SOURCE: An interview with Valerie Sayers, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 6, February 7, 1994, p. 66.

[In the following interview, Sayers discusses her career and influences, as well as major themes in her novels.]

Both geographically and culturally, the moss-bearded live oaks and white-columned antebellum mansions fronting the waterfront on Bay Street in idyllic Beaufort, S. C., seem far removed from the labeled Golden Dome crowning the Administration Building at Notre Dame University. But for novelist Valerie Sayers, newly appointed Director of Creative Writing at the South Bend, Ind., university, homegrown Beaufort is the connecting link to her literary roots.

Sayers's road from Beaufort to South Bend includes a 20-year detour by way of New York, where she began her writing career. Her fourth novel, The Distance Between Us, is out this month from Doubleday in a 100,000-copy first printing, and Sayers has embarked on a 12-city, coast-to-coast reading tour. An appearance in nearby Charleston has allowed an overnight sidetrip to visit her mother and two sisters, who still live in the picturesque community that cinema-goers would recognize as the setting for the films The Big Chill and The Prince of Tides.

Sayers readily acknowledges Beaufort as the model for the fictional town of Due East, which gave her first published novel its title and has since become the wellspring for her work. The town may well figure in a movie version; Propaganda Films is holding options on both Due East and Sayers's second novel, How I Got Him Back.

Walking along the sun-dappled Beaufort dockside in sweatshirt and jeans, the 41-year-old Sayers looks more like a freckle-faced coed than a professor. Time has not diminished her affection for her native city, which she recalls as a magical place in which to grow up. Going off to Fordham in New York City at age 17 was "like Alice falling down the rabbit hole," she says. "I always assumed I'd come back here to live, but it just hasn't been in the cards."

In The Distance Between Us Sayers traces a collection of flower-children through the rebellious '60s, uprooting a pair of socioeconomically antithetical soulmates from their rural Southern backwater and scattering them to the four winds. Brassy antiheroine Frances Starkey is one of nine offspring of an Irish-Catholic high school principal in the largely Protestant town. Searching for a "bed of her own," she becomes compulsively promiscuous, a trait that blights her romance with Steward Morehouse, grandson of the town's wealthiest citizen.

Grieving over her father's untimely death, artistic Franny enrolls in a Catholic university near Washington, D.C., where she is confronted with a collection of hard-drinking, hash-smoking Jesuit priests who wink at their own random womanizing and espouse a sensualistic version of social-protest Catholicism. There she meets and eventually marries alcoholic Michael Burke, an aspiring writer.

The middle section of the book is a surreal fiction-within-a-fiction screenplay, in which Michael romanticizes the couple's honeymoon in Ireland as an ill-fated gunrunning adventure for the IRA. Sayers had never attempted screenwriting before, and she says she was "terrified" that readers would put down the book at that point. She emphasizes that her goal was not simply to do something offbeat; the idea developed organically from the plot. As it turned out, the screenplay, with its surprising denouement, is one of the most effective parts of the narrative.

When asked about possible autobiographical content in her early novels, Sayers dances coquettishly around the issue. In The Distance Between Us, however, such content is hard to miss. Like heroine Franny, Sayers recalls working summers at the tomato-packing sheds out near the airport on Lady's Island. "Everybody I ran around with worked there … it was the social event of the year." Sayers says. And, like daddy's-girl Franny, Sayers adored her father and went north to attend his alma mater. Sayers was devastated when he died of a heart attack while she was a sophomore at Fordham. "My father was wonderful, funny and unflappable. He was my inspiration," she says.

The fourth of seven children of damn-Yankee Irish-Catholic parents. Sayers was born after the family moved to Beaufort, where her father was employed as a civilian psychologist at the Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot. Along with tomato farming and the shrimping industry, the local Marine and Naval installations remain today the economic lifeblood of the area.

As an undergrad at Fordham, Sayers met Christian Jara, who was studying to become a filmmaker, as does Steward Moorhouse in the novel. Sayers is quick to point out that Christian is nothing like Franny's husband, alcoholic Michael Burke. She admits, however, that she knew "roguish priests. I don't remember ever going to a party without someone trying to con me for IRA gunrunning money." Then as now, her seemingly ingenuous, upbeat manner can be deceiving. "A drama teacher once told me it was obvious I had no firsthand experience with four-letter words," she recalls. "I didn't bother to tell him what a trash-mouth I really was. I suppose that outwardly I might convey an air of innocence, but as a writer my job is to tell the truth."

Following graduation in 1973, Sayers returned to Beaufort to teach at the Technical College of the Low-country for a year. She recalls afternoons spent reading Dickens, Eliot and Faulkner in her favorite sanctuary: the huge, embracing limb of a live oak. She also felt a strong sympathy with Flannery O'Connor, who grew up in Savannah, less than an hour down the road.

The writing course Sayers taught at Tech reawakened her own interest in the craft. Her family had always encouraged her to write, she says, and in high school she had produced the teen column for the Beaufort Gazette. "But the idea of writing as a career seemed too intimidating, on the one hand, and not very glamorous on the other. In college I tried poetry, but I wasn't very good. It was that year teaching at Tech when I became interested in writing fiction."

At that point, however, Jara came down to Beaufort to sweep Sayers off to the altar. The couple returned to Manhattan, where Jara pursued opportunities as a filmmaker and where Sayers enrolled in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Columbia. Her thesis was a collection of stories. "At that stage, the idea of something on the magnitude of a novel seemed impossible," she says.

Her next teaching job, at an arm of CUNY, generated serious commitment to her own work. By the time her son, Christian, was born in 1978, she was immersed in rewriting her first novel. "Most likely, Chris will tell you that Christian's first word was, 'typewriter,'" she laughs.

Now gathering dust in her South Bend basement, that first effort was titled My Sister Has Left Me. Sayers says wryly, "That title should tell you something about the level of my prose at that stage."

The book was good enough to win the attention of her first agent, however. (Sayers does not wish to disclose the agent's name, since their parting was not amicable. Southern good manners seem to underlie her reluctance.) Although no publisher bought that initial effort, Sayers was undaunted by rejection slips and began writing another book. "Having an agent provided all the validation I needed to move ahead," she observes.

About the time her son Raul was born in 1983. Sayers had finished that second book, which became Due East. Its heroine is teenager Mary Faith Rapple, brought up Baptist, who proclaims herself an atheist and insists that the baby she conceives is the product of a virgin birth. "That book is about faith and the hope of redemption," Sayers says. The manuscript, originally titled "After My Mother Died," made the rounds for two years. She had "about given up" when editor Lisa Wager read the book and bought it for Doubleday late in 1985. It was at Wager's suggestion that Sayers used the name of the seacoast town as the title.

Sayers was distressed when Wager, having edited about half of How I Got Him Back, left for Putnam. The manuscript was turned over to Casey Fuetsch. "I've been twice blessed," Sayers says. "Casey makes me better than I know how to be."

How I Got Him Back (1989) tells of three women who lose their men and decide to do something about it. While writing Who Do You Love, Sayers became aware of "increasing philosophical differences" with her agent, and she deliberately kept herself uncommitted on the new manuscript. Although she says she will always feel deeply grateful for that agent's efforts on her behalf, she felt it was time for a change. Accepting ICM's Esther Newberg's offer to represent the new manuscript was, says Sayers, "the best decision of my career."

A Catholic woman pregnant with her fifth child is the protagonist of Who Do You Love. Trapped in a disheartening marriage, she is contemplating an adulterous affair. Sayers invests the situation with emotional complexity and historical resonance by setting the story during the evening before, and in the morning of, November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated.

Asked about her preoccupation with Catholicism, Sayers quickly points out that her first heroine, Mary Faith Rapple, was a Baptist. She concedes that early on she may have been subconsciously using the Baptist religion as a metaphorical catchall to camouflage her need to write about faith and the Catholic experience. She says, however, that at that stage it never occurred to her that Catholicism would play such a large part in her later work.

Sayers's storylines are always complicated by eddies of religious ambivalence. While sin and hope of redemption are the reassuring themes, an underlying sense of dissatisfaction with the Church always renders her epiphanies slightly bittersweet. She explains the obscure tripartite wordplay in the title, How I Got Him Back: "Recapture of the errant male; Revenge for his transgression; and Redemption. HIM meaning GOD!"

Asked to describe herself in a single word, Sayers laughingly replies: "Radical!" Fellow novelist and friend Lois Battle—a transplanted Australian schooled under the strict hands of the nuns, who now makes her home in Beaufort—agrees. "Valerie is an intellectual and a free spirit, but you have to understand, she's Catholic to the core," Battle says. "You can translate that as complicated!"

Sayers agrees with that assessment. "I'm definitely Catholic—and that comes with a lot of guilt-ridden baggage. But make no mistake, while I'm rebellious and while sometimes I get very put out with the Church's rigidity, the unyielding hierarchy, the antiquated structure, I have never had a moment's crisis of personal faith."

And things do seem to work out for her. She is enchanted with her teaching assignment at Notre Dame, a job she found via the prosaic route of an advertisement in the MLA job list. Characteristically, she announces, "We're truly blessed. Chris can produce videos from almost anywhere, and the university allows me complete freedom to write and travel to do publicity for my books."

She reads other contemporary novelists with enjoyment. High on her list is Maureen Howard's Natural History, "for the density and richness of its language." She also admires Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy "for his startling prose style." It should not be surprising that both novels have Catholic themes.

Sayers's next novel, Brain Fever, reintroduces Tim Rooney, a character from an earlier book. "The last Catholic existentialist in the South," Rooney has denied his faith and is having a nervous breakdown. But this time the Due East setting may give her trouble, observes Sayers, tongue in cheek. She and PW are driving across the Lady's Island drawbridge after a trip out to Hunting Island, where she has pointed out the location of Aunt Blinky's cabin, the remote setting for the final scene of The Distance Between Us. Waving her hand at the seabirds circling lazily above the church-steepled skyline, she asks, "Can you imagine someone actually having a nervous breakdown in a place like this?"