Varley O'Connor

Synopsis:

As America emerges from the Depression, the Hatherfords build a comfortable life just outside of New York City, in rural Bergen County, New Jersey. They are a glamorous couple: Vern is the charismatic owner of a successful Ford dealership and his flamboyant wife Maeve is beautiful even in middle age. When their three-year-old son Scott falls prey to polio, and later, another son must go to war, their marriage slowly implodes. In the midst of it all 12-year-old Patsy steals swallows of whiskey and tries to make sense of the world around her, which includes an unusual intimacy between her brother Scott, and Julian, a young African American boy who lives among them.

Neither historical nor medical fiction, The Cure offers the pleasure of both in its richly complex portrayal of the lives and times of its characters. A beautifully written family saga about race, war, childhood illness, and romantic desire, The Cure has at its heart wounding and the struggle for hope.

Early Praise for The Cure

“A sustained tenderness and rare emotional sympathy for all her characters infuse Varley O’Connor’s latest novel, her best. The Cure is fresh and engaging from first page to last, not least because of the author’s commanding literary skill, her imaginative control of the historic details, and her marvelous feeling for the fragility of family dynamics."

“In this poignant and well-told novel, Varley O’Connor inhabits the fragile lives that unravel in the face of illness and disease. But as with all wonderful writers, this is just the beginning for this tale ripples into one of race and class. Part period piece, part family saga, The Cure is a particularly American story and an achingly beautiful one at that.”

“Varley O’Connor’s The Cure is a moving, beautifully written, character-driven novel that captures the dangerous intersection between private life and the forces of history and gives the reader that rare pleasure of inhabiting another family life that feels at once entirely familiar and new.”


VARLEY O’CONNOR ON POLIO, HER FATHER, AND WRITING THE CURE

My father was struck by polio at the age of three in 1931. His youth, up until the time he went off to college, was spent in recovery from the ravages of the disease; he underwent five major operations, wore braces and casts, and received all of the cutting-edge treatments of the day. As a result, he was one of the lucky ones, in that he could walk and looked fairly normal for most of his adult life.

When he began to experience symptoms of post-polio syndrome as an older man in his sixties, I got more curious about his early life, and he became active as an advocate for post-polio clinics and served as the leader of a local post-polio support group in Michigan. I interviewed my father, taking extensive notes, I read polio memoirs and studied other books about the science and cultural ramifications of polio in early to mid-twentieth century America. As the story took shape in my mind, I read books and watched films about the 40s so that I could successfully create a world for my characters, most of whom were based on my father’s family. I imagined what my father’s parents might have been like, since his father died before I was born and his mother, who I do remember, died when I was seven. As I wrote, the made-up story came to be studded with details from family lore, family expressions, and my own memories and perceptions of my father and New Jersey, where I also lived as a child.

The interview process was a significant means of bonding with my father in the last years of his life. At his funeral, I read a story he once wrote about having polio as a child, called “Donald’s Left Leg.” The church was packed with the wheelchairs of polio survivors my father had counseled and grown close to.


About Bellevue Literary Press:

The Bellevue Literary Press is a new nonprofit small book press. Like our sibling, the flourishing Bellevue Literary Review, we are a project of the New York University School of Medicine and committed to publishing writing of the greatest artistic and intellectual merit from the larger community, both medical and non-medical, while reflecting NYU’s excellence in scholarship, humanistic, medicine, and science.

Our aim is to produce original authoritative and literary works, both fiction and nonfiction, that focus on relationships to the human body, illness, health and
healing and range the intersection of the sciences and the arts. Our readers are the general public as well as medical and science professionals and academics
interested in literate, jargon-free presentations of issues in their own and other disciplines. The books will be available for purchase online and at large and small bookstores across the country.