I just finished reading my novel Ruby & Spear, which was published in 1996. The novel, ostensibly about basketball, is set in San Francisco and Oakland in the years just prior to the dot-com digital revolution, before cell phones and social media arrived and took over the world. If anyone ever makes a movie of this book (someone with a vivid imagination and a fabulous sense of humor) they’ll want to preface the film with a screen graphic with 1994 writ large.
I have only read Ruby & Spear one other time since it was published, and that was twelve years ago when I read the novel aloud to make the audio book. So what prompted me to read Ruby & Spear again after all these years? A mystery. I was hunting for books on my shelves to donate to the annual library book sale, took down Ruby & Spear, and began to read.
At first I felt I was doing something wrong, as if reading this book was forbidden to me. How strange to feel my own creation was verboten. Nevertheless, I was immediately hooked, the writing fluid and poetic and funny and largely unfamiliar to me, and though I knew the plot of the novel, I’d forgotten most of the details, forgotten the book is a realistic fantasy, very much a love story, much more about relationships than basketball.
The audio edition, which I loved making (so many juicy roles to play!), is an 8.5 hours listen, whereas reading the book to myself took about four hours. Given the extraordinary pace at which events unfold in the book, the audio-book length seems ideal. Reading the book in four hours felt like being swept along by a torrent – an epic poem punctuated by intriguing dialogue.
About a third of the way through the novel, I burst into tears, overwhelmed by the realization that this book was written for people like me who have struggled throughout our lives to overcome the sense of having done something wrong and inexcusable by choosing the lives we chose for ourselves. Ruby & Spear is a grand encouragement to be brave and honest and true to one’s self, despite inner and outer opposition to doing so.
I cried several more times while reading the book, and cried a little about the book being taken out of print by the publisher on the day it was published, which meant my lovely novel essentially disappeared at the moment of its birth. Fortunately, used paperback copies abound and Ruby & Spear lives on in that way and as an audio book and e-book. (links below)
I found the New York Times review online, the mini-review that ran two weeks after the book was stifled by the publisher, and it is clear the reviewer missed most of the fun by assuming the book was supposed to be entirely realistic, which it obviously is not, though the dialogue and scenes within the fanciful tale are wonderfully real-seeming.
And my biggest cry came when I finished the book and had a revelation I’d never had before, which is that Ruby & Spear and Inside Moves and Oasis Tales of the Conjuror and all my stories and books are deeply concerned with bridging the chasms between men and women and people of different colors.
Reading Ruby & Spear at this moment in my life was a powerfully reaffirming experience for me – a message I wrote to myself to be read twenty-seven years later!
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