Clintonville Spotlight

Author brings back familiar characters



Michelle Herman remembers the first time she taught a creative writing class.

“I was in graduate school and 20 kids in Iowa were looking at me completely rapt, like ‘Tell me your wisdom, Obi-Wan Kenobi.’ They were writing down every word I said. It was exhilarating,” Herman said.

“I’ll miss having that effect on people.”

Herman, who lives in Clintonville, is retiring from the Ohio State University at the conclusion of this semester.

Michelle Herman

This is far from the end of Herman’s career, however. Her ninth book, Close-Up: A Novel, won the Donald L. Jordan Literary Prize and will be published in the coming weeks. For fans of Herman’s most popular book, DOG, the protagonist of Close-Up will be familiar.

“Jill, the protagonist of DOG, comes back in the new novel. I’ve been thinking of her all these years, so I resurrected her. Phil (the dog) is still around but he’s old,” Herman said.

“Jill is one of the protagonists of Close-Up and I was so happy to be with her again. I missed her all these years.”

Having Jill return in Close-Up gave Herman the chance to do something she wishes more literary fiction did: aspire to hope, and have a happy ending.

“Bringing Jill back gave me the chance to give her the happy ending that I always felt she deserved. I’m a little bit of a sap that way,” she said.

“I don’t like sentimentality, but I like to see people be happy if there’s a possibility of it. I felt like giving Jill more in her life than her writing and her dog was important.”

In a way, Herman’s new novel is not new to her because she began writing it in 2006, not long after DOG came out.

“It started as sort of a joke because I had a dog I was very close to, Molly, who had nothing personality-wise in common with Phil, but her biography was the same.” she said.

“I also had a bird that I was very attached to, and a friend joked that now that I’d written an entire novel inspired by the dog, I really had to write one inspired by the bird or the bird would be jealous.”

Herman’s bird, a cockatiel named Cody, would sit on her shoulder as she worked, while Molly sat at her feet.

“I didn’t really think the bird would be jealous, but I’ve never read a bird protagonist in a novel, so I wrote a scene with a cockatiel and a young couple and their baby,” Herman added.

That scene would blossom into Close-Up, though Herman’s dog and bird were not the only real-life inspirations for the novel. One of Herman’s students inspired one of its protagonists.

“I wanted to write about a magician because I had a favorite undergraduate student who was a successful young magician. He was constantly having to be excused from class for a week to travel to Paris or L.A. to perform. He would do tricks for us and was remarkable,” Herman said.

“I’d never thought about magic as an art, as opposed to some entertainment, but he was a very artful magician.”

The pieces of the novel came together slowly while Herman wrote other books, primarily nonfiction, in the meantime. She wrote three collections of essays and several short stories in the interim and is one of the longest-running columnists at Slate’s parenting advice column Care and Feeding.

“I’ve always been a good advice-giver and amateur therapist. I’ve joked for decades that my dream job would be as an advice columnist,” she said.

Hand drawn magic elements as hand with the eye, vector illustration

There are particular issues Herman gravitates toward. She said she enjoys helping parents who are struggling to accept that their kid has come out as gay, nonbinary or trans, and she finds it rewarding to answer questions from children who are having trouble with their parents.

There’s one piece of wisdom in particular she never gets tired of reminding people: “Your child is not you. Their body is not your body. You have to let them live their life. If I had to boil my Care and Feeding philosophy down, that’d be it because that covers a lot of territory,” said Herman, mother of Grace.

“I get questions from parents about what their kid is wearing, the way they do their hair, what they should major in in college, what if they major in something not practical, they’ve gotten tattoos or shaved their heads. Basically, the parents want me to back them up,” she said.

“I always pull those questions so I can tell the parents to let their children be who they are. I’m always there on the side of the kids getting to make their own decisions.”

Herman has plans for more books now that she is a few short weeks away from retirement. She has more books to write, as well as a musical, and wants to spend more time practicing ballet, brushing up on her French, singing with The Harmony Project, and becoming a better swimmer.

“I love my students, so I’ll be sad about not being in classrooms, but I’m ready to get up and write for three or four hours and have a more normal life,” she said.

“That’s the dream.”

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