(This article, reprinted with permission, featuring a novel set in Bexley, appeared in The Dispatch on May 26, 2004.)

New York native finds Bexley a comfortable setting for book

By Elizabeth Weinstein
FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

In the first chapter of What To Keep, first-time novelist Rachel Cline sets the scene with a vivid description of Bexley— the home of her plucky young protagonist -- in 1976:

“Unlike the way most suburbs relate to their cities, Columbus has grown around Bexley in concentric rings of shopping malls, parks, hospitals, universities, institutes, and bedroom communities.’

The passage continues:

“It’s a very old suburb, but it has a faint theme: The street names have a Britannic sound, and many of the houses are distinctly manorial.”

For a city with barely 13,000 people, Bexley makes its way, time and again, into the literary world: In his 1988 memoir, Be True to Your School, Bob Greene chronicles his high-school years there in the 1960s; and in her 2002 off-Broadway play, Bexley, OH (!), or Two Tales of One City, Prudence Wright shares a more jaundiced view.

Cline, a native New Yorker, became intrigued with the suburb while studying English and art history in the 1970s at Oberlin College in northeastern Ohio.

“I had a boyfriend in college who grew up in Bexley and I went home with him for Thanksgiving one year,” she said from her home in New York. “I was enchanted by how beautiful it was but also how cosmopolitan.

“I really didn’t want to write about New York, because, growing up here, you realize that it’s not like anything else in America. I wanted to write a story that people would relate to even if they hadn’t grown up in the square mile that I grew up in.”

Roger Copeland, a theater professor at Oberlin College, remembers Cline from one of the first courses he taught there, in 1976.

“Even back then,” he said in an e-mail interview, “it was evident that Rachel had a very keen eye for telling details, the very sort of ‘telling details’ that most novels live or die by.   And she had a wonderfully sardonic take on things, informed sometimes by a world-weariness beyond her years.”

To research her novel, Cline holed up for almost a week in the Columbus Metropolitan Library-- reading old telephone books and studying archival photos.

What To Keep follows Denny Roman in her growth from an awkward-yet-gutsy 12-year-old to an aspiring actress in her 20s and finally, in her 30s, a successful playwright in modern New York.

Other characters include her divorced parents, a couple of absent-minded neuroscientists; and the lovably eccentric Maureen, an agoraphobic who serves as a nanny, secretary and personal assistant to the family.

Entertainment Weekly has called the book “a striking debut” -- one that “zings along with cinematic flair,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cline became a writer first for films and television --  notably, the prime-time soap opera Knots Landing.

Like her What To Keep protagonist, she took a circuitous route.

“In order to be successful as a television writer, you have to watch television all the time, and you have to love television the way I loved novels,” the author said.  “I’d come home from working the various odd jobs I had, and I’d have to sit there and watch three hours of Doogie Howser and Beverly Hills 90210 -- and I hated it.

“When I turned 40, I said to myself: ‘You know, what you’ve always really wanted to do is write a novel, and nobody’s going to pay you to do it. You might as well just do it.’”

What To Keep, she said, began with an idea for a screenplay.

“While I was . . . (in Los Angeles), it was sort of the boom time of what they called the high-concept script --  a story that you could tell in one sentence. My one line was ‘What if an ordinary-looking woman became convinced she was gorgeous and irresistible?’

She added with a laugh:

“It was called Hello, Gorgeous -- sort of like a feminist spin on a big Hollywood movie idea.”

In the first section of What To Keep, the mother, Lily, suffers a mild bout of amnesia alter a car crash and enters a beauty parlor for a full-scale makeover.

She is thus convinced of her attractiveness.

Cline came up with the eventual title in the middle of the night.

“I think I woke up out of a sound sleep and wrote it down on a scrap of paper. I kept it because it pertains to just about everything in the book.   It’s about: Who do you keep around you and what characteristics of your own do you accept and reject and what values do you keep and what personal possessions do you hang onto?”

As an adult, Denny returns home to help her mother and new stepfather prepare for a move to New York -- a task she describes as “loathsome.”

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