Dying Young

“Dying Young is an extraordinary accomplishment…Leimbach has produced in Dying Young a masterpiece of details that always rings true, with the sad, funny and fascinating unpredictability of real life.” People Magazine

Every once in a while, when my confidence is ebbing and I need a little shot in the arm, I get out Dying Young, published in 1990, to remind me that I am capable of writing, even in an impossibly “worst-case” environment.

I wrote this novel while seated at University of California’s computer room surrounded by Asian American student geniuses that spent the early hours of each day frantically programming and then hovering together around the screens on which they’d managed to create virtual porn.

I had to write the novel in the computer room because I couldn’t afford a computer. I’d won a Regents Fellowship to the University of California’s Creative Writing Program so I didn’t have to pay fees, but my mother and her parents were dying in three different hospitals in the mid-west, so I had to spend whatever I had on plane fare to go visit them.

In the novel, Dying Young, Hilary has fallen in love with a man who is deliberately forgoing treatment for leukaemia and is dying. “In normal circumstances, someone like Victor would never be with someone like me,” she says.

This is true, as the only reason he met her was that he hired her to look after him when he stole away from the world to die without interference. The love affair was a kind of surprise to them both, as doomed as his health, as isolated from “normal” life as the spit of land on which they live off the coast of Massachusetts.

At the time I wrote Dying Young I was working as a temp by day, going to the occasional class at night, sleeping for a few hours, and then writing from 11 pm to 2 am. Like Hilary in Dying Young, I longed for something I could not have. Hilary wants Victor, and she wants him healthy and alive. I wanted my mother and my grandparents to shirk off their cancers and survive. I wanted to wear the cool, fashionable clothes I saw all around me in southern California and not those I collected from Salvation Army warehouses and my mother’s abandoned wardrobe (the cancer swelled her belly so that nothing fit). I wanted my grandparents back in the big, Victorian house in Rockford, Illinois and for the house to be full of life again.

In Dying Young, Hilary is a shoplifter; pilfering those things she cannot buy. In my life I made a game of my poverty, pretending that all the money I didn’t spend – on cinema tickets or drinks with my classmates – amounted to a kind of salary. I suppose all I could afford to do was write, and while the computer room was hardly a romantic garret overlooking the sea, it was free and open all night.

I’ll never forget how the software geniuses used to laugh at the naked girl they invented. When one night they managed to get her to rotate into various improbable positions, they giggled so loudly I slammed my palm on the desk in front of me.

“We sorry,” said one of them. His eyeglasses had slipped to the end of his nose. He smelled the way young men do when they wear the same acrylic sweater for days on end.
“Shut the fuck up,” I told him. He had a heavy accent; I guess I assumed he didn’t know much English, but I was wrong.
“You shut fuck up!” he shouted back.
“No, you!” I said.
“YOU!”

His friends thought this was very funny. They laughed and pointed at the computer screen; calling back his attention. In the end, he went back to his rotating girl. I returned to my manuscript.

Dying Young eventually became number 5 on the New York Times Bestseller List. It remains a novel that I am proud of, in part because its narrative is so totally unlike anything else I’ve ever written, and also because I wrote it at a time that was incredibly difficult for me.

I think the book shows what happens when you take a gifted young person and throw a lot of crap at her. She will take the crap and try to fashion it into something beautiful. I was young, unworldly, exhausted and utterly lonely. I was helpless in the face of my mother’s and grandparents’ deaths. I’d moved to southern California to take part in a workshop I could barely stay awake through because I was so tired from trying to support myself and pay for all the necessary plane fare. In short, I felt hopeless, but I was not hopeless.

Write what you know, that’s what Hemingway said. And it turned out that I knew more than I realised.