and that we want to live with for a couple of years.”
That sort of polite conversational minuet of editing and amending is a way of life for Judith and Michael. Not only is it the way they write their best-selling fiction, but it also is the way they’ve learned to keep their love and marriage intact under the pressure of living and working together day after day.
While the name Judith Michael may not be quite as prominent as those of Danielle Steel, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Judith Krantz, the couple’s page-turners combined have spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
Their pop fiction novels, geared toward women but read by some men as well, are a blend of fantasy and reality, a sort of gritty, thinking person’s romance. Their ideas usually start with a universal fantasy, such as identical twins who trade lives in “Deceptions,” the novel that put Judith Michael on the map.
The couple met in 1977 under circumstances that a novelist might engineer. Esther Fain, Michael’s mother, was Judith’s dear friend, and Judith learned nearly everything about Michael from her. When Michael’s mother became ill, he returned to Chicago from Canada and met Judith at her bedside.
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Was it love at first sight?
“No, probably not,” Judith says.
“Not quite,” Michael says.
“When I met him I had the advantage of knowing so much about him and his divorce and his child,” Judith says. “I was a total stranger to him, but it didn’t take long. We courted in the corridors of what was then called Billings Hospital. We walked around and around those corridors, went downstairs for coffee. And I would go dancing down the stairs outside at the end of the day, thinking what a wonderful day it was, and then I’d remember that my friend was in there dying. So it was a very bittersweet time.
“I think I fell in love with Michael before he fell in love with me. I had been alone for a long time. I had been divorced and I decided that I would never meet anybody else. He was the first man that I thought I would like to be with in all those years.”
Their personal history appears to echo in their latest novel, “Acts of Love” (Crown), the story of a theater director, Luke Cameron, and an actress, Jessica Fontaine, linked by the director’s recently deceased grandmother, a legendary stage actress.
Luke falls in love with Jessica through the letters she wrote to his grandmother and then goes to great lengths to seek her out.
“I was thinking when I just said that I had the advantage over Michael that (in “Acts of Love”) Jessica tells Luke: `You have the advantage over me. You know all these things,’ ” Judith says. “It could have come from (our real life).”
“That could be, although I think the idea about finding out about the character through letters was something that I thought of and that would have been independent of you,” Michael says.
“Did you think of that? I don’t remember who thought of that,” Judith says. “At some point we really forget who thought of what. Nabokov talked about the way he wrote books and he said it’s a big tossed salad of ideas. What we get is tossed salad of both of our ideas.”
A team effort
Together, Judith and Michael come up with a cast of characters, a theme and a plot. They share the research into the professions, issues and locales they need to write a realistic story. It’s the most pleasant part of the process because they sometimes choose settings based on where they’d like to vacation (Egypt, India and Australia, for example) and they gain behind-the-scenes access to almost anything from television stations to biology labs.
Once they have a detailed outline, Judith starts writing and Michael edits chapter by chapter and writes plot summation for upcoming chapters.
This is the grueling part.
“What do you mean I write a bad sentence?” Judith says, slipping into mock dialogue to illustrate their working partnership. “I never write a bad sentence. How can you say that?”
“I never say you write a bad sentence,” Michael insists.
“No, he doesn’t,” Judith says. “He just wrinkles his nose. Or he’ll read a chapter I just finished and say, `This is good,’ and I know he doesn’t like it. He’s preparing to tell me what’s wrong with it.”
“The world’s worst job is to be the editor or critic of someone you love,” Michael says.
Judith allows that sometimes she has to tell Michael that she doesn’t like one of his ideas. “Both of us had to learn that just because we criticize each other’s ideas doesn’t mean we stop loving each other.
“The odd thing you can say about our marriage is that we are as nice to each other as if we were co-workers in an office. To get along 24 hours a day, you have to be careful and you can never say, `You idiot,’ because you destroy all the confidence in this other person. If you do that, you haven’t got anything in an office or in a marriage.”
Judith, 64, who was born in Denver, grew up in Chicago and Ohio. She has a master’s degree in English from Northwestern University and while in graduate school wrote a literary novel, published in 1967, “The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge,” about a political science professor at a school “amazingly similar to Northwestern.”
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Michael, 60, grew up in Rogers Park and Uptown before dropping out of Senn High School to enroll in the University of Chicago, which then accepted bright students without high school diplomas. He took as many courses as he could in geology and also worked in an engineering lab to help pay his way. He decided he wanted to be an engineer, lost interest in geology and never even completed his undergraduate degree. He became a self-taught aerospace engineer.
Started with `Deceptions’
When the couple met, Judith was eking out an existence as a free-lance writer and editor. They moved in together and began collaborating on pieces for magazines and newspapers, with Michael providing the photography. When they married in 1979, they wrote a first-person story for a women’s magazine about why they decided to get married after living together.
They enjoyed working together but found that constantly coming up with ideas and trying to sell proposals was a tiresome way to make a living. Being lifelong readers, they decided to try writing a novel.
They dreamed up a story, wrote some sample chapters, found an agent, got a contract and started working. The book became “Deceptions,” a novel about twins who trade lives. It was published in 1982 and became a best seller.
Difficult conditions
It was written in a cramped apartment on Stratford Place, with the two authors sitting at desks only a few feet apart for two years.
“It was a tense time,” Judith remembers. “It was not easy. We barely knew how to be married. We barely knew how to write a commercial novel.
“There was one argument that lasted for about three days. We didn’t talk to each other, which is hard when you’re working together. At the end of it, Michael said, `That’s it! I’m leaving.’ And I said, `You can’t leave; we have a contract with Simon & Schuster.’ We burst out laughing. It was so absurd that we’re going to keep our marriage going because of Simon & Schuster.
“We had $2,000 in the bank and we had been looking at want ads. If `Deceptions’ hadn’t worked, Michael would have gone back to being an engineer and I would have gone back to being an editor.”
Instead Judith and Michael are living a fairy tale. “Deceptions” was followed by eight more novels: “Possession,” the story of a Vancouver housewife coping with her husband’s disappearance; “Private Affairs,” about a husband-and-wife journalism team; “Inheritance,” “The Ruling Passion,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “A Pot of Gold,” “A Tangled Web” and “Acts of Love” (arriving in stores soon).
Secrets of their success
They divide their time between a home in Aspen, Colo., and a vintage co-op apartment in Chicago with a stunning view of Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan.
They’ve thought a lot about why they succeeded when so many other authors fail. It helped to have the benefit of a good agent and the same editor for all the books. It helps to write a good story. And, of course, luck and serendipity play their parts.
“And there’s something else,” Judith says. “We have an understanding of the way the powerful and the wealthy live with (an attitude) of innocent amazement.”
“Readers identify with that because most readers don’t grow up as a Rockefeller or Harriman. They have this same feeling that there is a world of money, power and influence that is really quite amazing. In fact it’s quite an ordinary world and those people do the same things we do. Meeting them I am quite amazed at how ordinary they are and, very often, how uninteresting.
“And so we have always combined fantasy and real life. I don’t know that anyone was doing that in the ’80s when we started. Our people are real. If we have a sex scene, it’s because it brings out character. It’s not just to have a sex scene.”
Judith Michael novels are deeper than most in the genre, driven more by character than by action. The reader knows what the characters are thinking; consequently only one of them, “Deceptions,” has been dramatized.
“In 100 years when we’re dead, like Jane Austen, they’ll get to our books and our heirs will enjoy it,” Judith says. “We really don’t write for the movies. We just write books and we love telling stories.”