Jane Hamilton
Biography
Jane Hamilton
Jane Hamilton
BIO
I was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1957 which seemed to me as I
grew up to be the luckiest place and time to live as a child. There
were 85 children on the block, each block a kind of intentional
community, with mothers whose sole purpose was to care for us.
Frank Lloyd Wright loved the village enough to design many houses
there, and Earnest Hemingway hated the place so much he made the
oft quoted remark: “Oak Park is a place of broad lawns and
narrow minds.” Oak Park was one of the first communities to
develop a plan for integration, so much for Hemingway’s
slur.
I wanted to be a ballet dancer and studied seriously downtown for
several years. I had big thighs, a big rear, breasts, no turn-out,
and no extension. But I could turn on a dime and jump. I wrecked my
feet doing point-work and was told by the podiatrist that I should
quit if I wanted to walk when I was thirty. That made an
impression. I was often the worst in the thing that I loved to do:
I was a lousy dancer, I had a weak voice in the choir, and in the
theater group, because I couldn’t act I did the backstage
jobs: Chairman of the Prop committee, Student assistant, Make up
girl. During Arsenic and Old Lace the apricot Danishes for
Act II were so delicious I ate most of them, and in my role as a
dead body during one performance, I started to laugh and could not
stop.
In short, I was ill-equipped to do much of anything. I studied
English at Carleton College because I loved the freedom from the
horrors of real life that a good book provides. When I graduated I
was still unfit for any real profession. I hadn’t gotten into
any of the writing programs I’d applied to, and I ended up
picking apples in the fall at a friend’s farm in Wisconsin. A
few years later I married one of the owners. As I student, my
English teachers had told me I had some talent but that it
wasn’t practical to expect to make a living as a writer. It
was sound advice. I wrote to myself, for myself, and in a deep
privacy. My writing was good company, and allowed me the same kind
of freedom reading gave me. That I have been able to spend my adult
life living other people’s lives has been a great privilege
and a luxury. People sometimes ask me what my goals are. Goals? I
want to keep writing books, and I want there always to be a world
in which people read books.
Jane Hamilton
