Mary Lou Shields

(from Cambridge Chronicle, March 4, 1999 www.townonline.com/cambridge)

Mary Lou Shields is nervous about the interview. Basically, the 63-year-old author explains, she doesn't see herself as a writer and feels cautious about being written up as one.

Besides that, being in the newspaper means acknowledging she is writting another book, a second memoir for publication.

"I haven't talked about the new book before," said Shields, who lives and works on Mead Street in North Cambridge, "and I don't feel like a writer, I know in my own mind I'm not publishing."

The reporter also is nervous. Unlike dozens of other interviews with authors, this one is with a woman who bared her soul in her one published book, "Sea Run," subtitled "Surviving My Mother's Madness." Like many books by Cambridge authors, Shields' 1981 memoir is about divorce and insanity, sex and work. But the details are her own.

It revolves around a five-year period when Shields was in five-day-a-week psychoanalysis at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Shields describes how she tries to escape the conviction that because her mother suffered mental illness, in fact in psychiatric hospital for 17 years, she too will suffer the same fate.

She describes how she dealt with marriage, divorce, feminism in the 60s, her dream of being a writer, her drunk and abusive father, her identity as a mother, and her relationship with her analyst.

Now, Shields is getting ready to publish her second memoir, entitled "In My Own Footsteps." She points to shelves full of boxes containing half a dozen journals each. The first book included nine journal volumes. The new one will incorporate 120. It is a much bigger undertaking, especially for Shields, who claims organization is not her thing.

How did it feel to set your personal life down for all the world to see, the reporter asks. How did it feel for your family to have you set down their lives in print for all the world to see.

Shields does not seem fazed by this aspect of her writing. She answers questions about such personal writing with answers about process.

"Writing as a process has preoccupied me," said Shields.

She describes a life that involves going to writers' worshops whenever she can and reading book after book about the process and life of writing. She also gives talks now and then to psychology classes or writing classes.

In fact, the 338 pages published about Shields' life are a fifth draft, pared down from the 1,000 pages of raw details included in Shields' first draft. By the time "Sea Run" reached the public, Shields had removed the parts she couldn't bare to let loose, and she had crafted the other people in her life - her ex-husband, her friends, her children -- in a way that was comfortable to her.

"I sketched them like that illustrator, Hirschfeld," said Shields, describing how the caricaturist would draw a profile with a few poignant lines.

Shields admits she had to leave in a few delicate facts about herself to preserve the truth behind the book. She wanted, for instance, to leave out the night she went home drunk with a man she met at Club Casablanca. But that same man was with her on a later date when she spread her mother's ashes.

Almost none of Shields' friends or family would read the book, until after it was published. Her ex-husband, who remains a close friend, still hasn't read the book.  A man as private as Shields is open, he told her he is saving it for his old age.

For her first book, Shields borrowed, begged and stole to survive economically. She received an advance from the publisher, and was counting on royalties after it was in print. But the publisher went out of business soon after her book was printed and Shields ended up buying over two thousand remaining copies.

When a professor at Brandeis asked her to talk about her memoir in the early 90s, Shields was ready to turn down the offer. There were no more copies of the book left. A business friend convinced her that if demand existed for the book, Shields should make a new supply available.  At this point, Amazon.com listed the book, which put it back into circulation.

A graduate of Radcliffe, Shields has had a variety of jobs in her adulthood, but none came close to eliciting the passion she has for writing.  After working 12 years in a local furniture shop with her ex-husband, Shields started her own public relations business. Writer Marge Piercy, who also was part of the women's movement at the time, became a client.

It was Piercy who convinced Shields to use her journals as the basis for a book. At the time, Shields had been injured in a car accident and could not keep her very active business going. That's when she looked to writing.

"Marge said writing is a very good occupation for an invalid, that is, if you can write," said Shields.

One weekend in Piercy's Wellfleet home, the two women had the idea of using the analysis as the basis for the book, giving Shields the kind of beginning, middle and end hard to come by for such a disorganized person.

Knowing that she needed a more steady income, Shields also started a business in 1983 selling Shaklee nutrition products and biodegradable cleaner.

"I realized I didn't ever want to be financially dependent on a publisher again," she said.

She runs the business out of a second floor office of the home she shares with the man she married three years ago.  It is the same home she lived in with her first husband, raised her children in, and described in her book.

On the third floor of the house is her small writing office. A large window opposite a large mirror makes the room seem larger. There are pictures of Shields' mother, after she had spent years institutionalized. There are pictures of Shields' friends and her two children, now in their 30s, as well as her new grandchild.  And there are the journals. In Shields' case, her life is her work is her life.

"I'd like to think when the memoirs are all done, I've said something about living and I've said something about writing and I've paid tribute to the people who have saved my life," said Shields.