‘Paper Chase’ author John Jay Osborn’s novel ideas just pop into his head
A novel can be triggered by an idea as simple as, “Someone oughta write a book about this.”
That was the impetus behind Bay Area-based author, screenwriter and University of San Francisco law professor John Jay Osborn’s new book, “Listen to the Marriage” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $25, 247 pages). The slim, swift-reading novel narrates the story of Gretchen and Steve from the perspective of Sandy, their marriage counselor. The San Francisco couple with two young children have confliciting lifestyles and poor communication skills that put their marriage in serious jeopardy. The action takes place entirely in Sandy’s office, but dialogue, plot lines and symbolism transport the experiences to psychological and even metaphysical realms.
Forty-seven years ago, while attending Harvard Law School, Osborn wrote 60 pages of his first and best-known novel, “The Paper Chase.” Osborn’s fictional chronicle of a Harvard Law School student and Charles Kingsfield, a near-villainous law professor, was published in 1971 and adapted to film in 1973. Actor John Houseman (as Kingsfield) won an Oscar. “Paper Chase” also became a television series, leading Osborn to screenwriting before he turned full-time to academia. Osborn, 73, is the author of five novels and several screenplays. He and his wife, Emilie Osborn, have been married for 50 years and have three adult children and five grandchildren.
Osborn, like all writers of fiction, is also a very convincing liar. “I have Osborn’s new novel, “Listen to the Marriage.”
no idea how I started writing,” he says in a phone interview. But three minutes later, he says about “Paper Chase”: “It was suddenly there in my brain. I thought, this is an important story, so I wrote it.”
His new book also was stirred up by a reaction he had to “a dearth of books” in which characters actually change. “Ninety percent of the stuff you see in the media; the characters are completely static. Someone wants to kill them, they have to run or hide, but it’s rare that characters change,” he says. “This whole damn book is about people who actually learn new skills.”
Another half-lie told
with conviction: “I don’t know how to write anything other than what I’ve processed personally. A lot of authors write about things that happened in the 1800s. I would never write about that. I don’t trust it: Why would I write about things I know nothing about?”
But “Listen” is told from the perspective of a woman, a viewpoint Osborn agrees is foreign to him. “It was wonderful to give myself permission to write from the character of a woman. It was freeing. Why not? I’m contradicting myself: I’ve never experienced being a woman, but it was great.