Her life as a novelist would not begin for Morocco RPCV Elizabeth Letts until she hit 40, had three children, made a career change and became a midwife, and moved with her family from New York to this wooded, secluded area a couple of miles from the bustle of U.S. 202 near the Delaware-Pennsylvania border It's been 20 years since Elizabeth Letts lived in a Moroccan village as a member of the Peace Corps. During her time there, she read many of the classics, from Tolstoy to Dickens -- "The longer the book the better," she says -- to help kill the TV-less, desertlike spaces between teaching English to Moroccan children. She did it to further prepare herself to be a writer, something she had wanted to be since grade school. "I wanted to be the writer I've turned out to be," Letts says, holding her infant child, Willis, in her arms in the family room of her home. Willis is her fourth child. She works two days a week at a health clinic in West Chester, Pa.
Morooco RCPV Elizabeth Letts is the writer she wanted to be
Life nurtures writer's voice
Local midwife and mother develops new chapter as author
By VICTOR GRETO
The News Journal
03/03/2006
Caption: Elizabeth Letts, 44, holds son Willis, 11 months. She wrote short stories while teaching English after returning from a Peace Corps stint, but did not begin writing novels until she was 40. The birth of her children and her experience as a midwife provide material for her books.
CHADDS FORD, Pa. -- It's been 20 years since Elizabeth Letts lived in a Moroccan village as a member of the Peace Corps.
[Excerpt]
During those formative three years of her life, Letts, 44, met her future husband, Ali Alalou, now an assistant professor of foreign language and literatures at the University of Delaware.
During her time there, she read many of the classics, from Tolstoy to Dickens -- "The longer the book the better," she says -- to help kill the TV-less, desertlike spaces between teaching English to Moroccan children.
She did it to further prepare herself to be a writer, something she had wanted to be since grade school.
But her life as a novelist would not begin until she hit 40, had three children, made a career change and became a midwife, and moved with her family from New York to this wooded, secluded area a couple of miles from the bustle of U.S. 202 near the Delaware-Pennsylvania border.
"I wanted to be the writer I've turned out to be," Letts says, holding her infant child, Willis, in her arms in the family room of her home. Willis is her fourth child. She works two days a week at a health clinic in West Chester, Pa.
Her second novel, "Family Planning" -- published this month by Penguin Books subsidiary New American Library -- quickly followed her first, published last year.
She's halfway through writing a third and plans to pump out one a year. After 40 circuitous years, writing has become easier for her.
Letts' fascination with obstetrics -- the care of women during and after pregnancy and childbirth -- is a trademark of her fiction.
"I was always exposed to the classics and men," she says, referring to her Yale education and her Moroccan immersion into classic literature that was invariably written by men. "But I like a lot of books. And for recreation, I liked women's commercial fiction. I always read that on the sly."
Now others are reading her books, but not on the sly.
"It sold very well," says Joe Drabyak, of West Chester's Chester County Books and Music, about Letts' first novel, "Quality of Care."
"It's a favorite among the reading groups in the area," he says. "She's an accomplished writer and has taken some of her professional life experience and melded it into fiction. It deals with issues that many of my female readers can relate to."
Roundabout path to writing
Although she was born in Houston, Texas, Letts grew up in Southern California near Los Angeles.
Her parents -- father J. Spencer Letts is a California federal district court judge -- sent her to boarding school in Massachusetts, where she got into Yale and earned an undergraduate degree in American history.
After her Moroccan Peace Corps experience, she returned to Southern California, where she taught English at a community college.
Although she wrote short stories, she was not ready to become the writer she wanted to be, she says, and part of that was due to her Ivy League education.
"It's a shame that in my day we weren't exposed to [female] role models," she says. "It took me so long to get around to writing. In a way, the education stifled me."
By contrast, Alalou, a Moroccan French teacher who moved out to California to be with her, was a breath of fresh air, and they married in 1989.
Letts became fascinated with childbirth and midwifery when she had her first child, Joey, in 1991. "It was fascinating seeing what an advanced-practice nurse could do," she says. "I was interested in birth, and I had this idea of becoming a nurse."
In 1992, Letts returned to her alma mater to become a certified nurse and midwife from the Yale University School of Nursing.
While the family bounced from California to New Haven, Conn., to New York City, where Alalou found a job as a professor at Columbia University, Letts had two more children, Nora in 1994, and Hannah in 1997.
She worked long hours as a midwife during the mid- to late 1990s, she says.
But commuting to New York City each day from where they lived in Bergen County, N.J., became too much of a burden.
When Alalou got a job with UD, they moved to Chadds Ford in 2000.
Letts then "took time off to get situated."
Teetering on 40, she decided to start writing again.
"I didn't want to be the kind of person to say she wished she could have written a book and didn't," she says.
While taking care of her three children, she wrote a "literary" novel. But the agent she found could not sell it.
While that first novel was being shopped around, she wrote a second, "Quality of Care," which sold.
That novel deals with an obstetrician whose patient dies.
"I just asked myself," she says, "what would happen if someone died on your watch. I never had someone die on me, but obstetricians work in those conditions in which they eventually have a problem. It's something you think about always."
Contact Victor Greto at 324-2832 or vgreto@delawareonline.com.
