I started out in life as an actress. Around my 32nd year, I was depressed. I had been getting great reviews on my theater performances in LA, but I was not getting hired for films. I had little parts in big movies and big parts in little movies, but not the work for which I was striving.

During a show I was doing in Hollywood (and for which I was once again receiving great reviews), I came down with double pneumonia and had to leave the show. I moved in with my parents to recover. When I did recover from the pneumonia, I moved into a house with another woman and we threw a party to celebrate my recovery. During the party, a fire broke out, the house burned down, we lost a lot of stuff, and I now had no place to live. I called an old boyfriend who was in real estate; he told me he had a house I could stay in until it sold. I moved in and then suffered a car accident, in which I was rear-ended. I was bedridden for three weeks. Soon, my mother, who was only 61 had a cerebral hemorrhage and died within a couple of days. I was a wreck.

When Turner, who was a friend of a friend, called because he needed a place to stay, I let him share the big house I’d procured. He’d gotten a grant to do a photography project in Louisiana and if he could save a month’s rent before he left, he would arrive there with money in his pocket. I told him to come but to stay out of my hair, because I was not in the mood for company. Of course we fell in love.

Turner left and my mother was gone and my friend Ralph needed the house back. I went and stayed with my dad for a while; he traveled for business and had gone back on the road again after my mother died.

While he was gone, I slept in their bed one night to be closer to my mom. I had a vision that night, something I never had before or since. What I saw was a hologram, a sphere of light with a book in it that had the title The Quotable Woman. I could leaf through the pages and saw the quotes, all from the works of women.

The next day, I biked over to the UCLA research library to see if it was a book I had seen, but there wasn’t anything like this book. My mother loved quotations, and she had books at home, so I started looking through her books, editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and Home Book of Quotations, and noticed hardly any women were quoted. I caught myself in the mirror and said, “Why don’t you do something about this?” I worked on The Quotable Woman on my own for a year as I also did some acting. Turner returned and we got an apartment together. When I had a full manuscript, I thought, “I’m in LA; maybe there are some publishers here.” I looked under publishers in the LA Yellow Pages. I came across one called Wollstonecraft, and knowing this press had to be named after the great grandmother of feminism Mary Wollstonecraft, I called. I spoke to an editor, Georgio Griggs, who said my manuscript sounded interesting. She also said to send it or drop it off. I dropped it off. Twenty-four hours later, she called to take me out to lunch.

 Turner said, “You’re going to get an advance. How much will you ask for? Ask for 15,000 dollars.” At the time, I was earning $5-6,000 a year.

When I met with the publisher, she asked what kind of advance I would need. When I said, “$15,000,” she didn’t blink. She asked me how long it would take for me to finish the book and I said a year. She said to think ten months and offered me $1,000 a month for ten months. We shook hands.

Unfortunately, the monthly checks started drying up and soon the company went bankrupt. But now I had a much bigger manuscript. And I had met an agent through some people I knew and she took it to NY and placed it with Corwin Books. That first edition took three more years to complete; pre computers, I had it all on index cards and used an IBM Selectric typewriter.

Two years later, after both a hardcover and a trade paperback, by Anchor-Doubleday, was published, Pinnacle took over Corwin and published a mass market edition of The Quotable Woman. I was 36 by now and Pinnacle asked me to write a book on aging. After doing some research, I came up with a theory: just like we have multiple intelligences, we also have lots of ages within us. I’ve produced two books on aging, the first, Breaking the Age Barrier, for Pinnacle, and the last, The Complete Idiots’ Guide to Your True Age, which I co-authored with my sister, Judith P. Hyman, who is a psychotherapist in Los Angeles.

Not too long after Breaking the Age Barrier came out, Michigan General, the multi-corporate giant that owned Pinnacle, came up and literally pulled the plug on its subsidiary “for tax purposes.” Along with several other writers, I never saw the royalties on those editions. But soon we sold The Quotable Woman to Facts on File, a publishing house that used to do abstracts for libraries but had now entered the trade market; they have been my publisher ever since. In fact, the latest edition of the book has a Fall, 2009 release date; I’m working on it right now.

Then Turner had a great book idea. He realized that there was no photography Who’s Who; so we had to do that. We got another agent and sold the book to McMillan. Photographic Artists and Innovators was a two-year project and another huge book.

My The Quotable Woman has been in print now for 30 years. The first edition had quotes from the work of women from the year 1800 on. With Facts on File, I stretched that into quotes from Eve to 1799, and in the next edition I put all these years together in one book. In the last edition, I finally put myself in the book. I used two from my play, “Hear Us Roar, A Woman’s Connection”:

I have seen how heart cells from different organisms, when placed together in the same Petri dish, begin to pulsate in unison. There is a connection between all living things, and more so between all like things.

and

It’s all an experiment, isn’t it? Aren’t we just one great big Petri dish in the cosmos?

And from the preface of The Female Dramatist, I included:

Theater is a democratic art form — it speaks to the myriad complexities of mood, intellect, station, age, and social status that make up an audience. If it succeeds in moving that amorphous body, whether to laughter, tears, reflection, or anger, it is good theater. If it happens to speak particularly to the members of “the ruling class” — upper class, white, powerful — it may garner the reputation of great theater.

Mae West once said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” That’s how I feel about women’s quotations.

And Emily Dickinson wrote:

I reckon — when I count at all
First poets–then the sun
Then Heaven–Then the Kingdom of God
And then the list is done.

But–looking back
The first–so seems to comprehend the whole–
The others look a needless show
So I say–Poets-all.

My theater background and my research helped me locate wonderful plays written by women from restoration on, plays that were never produced. I decided I wanted to do an anthology of those plays, but I found out what editors wanted was profiles of women playwrights form olden to contemporary times. I got a contract to create a book like that and was behind the eight ball, terribly behind on reaching my deadline. Since my niece was studying to be a writer, I called her. “Leslie,” I said, “I will pay you to work with me on this; I am so late.” Lesley Hyatt did a terrific job helping me with The Female Dramatist; I felt so proud and pleased to work with my dear niece.

The vision thing I experienced always reminds me to tell others not to ignore symbols and signs that come into their lives. You have to look at them and listen to them, because they are speaking to you from a very deep place. It is easy to say, “Forget it. What was that about anyway?” and block out your inner voice.

My vision was a seminal moment in my life. I could have totally ignored it, saying it was too weird. But I explored and investigated it and doing so turned my life around. I became a different person — I became politicized.

My mother was a voracious reader and loved literature. She imbued her daughters with that love. Ultimately, I wondered how I could dramatize what I was learning about as I searched for quotes. I began to do living history portraits of notable women, further researching the women I was especially interested in and whom I thought would be popular. I started memorizing long passages of poems. Edna St. Vincent Millay had been one of my mom’s favorite poets. I memorized the poem “Renascence,” which had catapulted her to fame when she was 18; it takes ten minutes to recite. My mother had always recited the first stanza, but for some reason, never did the whole poem for us, anyway. She had had a tough childhood. She was an only child and her dad died when she was 8; after that her grandmother lorded things over her and her mother, who died when my mother was 16. I think as a result, my mother was very hidden from us–perhaps even from herself. So she just recited from the first verse of Millay’s transcendent poem:

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.

Emily Dickinson was another woman whose life I portrayed. I played “The Belle of Amherst” for 10 days in a row in the small town of Hammond, Louisiana, while Turner and I lived in New Orleans, and people came back two and three times, more and more of them each night. When the Arts and Education coordinator for the New Orleans parish area came to see it, she asked if I could shorten the performance to an hour and do it in the schools for eighth graders.

I thought it was too heady and too still for that age group, that they’d get bored. What could I do to make Emily Dickinson work for them, I wondered — just be Emily was the answer. Enter in costume, as Emily, talk to the kids, recite poems to them, allow them to ask “Emily” questions. I did this and received more commissions from the schools.

I went on to develop “Movers and Shakers, American Women in Public Life.” I’d end with a dialog with the kids about women in the public arena. Then I was commissioned to do another living history performance, “Hispanic Women Speak.” Now coming up in April at the Tallahassee Writer’s Conference, I’ll do a performance of literary sheroes, as I like to call the woman — Ursula LeGuin, Murasaki Shikibu (first true novelist, 16-volume novel in the 11th C —Tales of Gingi and Margaret Mitchell–and I may do one other.

My dad remarried and lived to 87; my step mom has had her 90th birthday. Turner has a new career. We live in north Florida on a little island and our house has a gorgeous view.

But the winds are changing again. When we lost our home in a hurricane, we rebuilt from our own design, but now the house seems too much of a muchness. We miss our old bungalow and I miss my family in California. So, Turner and I are looking for an opportunity to move back to the West Coast. All we need to do is sell the house.

If a door opens, I say, look, walk through, and see what’s on the other side; don’t be afraid because, if you don’t like what you see, you can always turn around and go back. But who knows? You won’t, if you don’t take a look.

Right now my other niece Jessica Partnow, and two of her closest friends, a journalist and a photo journalist, have launched www.commonlanguageproject.net, whose mission is to cover positive grassroots news in underreported parts of the world. In less than three years, they’ve received a grant from Pultizer and won awards.

That’s what I mean about walking through the doors.