Finding fiction among grapes
I had decided to throw the novel out. I’d struggled with it for four years. I had discarded an entire draft already, and the narrative seemed irretrievably lost. I’d begun not to care what happened to the characters, which is when you know a book is dead.
I phoned my editor to tell her. “I’m giving up,” I said. The novel was under contract and already two years overdue. So obviously, my editor said, “Absolutely not.”
I had sold it to her based on one paragraph — a paragraph about a woman in New York who grew up on a peach farm. Over the years, peaches had evolved into grapes, and the daughter of this farming family narrated the novel from a cool, slightly closer distance — from Los Angeles. My editor insisted, “You need to get your protagonist involved in the story. You need to place her on the farm.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “I don’t know anything about farming.” I did not know, for example, how a farmer’s daily routine would shift from January to July. I did not know then, as I later would, that a big crop took longer to ripen, or that in a surplus year, the large wineries tended to find reasons to downgrade your grapes, or that some varieties came off the vine in berries (merlot) and some in bunches (Ruby Reds). I didn’t know that what a farmer did was drive around all day and look for problems, or that if you had 160 acres of grapes, you’d trap 94 coyotes in 30 days. I didn’t know that when farmers spoke of love, they spoke of mergers, not marriages.
I had done a lot of reading, but I hadn’t done the hard work of leaving the house. I had read histories of grapes in California. I had read textbooks on the different kinds of grapes, on how to grow a vine from seedling to maturity, on how wine was made. I had read all the books on Napa politics and the Mondavis and the Gallos. Like everyone, I knew the nature of people, of parents and siblings, which I’d thought would be enough to get me through this account of a family struggling to keep its fourth-generation farm.
I told my editor, “I would have to do so much research. It’s insurmountable.” My editor answered with instructions so obvious it was humiliating: “Katherine,” she said. “Do your research.”
I hung up the phone, got in my car and drove four hours north to my hometown, to the house where I grew up, in Fresno.
It was October, and the Central Valley was harvesting black grapes: Cabernet, Barbera, Ruby Reds. October weather in Los Angeles is brutally hot. October is when air conditioners all over the city finally give up. But fall in the Central Valley is one of the loveliest anywhere. Warm days shift into mild, chilly evenings. The air takes on that autumn smell: dying leaves and cut grass, the slight decay from dewy mornings and dry nights, a sweetness from the last of the Thompson seedless dehydrating in the sun.
From the car, I phoned my father’s golf friends: farmers, farm brokers, wine guys. I phoned a woman I’d known as a child whose husband had been one of the largest producers of grapes in the world in the 1980s. There is no more magnanimous group than the farm people of Fresno. Everyone wanted to talk to me. Everyone wanted to help.
“What do you want to know?” they kept asking. I had been writing this book about a grape and peach enterprise for four years, and I knew so little about the business that I didn’t even know what I had come to learn. I didn’t know that grapes were picked at night, that labor contractors took up to 40% of a worker’s total wages, that all the picking was done by machines and that even if you owned your own, there were never enough machines.
In these small details, in the specifics of place and of an industry and of a disappearing lifestyle, the novel began to breathe. The characters became real to me as they had not been before, and I cared what happened to them, and I knew — that first trip up for that first harvest in 2009 — that the book would live.
Over the next four years, I went up during the fall. I rode around with my father’s friends in their clean white pickups. I ate lunch at the Vineyard restaurant, which is where all the Fresno and Madera farmers ate lunch, and I eavesdropped. I made pals with a constant patron at the Vineyard’s bar, a retired farm insurance salesman called Jim who shared with me the gossip of everyone who walked into the room. I started reading the Western Farm Press daily, and I still do. I’m invested in the narrative.
What had started as a vague idea about a homesick woman from a peach farm depressed at her gallery job in New York became the story of agrarian survival, self-discovery and confronting the unresolved past.
A deeper understanding of the place I’m from opened little parcels of love for Fresno I didn’t know I had — parcels of love a writer needs to render a place with truth and empathy.
This is what a writer does: She does her research.