Leaving Maggie Hope
For David Lear, eleven years old, there has never been anybody quite like his mother. She can be so caring, so warm and funny, but there are times when her drinking sweeps her away, and her affection gives way to verbal abuse, and sometimes even violence. Then David tries to run away from home, and is sent away to boarding school.
At the beginning, it's an odd and unfamiliar place, where the rules are hard for a boy to understand. David struggles to adjust, to find friends who will accept him despite the vestiges of an old physical handicap.
To confront the legacy of his family, he sets out alone on a summertime journey in search of a father he hasn't seen in years, a stepmother who loathes him, and a mysterious benefactress who pays for his schooling. They offer bits and pieces of revelation, but at the center is his mother, Maggie Hope, whose life has long since slipped from its moorings.
For David, the question is whether something similar will happen to him, or whether he will succeed, as he becomes a young man, in finding the strength to make his way in the world.
-- Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls and Fair and Tender Ladies
I have been a fan of Tony Abbott’s writing for a long time. Because he is first a poet (and he will always be a poet), it isn’t a bit surprising that the language in his debut novel is sensory and vivid and downright loamy. He drops his reader directly into the world of the story, and though young David may be uncertain and lost, the reader is not. Leaving Maggie Hope is a story of quiet tragedies and longing. It left me feeling sorrowful and hopeful at the same time. I’m already waiting for the sequel!
-- Sheri Reynolds, author of The Rapture of Canaan
During the spring of 1977 I was on sabbatical from Davidson College and living in Melbourne, Australia. For the first time in my life I had the leisure to write almost every day; and so I began the novel that today is Leaving Maggie Hope.
The version I wrote in Australia began with the central character's birth and ended with his graduation from college, and it was modeled stylistically on James Joyce's autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which has always been one of my favorite books. I began with the boy, "more dog than boy" crawling around his house dragging his casts, playing with his dog, Gretel.
When I got back to Davidson I found an agent, and the agent attempted to sell the novel. For about a year he tried, and then returned it to me. The first half, he said, was much more interesting than the second half. So I rewrote the novel, focusing on the boy's life at a boarding school between the ages of nine and fourteen. The second half has become a sequel to this novel. I sent the novel to other writers, to teachers, and to some of my former students.
I got wonderful criticism, and month by month, year by year, the novel began to assume its present shape. I wanted to write a story about a boy sent off to boarding school at a very early age who doesn't really know who he is and what his values are, a boy who finds out slowly through his school experiences and his more traumatic family experiences during "vacations" what it is he really wants and who he really loves.
At one time I called the book "Almost a Beginning," suggesting that by the end of the novel he had almost made a beginning to his life. People ask whether this book is autobiographical. The central character, David, is me to some extent. But as I wrote the novel I found myself changing more and more of my personal experiences with each revision.
The novel had a mind of its own, and now, when people ask me what really happened in my life, I say that I find it hard to know where memory ends and imagination begins. I love David, and I only wish that I was as brave and as honest as he is in the closing scenes of the novel. And I hope that my mother was like Maggie Hope, whose advice to David is so central to this book.
