Dewberry, Elizabeth 1962–

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Dewberry, Elizabeth 1962–

(Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn)

PERSONAL:

Born September 7, 1962, in Birmingham, AL; daughter of James W. and Sallie Dewberry; married; first husband's last name Vaughn; married Robert Olen Butler (a novelist), April 23, 1995. Education: Vanderbilt University, B.S., 1983; Emory University, Ph.D., 1989. Religion: Christian.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—(fiction) Elaine Markson, Elaine Markson Literary Agency, 44 Greenwich Ave., New York, NY 10011; (drama) Joyce Ketay, Joyce Ketay Agency, 1501 Broadway, Ste. 1910, New York, NY 10036.

CAREER:

Writer, playwright, and educator. Emory University, instructor of English, 1987-88, visiting assistant professor of English, 1989-90; Samford University, adjunct lecturer of English, 1991-92; Ohio State University, assistant professor of English, 1992-94; Wesleyan Writers' Conference, teaching fellow, 1993; University of Southern California, visiting lecturer of creative writing, 1993; Sewanee Writers' Conference, faculty member, 1994; Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, faculty member, 1994; University of the South, Tennessee Williams Fellow, 1995.

MEMBER:

PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Artist-Initiated Project Grant from the Georgia Council for the Arts, 1989-90; Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, University of the South, 1991; Alabama Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, 1992-93; Bread Loaf Fellowship in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1993; Teaching fellowship from the Wesleyan Writers' Conference, 1993; Tennessee Williams Fellowship, University of the South, 1995; Bronze Medal, Florida Book Awards, 2007, for His Lovely Wife.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

(Adaptor, with Tom Key from Vaughn's novel) Many Things Have Happened since He Died, produced at Theatre Emory, Atlanta, GA, 1993.

Head On (one-act), produced at the Humana Festival of New Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY, 1995.

Flesh and Blood, produced at the Humana Festival of New Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 1996.

NOVELS

(As Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn) Many Things Have Happened since He Died and Here Are the Highlights, Doubleday, 1990.

(As Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn) Break the Heart of Me, N.A. Talese, 1994.

Sacrament of Lies, Blue Hen Books (New York, NY), 2002.

His Lovely Wife, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Hemingway Repossessed, edited by Kenneth Rosen, Praeger (New York, NY), 1994; and Food for Thought, Junior League of Birmingham (Birmingham, AL), 1995. Contributor to periodicals, including Southern Living, Hemingway Review, Comparatist, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Modern Fiction Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Elizabeth Dewberry is a novelist whose work depicts the emotional and psychological conflicts of young women reared in the traditions of Southern Christian fundamentalism. Her work has been praised for strong characterization and the portrayal of religion as both a nourishing and potentially destructive force in the lives of individuals.

Dewberry's first novel, Many Things Have Happened since He Died and Here Are the Highlights, was published in 1990, under the name Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn. In it, an unnamed narrator describes the events that have taken place in her life since her father's suicide. These include marriage to a Christian fundamentalist who abuses her, an unwanted pregnancy, and her husband's death from a drug overdose. Through all of these trials, the narrator attempts to cling to both Christianity and her dream of becoming a famous writer. "The most immediately striking quality" of Many Things Have Happened, according to Madison Smartt Bell in the Washington Post, "is the strangely fractured language that the … narrator generates. The narration indiscriminately smashes together wish-fulfillment daydreams, lunatic-fringe fundamentalist dogmas and what seem to be shards of an incipient psychosis." The critic also called Dewberry's first effort "powerfully disturbing and difficult to forget."

Dewberry's second book, Break the Heart of Me, was also written under the name Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn and was published in 1994. This is the story of Sylvia Grace Mullins, both during her adolescence—when she was molested by her grandfather and became bulimic—and during her marriage to an older man. She has aspirations of being a country singer, and she has an affair with a rising country star. Like the narrator of Many Things Have Happened since He Died and Here Are the Highlights, Sylvia struggles to reconcile her life situation with the ideals of evangelical Christianity. A Publishers Weekly contributor praised Break the Heart of Me and remarked upon Dewberry's writing talent: "Not one detail of her carefully drawn characters is out of place; not one note of her perfectly pitched voice falters."

Dewberry, like her protagonists, comes from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing. She attended a strict Presbyterian high school, but she was allowed to read almost anything she liked, which gave her a means of escape from what the author found to be a restrictive Christian fundamentalist environment.

There was a space of eight years between Dewberry's second novel and Sacrament of Lies. Fellow writer and professor W. Dale Brown interviewed Dewberry for Books & Culture, and he asked her what she had done during those interim years. He asked, "Did you have to write a bad book or two to get to this new novel?" Dewberry responded that, in part, that was exactly what she had done. She kept reworking the novel for about six years before it was published. She began writing it after having read and studied Shakespeare's Hamlet. "I was learning structure and some elements of character and plot development from Shakespeare," Dewberry said. Upon reaching a point at which she thought she had grasped the underlying structure, she then allowed her own characters to come to life. They needed time to find "their own voices, their own souls," Dewberry told Brown.

Although loosely based on the Shakespearian play, Sacrament of Lies takes place in Louisiana and the protagonist is a woman who is coping with the loss of her murdered mother. The protagonist of this story loves her father but suspects that he might have been involved in her mother's death. Worse yet, upon investigating the circumstances, Grayson begins to worry about her own safety. At one point, she is afraid that she is losing her mind, because the facts that she is discovering run counter to her previous beliefs. However, as she moves closer and closer to the truth, she also becomes concerned that what she is uncovering might ultimately lead to her own death.

Dewberry mixes fiction and nonfiction in her story, creatively producing her own characters and storyline while making subtle references to real people and events. For example, her protagonist, Grayson, is the daughter of a fictional Louisiana governor, Tom Guillory, who is described by Barbara Weston, for the Bloomsbury Review, as a "ruthless disciple" of Huey Long, a notorious Louisiana governor. "The clever weaving of Huey Long's legacy into Tom Guillory's story is effective in helping to understand the political picture" that surrounds this novel, wrote Weston.

Many critics commented that this is no ordinary thriller. A contributor to Publishers Weekly asserted: "A deftly plotted literary thriller that will hold the reader's attention on a tight leash until the very end, this psychological mystery set in contemporary New Orleans crackles with tension." Library Journal contributor Rebecca Kelm wrote: "The writing is so skillful and the wordplay so exquisite that one wants to savor each paragraph."

In the interview with Dewberry, Brown commented: "As with your earlier novels, I was struck by your preoccupation with the spiritual. In so many ways, this is a book about prayer." Dewberry answered that prayer was not the primary subject, but rather her intent was to write the story as "a quest for truth," which is, in a way, a form of prayer. She then explained that the central question around which this novel was built was: "What do you do when confronted by evil in your own family, and even in your own heart?" By the end of the story, Dewberry felt that her protagonist had "insisted on the truth. She had decided not to live with lies, not to live with evil, and not to look the other way when she's being asked to participate in lies." In other words, her protagonist had "come to a good place, a hopeful place." This is not to conclude that Grayson would live happily ever after. Dewberry does say that life is not that simple; but rather, she believes: "Life is messy."

Dewberry's 2006 novel, His Lovely Wife, was called "unique and distinctive" by Curled Up with a Good Book Web site contributor Michael Leonard. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted the novel's "clever premise." The premise lies in Ellen Baxter being mistaken for Great Britain's Princess Diana while both women are staying at the Paris Ritz Hotel and then in Ellen's growing identification with Diana's life. "Dewberry's novel grew out of her own irritation with being introduced as the lovely wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler," wrote Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. "A respected author in her own right, she began to see that despite her own accomplishments, people often view her as the beautiful spouse of a famous man."

At first Ellen, who is staying in Paris with her husband, Lawrence, is delighted with being mistaken for Princess Diana. However, when Diana is killed along with her boyfriend and driver in a car accident shortly afterwards, Ellen enters a crisis concerning her own charmed life and identity. After visiting the crash sight, Ellen soon begins to hear Diana's voice talking to her. Feeling neglected by her husband, who is a brilliant physicist, Ellen becomes enamored with a photographer named Max, who had taken her picture earlier that fateful evening at the Ritz. All the while, Diana's voice keeps giving Ellen advice as she recognizes more and more parallels between the late princess's life and her own.

Some reviewers noted that they did not think the author was particularly successful in integrating the string theory of physics into her novel but nevertheless praised many other aspects of the work. "Elizabeth Dewberry's novel is primarily theme-driven, with clean language and a well-researched plot to make it impossible to stop reading," wrote Jennifer Westfield in Prairie Schooner. Rebecca Kelm, writing in Library Journal, noted that "the explorations of love, beauty, forgiveness, physics, [and] spirituality … are intriguing."

Dewberry once told CA: "I started writing plays because Jon Jory, producing director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, read my novels and saw a playwright in them. The biggest difference for me between writing a novel and writing a play is that in a novel you can go inside your characters' heads and speak from there, whereas in a play you have to find other ways of revealing their inner lives. I like to explore the differences between what's immediately apparent in people and what else is going on in their hearts and souls."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Bloomsbury Review, January/February, 2002, Barbara Weston, review of Sacrament of Lies, p. 19.

Booklist, December 15, 2001, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Sacrament of Lies, pp. 702-703; January 1, 2006, Joanne Wilkinson, review of His Lovely Wife, p. 52.

Books & Culture, May, 2002, W. Dale Brown, "Hamlet in New Orleans: A Conversation with Novelist and Playwright Elizabeth Dewberry," p. 11.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2005, review of His Lovely Wife, p. 1244.

Library Journal, January, 2002, Rebecca Kelm, review of Sacrament of Lies, p. 149; March 1, 2006, Rebecca Kelm, review of His Lovely Wife, p. 77.

New York Times Book Review, March 3, 2002, Marilyn Stasio, review of Sacrament of Lies, p. 21.

Prairie Schooner, winter, 2006, Jennifer Westfield, review of His Lovely Wife, p. 197.

Publishers Weekly, December 20, 1993, review of Break the Heart of Me, p. 49; January 14, 2002, review of Sacrament of Lies, p. 39.

Times Literary Supplement, February 8, 2002, Number 5158, Sophie Ratcliffe, "Without the Prince," review of Sacrament of Lies, p. 24.

USA Today, April 4, 2006, Bob Minzesheimer, "His Lovely Wife Gets inside Her Head," p. 4.

Washington Post, April 19, 1990, Madison Smartt Bell, review of Many Things Have Happened since He Died and Here Are the Highlights; February 11, 2002, Kevin Allmann, review of Sacrament of Lies, p. C4.