The novelist who gave soap operas a conscience
Michael Malone 1942–2022
Michael Malone’s desire to tell stories sent him from academia to the soaps. By 1991, the University of Pennsylvania lecturer had published several novels set in his native North Carolina. But when he was invited to write for ABC’s One Life to Live, he said he “couldn’t resist.” During his 1991–96 first run as head writer, the long-running soap opera took on daring, socially relevant themes such as homophobia, AIDS, and sexual assault— all broadcast to a much wider audience than Malone reached on the page. “I think Dickens would have done it,” he said. “There was no way ever on God’s green earth that 5 million people a week would be reading my novels.”
Born in Durham, N.C., Malone, the eldest of six, often served as his deaf mother’s ears, said The Washington Post, “developing observational skills that he later used in his novels.” He received a literature degree from the University of North Carolina and wrote his first novel, 1975’s Painting the Roses Red, while procrastinating on his Harvard doctoral dissertation. In subsequent books such as Handling Sin and Time’s
Witness, he mastered “moving seamlessly” between comedy and sharp-eyed suspense. In daytime TV too, “Malone was the boldest of storytellers,” said The Toronto Star. A 1992 One Life to Live episode featured 17-year-old Ryan Phillippe as the first gay teenager on television, and Malone’s writing team won a Daytime Emmy for episodes about the rape of a college student. Despite typically soapy twists, the storyline was “rooted in real emotion,” with victim Marty Saybrooke sometimes unsympathetic but still worthy of being believed. After a stint on NBC’s Another World, he briefly returned to One Life to Live in 2003 and had another of its characters cross over to narrate his 2005 novel The Killing Club.
Malone spent his later years living in eastern Connecticut and Hillsborough, N.C., where “he wrote his last three books,” said the Charlotte, N.C., Observer. With fellow Southern novelist Allan Gurganus, he staged a two-man version of A Christmas Carol every year. Still, the soaps left a lasting mark. “My chapters used to close out very quietly,” he said in 2002. “Now they may end with ‘Get out of the car! There’s a bomb!’”