Patricia's profile
Alcoholism and polio; I had the latter and once knew a young man whose great promise was quashed by the latter.
Growing up in heavily industrial Bridgeport, Connecticut, during the 1950s, I lived in a Catholic cocoon of friends and classmates like myself, second- generation Americans who were expected to fulfill the aspirational dreams of their parents.
But polio set me apart; it distinguished me even within my own family — neither of my two sisters contracted the disease. Polio also interrupted my development. Because I contracted it two weeks after my sixth birthday, which was in August, I didn’t start the first grade with my age cohort. And because I didn’t start the first grade with my age cohort, I didn’t learn to read with them. From then on, my life became an exhausting game of catch-up. With my peers and my brilliant sisters, I always felt I was lagging behind, a feeling that further burdened me with overarching anxiety —which led me to escape into daydreams, the fount of my fiction, and into reading, once I mastered the skill. Even now, when I may forget the dates of my grandsons’ birthdays, I still can rattle off the names of the Bobbsey Twins: Nan and Burt; Freddie and Flossie.
On buses and trains I made the daily commute from Bridgeport to Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, where I met a young Yale student who inspired my current project about Teddy Holbrook, and the impact Teddy’s alcoholism has on himself, his marriage, and his children.
The young man from Yale and I didn’t date long, maybe four or five months, but I never forgot him telling me how he once had gotten so drunk his roommates got a Yale administrator to help control him. A few years later, in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on St. Paul Street, I was feeding pablum to my new baby and read the Yaley’s byline in The New York Times — the brilliance he had evinced as a student was being fulfilled.
Years, decades, passed, while I worked in public relations, free-lanced news and feature articles, raised my family, and thought that I would write fiction “some day . . . some day.” The sudden death of my beloved older sister, when I was fifty-two, made me realize that life doesn’t guarantee anyone a “some day.” Four years and four stories after Sally’s death, I submitted a story to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, thinking that acceptance would signify I had talent. While few of the youngsters in my workshop liked my story about a Vietnam War veteran, “After the Service” eventually was published, first by The Distillery in 2002, and then as part of my award-winning short story collection, St. Bart’s Way in 2015.
Since then, two more books, forty stories, plus several dozen book reviews and essays of mine have been published. I’ve also written two unpublished mysteries. And become a widow. At loose ends professionally and personally, the true story of a teenager who killed his parents haunted me, but I couldn’t get a handle on it.
Widowhood permits a woman some license, and one afternoon, while twiddling around on the internet, I looked up that long-ago boyfriend. I was stunned. The only mention of him was his obituary, which made clear that he had died from alcoholism. That tragedy, braided with the teenager who killed his parents, becaame the inspiration for “In the Ullage.” (See “In the Ullage" under Other Published Short Stores in My Portfolio.)
I soon realized that “In the Ullage” was the basis for a whole collection centered on the impact of alcoholism on one middle-class family. The statistics are staggering: in 2018 there were 10,511 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities; more that 65 million Americans report binge drinking once month; teen use of alcohol kills 4,700 people each year. But statistics are only numbers; behind each number is an ndividual and a troubled family. Those are the stories I want to tell.
If I receive a Baker Award, I will use the money to conduct research, upgrade my computer system, and hire the personal support I need in order to have the time to write. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
