As a young child, I had a vivid imagination. Most kids do, but mine seemed to last a little longer and to be just a tad more florid than those of most children. I not only had imaginary friends, I had them in many different locales and diverse centuries. My friends were Greek goddesses of mythology, dames from medieval Europe, turn-of-the-century Boston blueblood girls in boarding schools, barefoot Okies from the dustbowl, and prisoners in concentration camps. Anything I heard or saw was re-created, enhanced, and then acted out in private. My “friends” and I went through a slew of adventures, and all before I reached school age.
School.
Nothing quite kills a fertile imagination like rote learning. No one is saying that times tables aren’t important, but how could such humdrum triviality compete with all my terrific escapades? Nonetheless, school is a necessary evil, and at the age of six I started first grade. And that’s when I discovered that although I had an elaborate imagination, I was saddled with a brain that had a hard time integrating letters with phonetics. Reading was difficult because I couldn’t sound out words. I learned how to read English the same way I learned how to read music-by sight-reading. In actuality, I learned how to read music before I learned how to read words. And, as I did with the notes on a scale, I had to memorize words in order to get my brain to properly translate what my eye saw. To do this, I resorted to a number of memorization and mnemonic tricks. I recall that I could easily identify the word look because of the two O’s that in my six-year-old mind resembled two wide eyes. My dyslexia stalled my reading for a while, but luckily I was compensated with a facility with numbers. I always say in my talks that I could work with X, Y, and Z as long as the letters weren’t strung together to make words. I did not like English. I did not like writing papers and essays. I did like creative writing, but so little of that is done in school that my preference didn’t matter much. As far as learning, I took the path of least resistance and was a math major in high school and college, graduating from UCLA with a BA in theoretical mathematics in 1974.
My next incarnation was in dental medicine. I attended UCLA Dental School and graduated in 1978 fully intending to practice dentistry, but fate had other plans. Jesse Oren Kellerman was delivered about two and a half months after I graduated. I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought I’d be up on my feet a week after birth. I must have been on another planet when I thought I could easily integrate career and children. I had to learn on my own that babies are a lot of work. This was a revelation to me. For the first six months of my son’s life, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get anything done other than to take care of the little rascal. It helped to know people in the same situation, but as I had always been a competent person and prided myself on being organized to the point of compulsive, I felt I should be doing better.
By the time I finally reached some kind of equilibrium, Jess was around six months old. I was able to brush my teeth, shower, and get dressed all before noon. I was learning how to become a functional person at the same time my son was becoming a person. He was a lot of work, but with that work was the joy of seeing a human being develop. He was a happy little guy-amusing and engaging-and we had a really good time together. As he grew older, he was very responsive and made my life easier by being an early talker. I decided to put off my illustrious career in dentistry in favor of motherhood and I kept telling myself that I’d soldier on with dentistry just as soon as Jesse was in school.
But then I got pregnant again. By the time Rachel came around, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not just postponing dentistry, I was shelving it. It was an easy decision in some ways, but a very hard one in others. I felt I was wasting years of education and letting my profession down. But at the time, dentistry wasn’t calling my name, and honestly, no one from the ADA has ever phoned me and asked, “Where the heck are you?” It seems that dentistry has gotten along just fine without me.
So I went about the business of raising a family. Now, anyone who has ever spent long periods with a child knows that there’s a lot of down time-pushing a swing, taking a walk, watching your child play at the park.
The mind abhors a vacuum.
Presented with blocks of time without speaking, my brain began to spark and fill in the blanks. In my head, I listed chores that needed to be done. I planned dinner menus. I considered baby gyms and music classes. I was expected to be thinking about all those things. What I didn’t expect was to be making up stories again.
My imaginary friends awoke from the dormancy caused by twenty years of education. They began to make their big-screen comebacks in my head, only this time they materialized in adult form. I began to invent new adventures, more daring quests, more racy and passionate love stories, darker fables, and elusive murder mysteries. Once again, the chief protagonist in all my stories was some kind of Faye Kellerman facsimile, but at twenty-six, I knew better than to act out the stories aloud as I had done as a kid. They put adults away for those kinds of things. I kept all my buddies inside because I felt that there was something a little off with me: making up stories when you’re a wife, a mother, and supposedly a sane person. I firmly believe that I would have left my tales deep inside my gray matter if I had been married to anyone other than Jonathan Kellerman.
Unlike me, Jonathan was a natural-born writer. I think he emerged from his mother’s womb with pen in hand. When I met Jon, I was eighteen. We married a year and a half later, both of us still wet-behind-the-ears kids and very much unformed. Jonathan not only saw me through college and dental school, but elected to go to graduate school in Los Angeles because I didn’t want to move from there. Jonathan graduated with a PhD in clinical psychology from USC at the tender age of twenty-four. My husband was a true Renaissance man, with many interests and hobbies, and one of his extracurricular passions was writing. If he saw me through college, I saw him through nine novels, all of them eventually relegated to boxes in storage. His attempts taught him a lot. They taught me what it meant to persevere and how much fun it was to write. Yes, he cared that his novels weren’t getting published, but it didn’t deter him a whit from writing. It was almost as if writing were an addiction.
Then one day it suddenly dawned on me what he was doing. He was taking his imaginary friends and putting them down on paper and calling himself a writer. If he was brave enough to do that and strong enough to suffer through one rejection after another, what in the world did I have to lose by putting my imaginary friends on paper too? And the timing was perfect. He was on the brink of breaking through into the publishing business. Had he been the monster bestseller that he is today, I would have been much too intimidated to try to write.
Another husband might have been outright discouraging. Another husband might have been encouraging in a discouraging way. Jonathan, bless him, was only encouraging. As the premier author in the family, he was helpful and straightforward, straddling the difficult lines between tutor, critic, and husband. The nights weren’t always easy, but the conversation was always honest.
As with a lot of neophyte writers, my first attempts were competently written but went nowhere. The stories dragged, the characters didn’t develop, the sense of place was wanting. It was good that my initial forays into fiction never saw the light of day, but all those hours of writing bad stories weren’t for nothing. I considered the four-to-five-year experience a protracted course in writing fiction. I had Jonathan’s input, but I still had to act as my own student, teacher, editor, and critic.