Novel Dickinsonia

Jennifer Haigh’s first novel has been a hit for publisher HarperCollins.

A Natural Novelist
Jennifer Wasilko Haigh ’90 left a successful career in magazine publishing to follow her muse

Jennifer Wasilko Haigh ’90 thought she had built a terrific life for herself.

The small-town girl from Barnesboro, Pa., left Dickinson with a French major and a broad background in all the subjects she loved—drama, history, literature—and headed to Dunkirk, France, for a Fulbright teaching fellowship. Afterwards she puttered around the East Coast, touching down in four states. For years she moonlighted as a yoga instructor. By day she earned success as a book and magazine editor.

Then she turned 30. And that terrific life didn’t fit so well.

“It was a great life.” (One-beat pause.) “For someone else.”

Haigh delivers this punch line over the phone from her home in Hull, Mass., a seaside village about 20 miles south of Boston.

“You can’t be a young, promising writer at 50. Once I turned 30 I said, ‘If I’m going to pretend to myself that I’m going to write this novel some day, is that going to be any easier at 40? At 50?’ ”

She needed little more than that realization to leave her senior-editor position at Self magazine. “I quit in 1998, and I haven’t had a full-time job since.”

The longer she talks, the more apparent it is that Haigh was a natural novelist all along. Articulate and thoughtful, she drops similes easily into conversation: Writers’ lives are changeable, like holding water in your hands. Short stories are like a first date; novels are like a marriage. Reading good writers is like taking vitamins.

Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, was released in February. The book tells the story of Ken Kimble, a rascal of a husband, through the eyes of the three wives he loves and leaves. The author’s measured tones grow more intense as she deflects the suggestion that Kimble might be based on men from her past.

“It’s always difficult to say where a story came from.” Here again, a simile illustrates her point: “Writing a novel is like driving a car with a flat tire. You have to see which way it pulls. The narrative was pulling in the direction of Ken Kimble.”

Who, she adds, is more of a blank slate than the villain some book reviewers took him for. “[Kimble’s wives] invite him into their lives. … They have very particular needs, and he’s the man who sort of comes along [to meet them]. How these women convince themselves that he’s ‘it’—that’s fascinating.”

Haigh recognizes the pattern, which her friends have fallen into again and again. She’s done it herself on occasion. Single at 34, she’s happy to be the sole inhabitant of her tiny white-clapboard cottage. “I have plants and, at times, I find them very demanding,” she says in a deadpan tone.

Aside from the demands of her rose bushes, Haigh finds the solitude sublime. Hull’s coastal rhythms are sweet, especially compared to Boston’s lively Jamaica Plain neighborhood, where she settled briefly after she earned an M.F.A. from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop in 2002.

Haigh tried to live the writing life once before—long before she was ready. Her senior year at Dickinson, inspired by creative-writing professor Robert Olmstead, she decided to apply to M.F.A. programs. “I asked Professor Olmstead for a recommendation. He said, ‘No. Don’t do that now. Write more first.’

“I saw him a few months ago and thanked him. The [Iowa] program is not a great place for novice writers, which is what I was at 21.”

Life intervened for about 10 years. When she started Mrs. Kimble, Haigh knew she was ready to live the writing life. By the time she moved to Iowa in 2000, the manuscript had taken shape. A month after she finished the book, in October of 2001, publishing house William Morrow signed her. Readings, book tours, media interviews and reviews in The Washington Post and The New York Times followed the novel’s debut.

By now the publicity has died down and Haigh is deep into her second novel. She’s tight-lipped on the details, but it will be a family saga set in the 1950s.

Mornings, she settles at the kitchen table to write—in long hand, since the words “flow too fast and too many” on a computer. Afternoons she devotes to yoga. Outside, the surf murmurs its own story.

At last, Jennifer Haigh has built a life that fits.

—Jillian Cohan

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