Post by roxy on Jul 2, 2007 22:17:34 GMT -5
LOVE BLOOMS BEHIND BARS
Before they met, Bridget Kinsella fell in love with a prisoner's prose; she never suspected he would help heal the wounds of her divorce
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2007
What kind of women fall for men behind bars?
Don't jump to conclusions. One of them is Oakland author Bridget Kinsella, a former cheerleader and National Honor Society scholar. The beloved youngest daughter in a large Irish-Italian family, she holds degrees from Rutgers and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
But in 2003, during a brief stint as a literary agent, she took an unexpected turn -- north on Highway 1 to Crescent City, to be precise -- when a friend who taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison asked her to read a novel written by one of his students.
The author was CDC#K78728, or Rory, a convicted murderer doing life-plus-15. "The book blew me away," says Kinsella, 43, now West Coast correspondent for Publisher's Weekly magazine (and no relation to chick-lit author Sophie Kinsella). "From the first page it took off and barreled its way along to a shocking conclusion." She decided to contact him to tell him she thought he had talent.
"At the very least," she says, "I knew I'd make his day."
She didn't know it would ignite a life-changing relationship for them both. Their correspondence was, at first, based on a shared passion for the written word. Grateful for her friendship and encouragement, he called her "his rainbow in the dark."
As their trust and intimacy gradually deepened, they began to share more of themselves. Rory, nine years her junior, told her about his life, and his crime: After a youth marred by neglect and abuse, he was selling and using drugs when, at 20, he was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy in a gang-style shooting.
She described the unhealed wound at the center of her life: Her marriage had ended in divorce. Nearing 40, she was in mourning for the family she feared she'd never have.
They exchanged letters for nearly a year before she felt compelled to see him face-to-face. It was arevelation that she describes very simply: "I met him in prison and we fell in love, even though I tried not to."
The full story of their complex romance is told in her candid new memoir, "Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside" (Harmony Books).
"In an early letter Rory had explained that prison is about sorrow for what can never be," writes Kinsella, noting the similar pang she suffered after her divorce.
"But Rory honors my sorrow -- even loves me more for it. In that concrete pen, beneath the razor wire, and looking deeply into his eyes, I finally uncork all of my sorrow and let it pour out."
Kinsella's writing is close to the bone. Still, as a reporter who aims "to give voice to people who aren't ever seen," she includes the stories of prisoners' wives she met along the way. Social scientists have speculated that women who marry men behind bars, including those who seek out death row "celebrities, " often are acting out a rescue fantasy, suffering from low self-esteem or reacting to their own history of abuse. The lives of the women Kinsella befriended -- from spinsterish Ruth to ex-stripper Nancy -- couldn't have been more different from her own.
Somehow, she always knew her future was elsewhere; she was never tempted to marry Rory. But she came to realize, over time, that she shared more than a prison yard with these women. Emotionally, each of them had done time. It's not just her resume that makes the flame-haired Kinsella an unlikely candidate for this role. With her vivacious, upbeat personality and career-girl chic, she might have strolled off the set of "Sex and the City."
Caught recently in a rare moment of repose, she sipped coffee at Oliveto's, the serene Rockridge restaurant. Leafy sycamores filtered late-morning light through picture windows. Outside, her Cavalier awaits -- a rust-colored Chevy, packed to the gills. She's bracing for the seven-hour drive to Pelican Bay, the most notorious maximum-security prison in California, home of the "worst of the worst." But first, she places two Polaroid photos on the linen tablecloth. Each shows her with Rory, beneath a steely blue sky. He is compact and muscular, with a pale complexion, close-shaven black hair and blue eyes behind what she calls Buddy Holly glasses.
"The pictures were taken a year apart," she says, and it shows. In the first, shot during her second visit in August 2003, they sit side by side at a picnic table, Rory's arm around her shoulder. "I look scared," she says, laughing.
The second, taken in March 2004, captures a transformation: They are standing in a relaxed, more familiar pose. She leans back against him and he encircles her with his arms. This one was snapped on a red-letter day.
She had just informed Rory that, during the drive up, she had decided to let him kiss her. (One kiss is allowed at the end of each visit.) "Why not?" she asked him. Why not surrender to their mutual attraction? But first, she set some ground rules. "This is not an invitation to anything more than it can be," she warned Rory. "I cannot fall for you.
You would be another unavailable man, and I've had enough of those." He flashed his crooked grin. "I just want to help you to get better and get back out there, finally let go of all the pain," he said. "To want anything else, I would have to be really selfish." The kiss? It was perfect. Pictures set the tone from the start. On her very first visit, she brought an array of family snapshots and school portraits, hoping to build a foundation for the intimacy that had accelerated so rapidly through their letters.
Included was her favorite wedding portrait, in which she sits at the center of a pool of white satin. "My Cinderella dress spread out," she writes, "my husband kneeling on it as we share a kiss." Alexei was her first boyfriend. When they married in 1990, he was welcomed into the family.
She calls the wedding joyous, with her father waving like the mayor as he walked her down the aisle of the seaside Catholic church in their New Jersey hometown. After the honeymoon, they settled in Michigan, where Alexei, a fine artist, worked toward a graduate degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She had been loath to leave her New York magazine job until her editors suggested that she could cover the book world in the Midwest.
Everything appeared to be copacetic, but, all too soon, the marriage began to show strain. Kinsella was broadsided. "Alexei started spending more and more time at school," she writes. "He was pulling away from me." She didn't know why -- or how to fix it. "The panic attacks to which he had always been prone came on more regularly," she writes. "So, we did what people do and sought counseling."
After months in both couples' and individual therapy, Alexei was finally able to uncover a long-buried truth, which she details in the book: He had been molested as a child. With that dark nightmare exhumed, he then was able to acknowledge, and eventually accept, his homosexuality. They divorced, and while he entered a process of discovery, she felt entirely lost. No one in her family had ever been divorced; they didn't know what to say or how to help. The company of her much-loved nieces and nephews became a source of pain rather than pleasure. Beneath her grief and confusion ran a vein of fear. She and Alexei had planned a family. "I had always really wanted to have children," she says.
The ticking of her biological clock was growing deafening. "I needed to start life over again in a place where I had no past," she says. And, right on cue, her editor suggested she become the magazine's West Coast correspondent. "Others came to the Golden State to pan for gold, why couldn't I mine myself a new future?"
The welcoming Bay Area book community gave her a built-in social life.
But dating was tricky: She'd meet someone with potential, but he didn't want children, or she'd meet someone who wanted kids, but there would be no chemistry. That's when a friend put
Rory's manuscript in her hands. His first letter arrived just before
her 39th birthday, she recalls. "I'm getting better, and he's the
reason," she told her mother, who replied: "You never know who your
angels are."
As her 40th birthday approached, she planned an all-out gals' lunch at her favorite haunt -- Skates on the Bay in the Berkeley marina -- and she splurged on a pink cashmere coat. About that time, she found herself beginning to pull away from Rory.
"I had to," she says. "I needed to get better and back to living. I wanted to be able to dream of a real future, and if I dreamed of it with Rory, I wouldn't have a future." The remarkable thing is, he understood. Seeing Pelican Bay from the inside has altered her goals: Her next book will focus on the families of prisoners.
"These children whose mothers are in prison have stories to tell," she says. "I'm a good person to help show how to navigate loving someone who's done something wrong." And she hopes, one day, to become a foster parent.
For Rory, being loved -- and being able to selflessly care for another person -- allowed him to overcome years of self-loathing and a dearth of role models. "He was finally proud to be a man," she says.
Though they have parted romantically (details are best withheld from those who will read the book), they remain a powerful force in each other's lives. Theirs is a generous kind of friendship. Kinsella takes one last sip of coffee, bolstered for the road trip ahead. Talking about Rory has brought a fond smile to her face. "He wants someone to read this book," she says, "and fall in love with me."
From Bridget Kinsella's 'Visiting Life': "When I decided to visit Rory I promised my older brother that I would not fall in love with him and give my life away. 'Can I get that in writing?' he said. We laughed. But now I am thinking about the women who do give their lives away to the incarcerated.
One of the Menendez brothers married in prison. Women send Scott Peterson love letters on death row. But these are 'celebrities. ' These guys are no one. What of these women then, the members of the sorority I've pledged not to pledge?"
Reprinted from "Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside" by Bridget Kinsella.
Copyright © 2007. Published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc. E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle .com.
Before they met, Bridget Kinsella fell in love with a prisoner's prose; she never suspected he would help heal the wounds of her divorce
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2007
What kind of women fall for men behind bars?
Don't jump to conclusions. One of them is Oakland author Bridget Kinsella, a former cheerleader and National Honor Society scholar. The beloved youngest daughter in a large Irish-Italian family, she holds degrees from Rutgers and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
But in 2003, during a brief stint as a literary agent, she took an unexpected turn -- north on Highway 1 to Crescent City, to be precise -- when a friend who taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison asked her to read a novel written by one of his students.
The author was CDC#K78728, or Rory, a convicted murderer doing life-plus-15. "The book blew me away," says Kinsella, 43, now West Coast correspondent for Publisher's Weekly magazine (and no relation to chick-lit author Sophie Kinsella). "From the first page it took off and barreled its way along to a shocking conclusion." She decided to contact him to tell him she thought he had talent.
"At the very least," she says, "I knew I'd make his day."
She didn't know it would ignite a life-changing relationship for them both. Their correspondence was, at first, based on a shared passion for the written word. Grateful for her friendship and encouragement, he called her "his rainbow in the dark."
As their trust and intimacy gradually deepened, they began to share more of themselves. Rory, nine years her junior, told her about his life, and his crime: After a youth marred by neglect and abuse, he was selling and using drugs when, at 20, he was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy in a gang-style shooting.
She described the unhealed wound at the center of her life: Her marriage had ended in divorce. Nearing 40, she was in mourning for the family she feared she'd never have.
They exchanged letters for nearly a year before she felt compelled to see him face-to-face. It was arevelation that she describes very simply: "I met him in prison and we fell in love, even though I tried not to."
The full story of their complex romance is told in her candid new memoir, "Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside" (Harmony Books).
"In an early letter Rory had explained that prison is about sorrow for what can never be," writes Kinsella, noting the similar pang she suffered after her divorce.
"But Rory honors my sorrow -- even loves me more for it. In that concrete pen, beneath the razor wire, and looking deeply into his eyes, I finally uncork all of my sorrow and let it pour out."
Kinsella's writing is close to the bone. Still, as a reporter who aims "to give voice to people who aren't ever seen," she includes the stories of prisoners' wives she met along the way. Social scientists have speculated that women who marry men behind bars, including those who seek out death row "celebrities, " often are acting out a rescue fantasy, suffering from low self-esteem or reacting to their own history of abuse. The lives of the women Kinsella befriended -- from spinsterish Ruth to ex-stripper Nancy -- couldn't have been more different from her own.
Somehow, she always knew her future was elsewhere; she was never tempted to marry Rory. But she came to realize, over time, that she shared more than a prison yard with these women. Emotionally, each of them had done time. It's not just her resume that makes the flame-haired Kinsella an unlikely candidate for this role. With her vivacious, upbeat personality and career-girl chic, she might have strolled off the set of "Sex and the City."
Caught recently in a rare moment of repose, she sipped coffee at Oliveto's, the serene Rockridge restaurant. Leafy sycamores filtered late-morning light through picture windows. Outside, her Cavalier awaits -- a rust-colored Chevy, packed to the gills. She's bracing for the seven-hour drive to Pelican Bay, the most notorious maximum-security prison in California, home of the "worst of the worst." But first, she places two Polaroid photos on the linen tablecloth. Each shows her with Rory, beneath a steely blue sky. He is compact and muscular, with a pale complexion, close-shaven black hair and blue eyes behind what she calls Buddy Holly glasses.
"The pictures were taken a year apart," she says, and it shows. In the first, shot during her second visit in August 2003, they sit side by side at a picnic table, Rory's arm around her shoulder. "I look scared," she says, laughing.
The second, taken in March 2004, captures a transformation: They are standing in a relaxed, more familiar pose. She leans back against him and he encircles her with his arms. This one was snapped on a red-letter day.
She had just informed Rory that, during the drive up, she had decided to let him kiss her. (One kiss is allowed at the end of each visit.) "Why not?" she asked him. Why not surrender to their mutual attraction? But first, she set some ground rules. "This is not an invitation to anything more than it can be," she warned Rory. "I cannot fall for you.
You would be another unavailable man, and I've had enough of those." He flashed his crooked grin. "I just want to help you to get better and get back out there, finally let go of all the pain," he said. "To want anything else, I would have to be really selfish." The kiss? It was perfect. Pictures set the tone from the start. On her very first visit, she brought an array of family snapshots and school portraits, hoping to build a foundation for the intimacy that had accelerated so rapidly through their letters.
Included was her favorite wedding portrait, in which she sits at the center of a pool of white satin. "My Cinderella dress spread out," she writes, "my husband kneeling on it as we share a kiss." Alexei was her first boyfriend. When they married in 1990, he was welcomed into the family.
She calls the wedding joyous, with her father waving like the mayor as he walked her down the aisle of the seaside Catholic church in their New Jersey hometown. After the honeymoon, they settled in Michigan, where Alexei, a fine artist, worked toward a graduate degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She had been loath to leave her New York magazine job until her editors suggested that she could cover the book world in the Midwest.
Everything appeared to be copacetic, but, all too soon, the marriage began to show strain. Kinsella was broadsided. "Alexei started spending more and more time at school," she writes. "He was pulling away from me." She didn't know why -- or how to fix it. "The panic attacks to which he had always been prone came on more regularly," she writes. "So, we did what people do and sought counseling."
After months in both couples' and individual therapy, Alexei was finally able to uncover a long-buried truth, which she details in the book: He had been molested as a child. With that dark nightmare exhumed, he then was able to acknowledge, and eventually accept, his homosexuality. They divorced, and while he entered a process of discovery, she felt entirely lost. No one in her family had ever been divorced; they didn't know what to say or how to help. The company of her much-loved nieces and nephews became a source of pain rather than pleasure. Beneath her grief and confusion ran a vein of fear. She and Alexei had planned a family. "I had always really wanted to have children," she says.
The ticking of her biological clock was growing deafening. "I needed to start life over again in a place where I had no past," she says. And, right on cue, her editor suggested she become the magazine's West Coast correspondent. "Others came to the Golden State to pan for gold, why couldn't I mine myself a new future?"
The welcoming Bay Area book community gave her a built-in social life.
But dating was tricky: She'd meet someone with potential, but he didn't want children, or she'd meet someone who wanted kids, but there would be no chemistry. That's when a friend put
Rory's manuscript in her hands. His first letter arrived just before
her 39th birthday, she recalls. "I'm getting better, and he's the
reason," she told her mother, who replied: "You never know who your
angels are."
As her 40th birthday approached, she planned an all-out gals' lunch at her favorite haunt -- Skates on the Bay in the Berkeley marina -- and she splurged on a pink cashmere coat. About that time, she found herself beginning to pull away from Rory.
"I had to," she says. "I needed to get better and back to living. I wanted to be able to dream of a real future, and if I dreamed of it with Rory, I wouldn't have a future." The remarkable thing is, he understood. Seeing Pelican Bay from the inside has altered her goals: Her next book will focus on the families of prisoners.
"These children whose mothers are in prison have stories to tell," she says. "I'm a good person to help show how to navigate loving someone who's done something wrong." And she hopes, one day, to become a foster parent.
For Rory, being loved -- and being able to selflessly care for another person -- allowed him to overcome years of self-loathing and a dearth of role models. "He was finally proud to be a man," she says.
Though they have parted romantically (details are best withheld from those who will read the book), they remain a powerful force in each other's lives. Theirs is a generous kind of friendship. Kinsella takes one last sip of coffee, bolstered for the road trip ahead. Talking about Rory has brought a fond smile to her face. "He wants someone to read this book," she says, "and fall in love with me."
From Bridget Kinsella's 'Visiting Life': "When I decided to visit Rory I promised my older brother that I would not fall in love with him and give my life away. 'Can I get that in writing?' he said. We laughed. But now I am thinking about the women who do give their lives away to the incarcerated.
One of the Menendez brothers married in prison. Women send Scott Peterson love letters on death row. But these are 'celebrities. ' These guys are no one. What of these women then, the members of the sorority I've pledged not to pledge?"
Reprinted from "Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside" by Bridget Kinsella.
Copyright © 2007. Published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc. E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle .com.