It is very, very difficult to write a funny novel. The handful of humans who have pulled it off are, in a small way to a particular fan club, immortal. Their names are well known to everyone who finds great joy laughing alone over words on a page: Think P.G. Wodehouse, Anita Loos, Kurt Vonnegut. It’s big news when this circle expands, and so it’s been very notable indeed that Julie Schumacher—Minnesota professor and novelist—is wrapping up her best-selling academic comic trilogy with the release this month of The English Experience.
If you haven’t read the first of the series, Dear Committee Members, do so now: I’ll wait. You’ll meet Jason Fitger, English professor, who is trapped in an endless hell of only being able to express his piqued, combative, and yearning soul through letters of recommendation and other academic missives issued from his desk at Payne University. It’s surely one of the funniest books of this present century, funny enough to win Schumacher the Thurber Prize for American Humor—the first woman to ever do so. Dear Committee Members was epistolary, and Schumacher followed it up with a more traditional third-person delve into the further misadventures of Fitger at Payne, The Shakespeare Requirement, in which the well-funded economics department threatens to topple the infighting English department. The final installment, she says, is The English Experience, in which the academy’s crabby Bertie Wooster is pulled in at the last minute to lead a January-term group of eleven undergraduates studying abroad in London.
I meet Julie Schumacher at Pajarito on West 7th, a favorite of hers. As the salsas and chips hit the table, Schumacher explains to me that much of The English Experience was written longhand while sitting in one of those romantic turrets that protrude from one of those romantic Victorian mansions that ring Irvine Park.
“You bought yourself a writing turret with the money you made writing a comic bestseller after having grown up in a world where the question of whether women could be funny was constant magazine fodder?” I say, letting out a low whistle. “You did it. You won. You won the bookish girl’s American dream.”
Julie Schumacher does not respond but dips her chin slightly in the grim but pleased manner of someone who’s been noticed for pulling off something difficult but prefers to be pleased with inner satisfaction, which is more socially appropriate than outward satisfaction. She goes on to tell me how she has outfitted the spot with a beanbag, leaves her phone downstairs in the house, and writes in the morning light before heading out to her job as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Minnesota.
I tell her that Irvine Park, the intensely romantic tiny park with the ornate central fountain, is St. Paul’s most hotly in demand public park for weddings, and that I like the idea of a sister who did it for herself hovering over all the blessed nuptials like a secret angel.
Then I pummel her around the ears with questions while plying her with margaritas till I get all her secrets.
Which are here revealed!
Julie Schumacher was born in 1958, in Wilmington, Delaware, the fifth of five daughters, to an engineer, who descended from a long line of German engineers, and a homemaker and voracious reader, who was given to keeping herself to herself. “It was a WASPy family of the ’60s and ’70s,” she recalls. “You didn’t say how you felt, which left you feeling unsettled or not knowing where you stood. And, of course, with everyone so much older than me, I never knew more than anyone, but I could make them pay attention by being funny. That’s how the page, for me, became what I could talk to.”
Schumacher has blue eyes and dark hair and an air a bit like a French actress playing the role of the most careful listener in the world. I ask her if she remembers any of those very early childhood writings. She does. A real-life backyard lawn mower tragedy orphaned a nest of newborn rabbit kits. “I fed them little shreds, and each one died, one after the other,” she recalls. “I buried them in Band-Aid boxes in the yard. I was so sad. I was so smitten with these little things. I started writing sad poems, odes to the baby bunnies. ‘Death’s shadow crept closer to the young bunny’s side; I sat weeping as my little bunny died.’ That kind of thing. At first my mother put the poems on the refrigerator, but after a while she was like, ‘Enough. There are more bunnies. Go find them.’ But I was sad. I put my sadness on the page. Now I feel better. I’m no longer sad. This is good.”
Instead of finding more bunnies, young Julie went and smoked cigarettes in the nearest graveyard and planned her next steps, which involved enrolling at Oberlin College, taking freshman English composition, and keeping such extraordinary, color-coded notes that a fellow freshman came to her to see them. “I was very meticulous. I said, ‘You can only borrow them if you sit outside my dorm room. You are not taking my notebook anywhere.’” That note-looker? Larry Jacobs, the well-known political talker and fellow University of Minnesota professor. The two have been married for more than 40 years.
“That’s like a bookish girl’s fantasy no one ever dreamed of articulating, it’s so preposterous,” I counter. “Are you telling me that you were so good at reading Jane Austen that the love of your life was drawn to you like a tractor beam?” I get another self-contained but pleased nod.
Jacobs and Schumacher knocked around New York City for a while, in the worlds of grad school and publishing. When Schumacher’s mom got cancer and Schumacher’s dad sent his youngest peculiarly inexpressive yet harrowing letters with few words but elaborate medical diagrams, she turned that experience into a short story that Anne Tyler selected for the anthology The Best American Short Stories 1983. “I remember they asked for a contributor’s note, and I tried to make myself sound important,” she recalls. “I really should have said, ‘Julie Schumacher is 22 years old, and this is the first thing she ever wrote.’”
Looking back, she says, “That story really gave me a kick in the ass. I thought: Maybe writing isn’t just something I do for myself but something I could actually do.”
They were still living in New York City— she hated it. “I was getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning, trying to write a novel, then going to work at a publishing company, copyediting the magazines Primary Cardiology and The Female Patient. That involved a lot of spelling of diseases. And this was New York in the early 1980s—not a terrific place. I felt like every man in the city exposed himself to me at least twice. I was young and an idiot. Anytime anybody said, ‘Turn around!’ I would. Oh, it’s that guy. I saw him yesterday.”
The young couple, who had heard from relatives with fertility troubles that it can take a very long time to get pregnant, thought they might as well get started on the arduous process, whereupon Schumacher instantly became pregnant. “Larry was like, ‘Ack! I thought you said this would take years! We don’t have health insurance!’” Which is how the two, not much like Joseph and Mary on the journey that led to the manger, but not entirely unlike them, came to Minnesota all but sight unseen.
“It was August of 1988; I was eight months pregnant,” recalls Schumacher. “We bought a house and moved in over a weekend. It was 103 degrees. Air conditioners were sold out; fans were sold out. I lay in a bathtub of ice for days. Larry had an Intro to American Politics section, a 450-student lecture—he’d never taught a class like that. He said, ‘The baby can come any day except September 26th.’ Well, of course you know what happened next. He ended up working about 100 hours a week that year, and once the snow set in, I felt like a pioneer wife alone on the prairie. I didn’t know a single soul west of Ohio.”
The baby, and soon babies, arrived, providing the emotional core to Schumacher’s 1995 book The Body Is Water, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Schumacher began teaching, driving back and forth to St. Olaf, walking back and forth to St. Thomas. (“I feel like every St. Thomas class opened with me asking: ‘Does anyone babysit?’” Schumacher laughs.) She still knew hardly anyone west of Ohio who wasn’t in diapers or handing her essays to grade.
“It’s a high-wire act, a comedic novel. So much of it is timing. For the joke to play, you need the characters and situation set up, the reaction shot, the ripple effect—it’s very precise surgery.”
–Lee Boudreaux, Doubleday editor
Enter: Alison McGhee, the Minnesota friend and fellow writer whom Schumacher describes as her “book midwife.”
“When I first moved to Minnesota, I could not make a single friend,” says McGhee, a witty and wise south Minneapolis novelist known for her Pulitzer Prize–nominated Shadow Baby and bestseller Someday. “I was just constantly lonely and wondering what was wrong with me. I met Julie [in 1991] at a small dinner party, and we were like moths to the flame with each other. We have been each other’s first editors ever since.”
What’s Julie Schumacher like? McGhee boggles at trying to define a friendship of more than 30 years. They both say they phone each other constantly. They meet at The Lowry to share brussels sprouts and mac ’n’ cheese. When McGhee was in a tough spot during a heat wave, Schumacher and her husband descended upon her doorstep, presented an air conditioner, and demanded McGhee come stay with them so they could cook for her and take care of her.
“Personally, Julie is extraordinarily organized,” says McGhee. “I’ve always kidded her about her German heritage. If you have a date to meet her at 6:30, she’ll be there 10 minutes early and wave happily from the booth. I like to say that as writers, there are two kinds. Pants-ers, who fly by the seat of their pants—that’s me. Plotters, who plot everything out—that’s Julie. All of her ideas for novels are written out in pencil on yellow legal pads, and then she gets to making everything, at the level of the sentence, precise and beautiful. I really mean it: At the level of the sentence, she burns fierce.”
Schumacher also burns fierce at the level of the running gag: “At a white elephant party, I got this truly demonic crocheted doll of a feather duster,” McGhee remembers. “For 25 years, we have brought it back and forth to each other’s house, leaving it in the shower, hiding it in a planter. She once had someone mail it to me in an unmarked box from Delaware. But I called her in her hotel when she was in New York to pick up her Thurber Prize, which she didn’t think she would win. ‘Everyone thinks I’m funny. I’m not funny,’ she told me. But she is funny, very funny. Only, it’s a funny that mainly comes out when she’s passionate about something, like literature.”
The secret to the success of the trio of books culminating in The English Experience, says McGhee, is the subtext, which is both sad and angry, about the post-Reagan perpetual drumbeat that there’s something wrong with studying English, or art, or any of the non-money-focused fields. “It’s Julie’s fierceness of heart and soul that people are responding to,” says McGhee, “the absolute passion for words and literature and what story can do for ourselves and the world in a culture that makes fun of the humanities and people who choose to live with language at the core of their existence. The series is really an elegy for a man who lives for words, and that’s what tugs at you. People think they’re laughing at this hapless professor and his students. They’re rooting for them.”
Speaking of hapless professors, Julie Schumacher is not one. She is the opposite, helpful and so, in the process, nurturing good fortune. She keeps proof of this in physical form at her office at the University of Minnesota, where a vertical shelf holding the published books of Schumacher’s mentees stretches nearly from floor to ceiling.
“I joke when it hits the top I retire,” says Schumacher.
I note, “If I put that in the magazine, people are going to start pulling out ones from the bottom so it never reaches the top.”
In the stack? Sally Franson, Matt Burgess, Antonia Angress, and too many others to mention here.
Charles Baxter, the eminent and renowned writer, National Book Award nominee, and author of The Feast of Love, eventually made into a Morgan Freeman film, taught at Schumacher’s side at the University of Minnesota for nearly 20 years. “The interesting place to start when considering Julie Schumacher,” Baxter tells me, “is with the knowledge that the protagonist of her last three books, Jason Fitger, is Julie’s anti-self. Fitger is given to feuds; he is impatient, prickly, and irascible. Julie is patient to a fault and very nurturing to students who come under her care. She doesn’t try to impose a particular kind of story or fiction on fiction writers; she tries to absorb what they are doing and give them the best way of being themselves as writers.”
Baxter tells me that, when teaching writing, he sometimes talks about “Captain Happen,” a character who enters a room and instigates, punches, sets fires, kisses the neighbor’s husband, and in general stirs up as much drama as possible. “Captain Happen—and that individual can be of any gender—is great in a story. But you never want an office next to them. Julie, in all the time I worked with her, is the opposite of Captain Happen. She’s the person you want in charge of something because she is so level-headed, extremely tactful, and diplomatic. At the same time, she’s always got her eyes wide open, and she’s watching and observing everything. So she notices those Captain Happen moments, those transactional ‘request’ moments—really all the moments. You see it when she reads student work; she’ll reference lines, page numbers. She has paid such close attention. But in any particular room, she’s never the person acting out; she’s the person who’s watching and observing.”
Lee Boudreaux is a star editor in New York City at Schumacher’s current publisher, Doubleday, who works with other luminaries, including Margaret Atwood. Boudreaux inherited Schumacher’s work after Gerry Howard, the legendary editor who helped her shape Dear Committee Members, retired. “When I first read The English Experience, I thought, This is about someone who teaches and knows teaching, who teaches writing and knows teaching writing, inside and out. But then you realize, no—with Julie, it’s about the exact right word choice, flipping a line, inserting an insight where you didn’t expect it, and then you laugh as you recognize the moment. There is such tenderness and vulnerability to this prickly character who’s spiraling down, a difficult guy finding his resilience. You become so fond of these characters. I think she’s a genius. I couldn’t believe she was the first woman to win the Thurber Prize. I think she’s absolutely singular.”
Boudreaux goes on to note, “When I first got the manuscript, I was just circling lines—I love this, exclamation point. After a million of those, I thought, Surely I should contribute something more helpful, and we clarified a few plot points. It’s a high-wire act, a comedic novel. So much of it is timing. For the joke to play, you need the characters and situation set up, the reaction shot, the ripple effect—it’s very precise surgery.”
Precise surgery, done by hand, up a ladder, in a turret.
Before she ascends the ladder to put pencil to paper, Schumacher might pause to spend some time dipping into poetry. “I read a little poetry—Ted Kooser, Leila Chatti—just so I remember: Language is an excellent thing. I’ll read three poems, then climb into my turret.”
“It’s Julie’s fierceness of heart and soul that people are responding to, the absolute passion for words and literature and what story can do.”
–Alison Mcghee, author
“A turret! An Irvine Park turret,” I echo, in awe. “I’m a little jealous and a little thrilled to the absolute edges of my being. I want a great writer to be writing in those turrets. Every Minnesotan wants to look up at those Irvine Park turrets and think each one holds a genius making masterpieces. You’re living the writer’s dream.”
“It is.” Schumacher nods happily. “It’s just so cool.”
And thus concludes the rarest of all literary tales, one about a woman confined within a high tower, not in need of any kind of rescue at all, because she’s already living her real-life happily ever after.