As a child of 5 or 6 growing up in the Forest Hills section of New York City, Katharine Weber pecked out stories, “typing very slowly, very laboriously, on an old Underwood typewriter — you know, the kind with the silver-circled keys.” Her mother kept them all. One tale centered on a woman who died after chowing down on too much furniture. The inspiration, Weber figures, was the folk ditty about the old woman who swallowed a fly and, perhaps, she died.
Not until years later, after marriage to cultural historian (and West Hartford native) Nicholas Fox Weber and a move to Connecticut in 1976, did Weber begin thinking of writing as a career. In a phone interview from Ohio, where she was teaching a class at Kenyon College, Weber spoke about her writing, which, she said, developed less as a “defined profession” and more as a desire “to write things like the things I was reading.”
Read a novel, write a novel.
If there’s a parallel with the old adage “Monkey see, monkey do,” it’s not entirely coincidental. The phrase appears more than once — for good reason — in Weber’s sixth and newest novel, “Still Life with Monkey,” which the New York Times called “profoundly humane even while it’s asking the most difficult questions.”
Those questions revolve around the book’s main character, Duncan Wheeler, a 37-year-old New Haven architect left quadriplegic by an automobile accident that killed a colleague. No longer able to perform most of life’s simplest tasks, Duncan wonders if his life is worth living.
Desperate to bolster her husband’s will to live, Laura Wheeler brings home a capuchin monkey helper named Ottoline, specially trained by the fictional New Haven-based Primate Institute of New England, which is modeled after Boston’s very real Helping Hands organization.
Helping Hands provides, free of charge, capuchin monkey helpers to aid individuals with spinal-cord injuries and other severe mobility problems. The monkeys assist with once-simple chores such as fetching a person’s glasses, turning the pages of a book, flipping a light switch. Connecticut, ironically, is one of 22 states that ban “private possession of non-human primates” — which includes service monkeys — according to the website MonkeyPro.
Writing “Still Life with Monkey” required significant knowledge of architecture, both the design and business aspects; art conservation (Laura’s job at Yale Art Gallery); spinal cord injuries, and capuchin monkeys. Life had given Weber experience with architecture (she once worked for award-winning artist and architect Richard Meier) and with art conservation (via the Albers Foundation, a non-profit arts and art-conservation organization headed by her husband).
She acquired her additional knowledge via research.
Weber read “stacks of books” about understanding and living with quadriplegia, but a significant portion of her insight involved long hours spent with Kent and Nancy Converse, a Massachusetts couple whose tufted capuchin monkey helper, Farah, assists Kent — paralyzed from the chest down in a 2006 auto accident — with small, everyday tasks he no longer can manage.
The Converses have high praise for “Still Life with Monkey,” and for the accuracy with which Weber portrayed the smart, loving, mischievous, food-scavenging capuchin monkey.
“Kent is still reading the book,” Nancy Converse said in a phone interview. “But we’re both on the same page. I think she did a wonderful job — and a respectful job. … We feel so honored to have been part of her creative process.”
“I love doing research when I’m writing a novel,” said Weber, who lives in Bethany. “All of my novels have a lot of real-world information in them, on which the fiction is built.”
She pooh-poohs the teacherly mantra “Write what you know,” suggesting that “Know what you write” would better serve aspiring writers.
From the beginning, Weber’s writing landed well: Her first short story appeared in The New Yorker in 1993. Her first novel was published in 1995. And one year later, the British literary magazine Granta named her one of the 50 Best Young American Novelists.
Inspiration for her sixth novel derived, in part, from Andrew Zerman, a long-time friend who is quadriplegic — and to whom, along with the Converses and Farah — Weber dedicated the book. Of all the novel’s fully realized characters, only the adorable, mischievous, Nutella-loving Ottoline is based on an actual being: Farah.
Finding a publisher for the deeply moving “Still Life with Monkey” was its own challenge.
“At several big-deal houses in mainstream publishing, it got road-blocked in marketing,” she said. “They’d say, ‘A monkey . . . ew!’ Or, ‘A quadriplegic . . . oh!’ It was deemed ‘insufficiently relatable.’ I think it’s a form of bigotry. No one would say that about a Holocaust survivor or a 9/11 survivor.”
Ultimately, a small, independent publishing house — Paul Dry Books, in Philadelphia — took the book.
Book reviews can resemble literary Rorschach tests, revealing more about a reader than what’s read. Although highly praised by a slew of prominent reviewers, Weber’s novel took some bruising from a reviewer or two who suggested that Duncan’s despair sent a message implying that suicide is an appropriate response to severe disability.
Weber is offended — outraged is not too strong a word — by the assumption.
“If you have a message, call Western Union,” she said, quoting a line often attributed to playwright Moss Hart. And, she added, “If my book has any sort of message, it is that disabled people have the right to make their own choices. All choices.”
Choices of another sort have been on Weber’s mind lately: She’s juggling three potential novels and a novella for her next book: “I really do need to get to work.”
