Author Sue Miller isn’t afraid of writing about women who have made mistakes in relationships. Anna, the protagonist of Miller’s first novel, the 1986 best-selling “The Good Mother,” is willing to jeopardize having custody of her young child because of her relationship with a live-in lover. In Miller’s most recent novel, “While I Was Gone,” the main character is a successful veterinarian in her 50s who endangers her longtime marriage to a minister when she finds herself drawn to a man from her complicated past.
Miller, who is a native of Hyde Park, will read at the Harold Washington Library Center at 6 p.m. Tuesday. The author recently spoke with Deputy Literary Editor Carolyn Alessio.
Q. You often write about women during vulnerable periods in their lives. Hasn’t this brought you criticism in the past?
A. There was a lot of discussion about Anna with “The Good Mother.” She was a character who didn’t have a call to anything and did what she could. She taught piano, then came to work in a university office doing administration. I remember feminists saying that she was an underachiever and I thought, Where are you? Most people find work that is respectable and will earn them enough money and they can bear to do. The wish for that heroic figure is a wish for a political novel.
Q. Yet you’ve always identified yourself as a feminist writer.
A. Yes. As a fiction writer, my mission is to write characters who can stand in for any person, with some sense of enlargement. That’s how I see myself as a feminist, not as personifying any agenda. I’ve never written a character I’m not sympathetic to. I don’t think of them as weak; I think they all have their weak moments.
Q. How do young women today respond to the concept of feminism?
A. People are afraid to be seen as unpleasant, highly politicized. Maybe young people do feel a sense of distance from the anger that fueled the feminist movement at the start. I think that’s different. I think there’s a lot that’s taken for granted about the ease of some things now. I think it’s important to notice a lot of things that haven’t happened as they were supposed to. Some people think, Well, there’s a move toward integration and the attitude is, Well, isn’t that sufficient?
Q. Some of your characters are defined largely by their jobs. How has your own, varied work experience — day-care worker, professor — influenced the way you portray women and work?
A. Jo (the veterinarian in “While I Was Gone”) was someone who was so frightened in a way, and animals are a great comfort to people at those times in their lives. When humans seem least trustworthy or attractive, the animal world offers uncomplicated simplicity. Jo has a lot of difficulty with coming clean and feeling forthrightly engaged.
Work becomes more important as you get older. For years, nothing felt very permanent to me. I would think, I’m going to have to get serious about a reasonable living. I was always writing but always giving other things attention. I’m very glad my life worked out that way, unlike Tillie Olsen with “Silences.” It was everything to me to be reading and thinking and trying to write slowly but not imagining myself sending anything out for a good 10 years. I’d read so much more, understood the way the contemporary novel worked. In my 20s I’d never read the novel past Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I felt very grateful for that long, silent apprenticeship.
Q. You grew up in Hyde Park. Were there any particular Midwestern writers who influenced you?
A. Saul Bellow. And Willa Cather. I’ve read and re-read her. She writes a lot about work, particularly art and the making of it, the making of music. I don’t know if there’s a Midwestern aesthetic. It’s so mixed up now, generalized. Chicago was the sort of place people went to get away from the prairie. The escape to Chicago represented a lot to people. But I think it’s less true now. Although I feel very different in the Midwest; it’s a much friendlier, easier place to be. There’s a larger black middle-class than in other places.
Q. There seems to be more about faith in your new novel than in some of your previous books. Daniel, the minister, is a real contrast to his wife Jo, who isn’t at all religious.
A. I wanted Jo to be so cut off from a religious kind of forgiveness, from reconciliation with herself through religion. But I wanted that to be represented strongly by someone in that novel. There’s Jo sort of feeling that by not wishing she could have what he has, she is cut off from it, and it makes her rely more on human contact.
Q. Has there been a certain moment in writing that has surprised you or shown you something you didn’t know?
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A. I think with this book it was in writing Daniel’s sermon, coming up with the notion of memory as a metaphor for life after death. For me, it made a whole lot of other things work.