Novelist Susan Coll has a muse, and its name is Bethesda.
The author’s two most recent books—2005’s Rockville Pike and the 2007 college-application comedy Acceptance—are set in the Bethesda area. Already, the 48-year-old Coll, a mother of three and wife of Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is at work on another novel. We asked Coll, who lived in Bethesda for 12 years before moving to Washington, D.C., last year, why she’s chosen to use the Bethesda area as the backdrop for her writing.
Is there something particularly evocative about the Bethesda area that makes you want to write about it? Or is it simply that, as a writer, you draw on your surroundings for inspiration?
I think it’s probably a little bit of both, but I do think there is something about Montgomery County that’s really interesting to me as an observer. Part of it may just be that I came to it new. I’ve been relatively nomadic my entire life: Before moving to Bethesda I lived in London for three years, New Delhi for three years, New York for three years and Montgomery Village in Gaithersburg for three years. I was in Los Angeles for about eight years before that.
My time in Bethesda was largely informed by the fact that it was the first place I ever stayed put for more than a few years. It was my first experience as a homeowner, and I was mostly trying to wrap my mind around managing a garden and paying heating bills and getting the kids to the bus stop on time. This was also my first (and only) experience raising children in the suburbs, and I found everything about this life strangely fascinating: I-270 and the Maryland SoccerPlex in Germantown were mini-wonders, and part of what inspired Rockville Pike. I think there is something about [Montgomery County] that’s interesting in that it’s an almost perfect society, or as close as we have to it right now. I mean, you have, by and large, a very affluent population. You have a highly educated population. And you have a government that really works, in a very earnest way.
What inspired you to write Rockville Pike?
I was just out running errands on Rockville Pike on one of those dull, dreary, traffic-filled days. I knew [F. Scott] Fitzgerald was buried [at St. Mary’s Cemetery], but I had never taken the time to pull over and take a look at the tombstone.
Just the setting took my breath away. I saw his tombstone—he and Zelda are both buried there. I read the inscription, which is the last line of The Great Gatsby. It was very idyllic-looking that day: Somebody had left an empty champagne bottle, and there were flowers, and there was a melted candle. Just the setting was so breathtaking to me; I actually felt a little teary looking at this.
Then I looked up, and across the street I saw a giant furniture store. I just thought to myself, I need to capture this somehow. There is something here. This is my next novel.
Did you have a similar epiphany that made you decide to write Acceptance?
While I was thinking about Rockville Pike I just kind of had a moment where I stopped asking questions and started to find everything kind of amusing in my daily life. I think that was the same process with Acceptance. I crossed the line from being a really stressed-out, ridiculous caricature of a parent myself to realizing this whole thing was completely absurd and needed to be satirized immediately.
When I attended my first back-to-school night in Montgomery County, the teacher kept referring to G&T, and I was the parent who raised her hand and asked what she was talking about. (Government Tested? Gin and tonic?) I had my antennae up from that point forward to what immediately struck me as a culture of overachievement: There was no “gifted and talented” program in the neighborhood London primary school my children had previously attended. A few other small things seeped into the narrative, such as the toothpick bridge turned in as a fifth grade science project that could have withstood a nuclear blast, or the kid who could recite the order of schools on the U.S. News & World Report top colleges list, which was admittedly a bit exaggerated in the book. There is a scene in Acceptance where kids line up outside the school at the crack of dawn to get a college recommendation, and this was inspired by an incident in which one of my kid’s teachers said that, in an effort to be fair, she’d write letters for the first 20 students to ask. This created such a stampede that I believe the school had to come up with a new policy to prevent that sort of thing from reoccurring.
My three kids are pretty close in age, so we went through the college application process in a condensed period of time. I thought I was a relatively mellow parent—I never pushed my kids to get straight As or load up on AP classes or sign up for endless extracurriculars—in fact we were the parents saying “no” to travel soccer, and I confess that we even subtly arm-twisted our son into abandoning the Boy Scouts since we couldn’t manage any more projects involving power tools. But, nevertheless, I found myself turning into one of those proverbial, psychotic helicopter parents. The pressure is so intense, at least in MCPS [Montgomery County Public Schools], that it’s hard to completely step back. As I watched my kids and their friends matriculate at college, I could see that their happiness and their abilities to transition had very little to do with whether they were attending their first-choice schools or their so-called safeties, and that was when this all started to seem ripe for comedy to me. For most of these bright and affluent kids, there was no tragic outcome even if the Harvard acceptance didn’t materialize.
In Acceptance, the town of Verona is the fictional name for Bethesda. Did you borrow that name from “Romeo & Juliet”?
I should say yes because that makes it sound more profound. It just kind of came out of the air. There was no particular reason for it, but it seemed to work.
Last fall, you and your husband moved from [Bethesda’s] Kenwood Park to Cleveland Park in D.C. What do you miss most about your former home?
I think I just miss the sense of familiarity, which I didn’t even know I had, in a way. I have a dog that I walk twice a day and everyone in the neighborhood would joke about the fact that I was always walking around the same block with the same dog. That was actually starting to feel a bit tedious. I needed a new block to walk around. But then I realized there are people I actually do miss, and I don’t even know who they are. There was a woman with a cute little red-headed baby that I used to see every morning. I don’t know her name. Those are things I miss.
On the other hand, I feel like it was good to get a fresh start because what I didn’t miss was the whole world of high school. I find Montgomery County a very stressful place to be a parent, and I felt some of that couldn’t really be helped. Even if you weren’t the sort of parent trying to raise kids who did every single activity, they still wanted to do lots of things. And that was a good, healthy thing. But just the nature of life there I found to be overwhelming at times. I don’t miss that. When I pass a soccer field on a Saturday or a Sunday, I think I’m really happy I can sit home and read the newspaper.
Do you think the move will make it difficult to write about Bethesda?
I thought it would be difficult at first because it took me a while to get going again writing. But now I think it’s good to have some distance. I feel like I can still observe it from four miles away.
Do you ever worry you’ll get pigeonholed as “that Montgomery County novelist”?
I don’t really worry about that because right now, I think that’s kind of where my head is anyway. I have a little fantasy about—this is my own pure, fantasy because I don’t know that anyone would want to publish it—a Verona trilogy. I mean, I’d like to keep writing about the place until I get it out of my system.
What made you choose “Beach Week,” a rite of passage for MCPS high school seniors, as the subject of your next book?
There is something inherently funny about the idea of a bunch of supposedly enlightened parents paying hundreds of dollars, holding countless meetings to discuss and micro-manage logistics, and then sending their kids off for a week of debauchery to celebrate their high school graduations. I was one of those parents—three times. Now that I’ve got a little distance from the subject, I can see both the pathos and the comic potential.
What was the inspiration for Brain Fever: A Comedy of Transcontinental Errors, the story you wrote with Jean Heilprin Diehl, and what was it like co-writing a story?
Jean and I returned to this area at roughly the same time after stints living overseas, where both of our husbands were then working as foreign correspondents for The Washington Post. We discovered that we were both fiction writers, and were experiencing the same general sense of dislocation readjusting to life in Washington. We would frequently bump into one another at the Bradley [Shopping] Center, and I also had a somewhat shocking parking lot experience not dissimilar to the one in the opening of the story, so that seemed the natural place to begin a narrative that was inspired by our shared experience. We had fun writing, and managed the process pretty smoothly and diplomatically. We’d each take a crack at crafting a chapter and then we’d exchange and rewrite. I learned a lot from working with Jean—she’s by far the better writer!
Jen Chaney is an editor at WashingtonPost.com and lives in Bethesda. Her stories have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today and People magazine.
