For the past 23 years, Nancy Lemann has lived in the Maryland suburbs, in a light-drenched house by the Chevy Chase Club, raising her daughters and volunteering in schools and engaging in all manner of introspection and self-recrimination while writing reams and reams of documents, fiction and nonfi ction, that basically all ended up in a drawer. She now thinks of this period as “The Doom.” Once a celebrated novelist, Lemann struggled during those years to get anything published. Highbrow tastemakers adored her elliptical, idiosyncratic prose and the cast of “wino lunatics and racetrack habitués and other weird types of wrecks” who populate her books. But outside niche literary circles, she was almost entirely unknown. Her work all fell out of print. “I tried to learn to fail with grace, or meet defeat with equanimity,” she recently told me, though the decades of obscurity were grim. Now “The Doom” has lifted. Lemann’s new novel, The Oyster Diaries, comes out today, along with reissues of two of her older works, Lives of the Saints and The Ritz of the Bayou. Recently, she and I sat at a long wood table in her kitchen and discussed her career renaissance. She wore slippers and a beige cardigan and chewed piece after piece of Nicorette gum while seeming a little baffled by it all. “I can’t believe it’s turning out this way,” she said, “that I’m not totally out in the cold anymore.” At age 70, she’s lately been the subject of fawning coverage in outlets like the New York Times and The Cut.  Lemann grew up in New Orleans, where her family has been rooted for generations. She was 22 when she wrote her first novel, Lives of the Saints, a slender volume about her hometown’s dazzling coterie of “wastrel youth.” Other novels followed, plus a 1987 work of nonfiction, The Ritz of the Bayou, about the bribery, fraud, and racketeering trials of former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. (That book began as an assignment for Vanity Fair, but the magazine balked because the draft was so atmospheric and uninterested in basic facts.) Lemann’s work was critically acclaimed—her mentor, Walker Percy, was among its champions—but her prose is eccentric and stylized and wasn’t terribly commercial. In 2003, she moved to Maryland with her husband, the biotech entrepreneur Mark Clein. It was around that time that publishers lost interest in her work.  Lemann is lukewarm on Washington. Compared to the vertiginous splendor of New Orleans, DC strikes her as a notch too even-keeled. At one point during our interview, she grabbed a notebook by her armchair and offered to read me a list of places that she likes around town, which included the Billy Goat Trail, the restaurant La Ferme, the cafe by the National Cathedral, and the Malaysian embassy, which was the childhood home of Gore Vidal. She’d compiled that list for her recent profile in the Times, in case she needed to bring the reporter somewhere. But she says that she actually doesn’t get out very much, that her life here is mostly internal. She described visiting the writer Shelby Foote in Memphis: “He was sitting in his study and the curtain was billowing by the window and he said, ‘I hardly know there’s a world out there.’ And that’s kind of what it’s like for me. I just live in my head.”  The narrator of The Oyster Diaries is similar to Lemann. She’s an incandescently neurotic woman who lives in Washington and has two adult daughters and loves opera and reads Kierkegaard and often visits her hometown of New Orleans, where she volunteers as a court monitor and cares for her ailing dad. Plot is not the point; the book is propelled by its narration, by inhabiting the consciousness of someone who is acutely alive to various things in the world (a storm blows up the coast “like a disturbed personality”; everyone in Washington “acts like federal tax bureaucrats, just by osmosis”). She’s fixated on the contours of her own mind, ruminating absurdly on her temperament. At one point, she calls herself “a demented cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Lord Byron.” She says, “The main issue yesterday was my unanswered prayers to help my personality. Ditto today.”  The material that became The Oyster Diaries was compiled in the midst of the “The Doom.” “I was always writing,” Lemann told me, “because it’s a compulsion, and that’s how I cope with the world.” This habit has left her with reams of backlogged work, which she now hopes to repurpose into new books. She said she might also like to cover the White House the way she did with the corruption trials in The Ritz of the Bayou, where it’s “all about the vibes and the atmosphere.” I asked if her agent was floating that idea. She shook her head, grabbed her notebook, and said to herself—with the strange, looping rhythms of one of her characters—“Okay, so float the idea. Maybe I should write that down. Float the idea to the agent. Can we write that down?” Lemann acknowledges that the recent enthusiasm for her work comes largely from decades of pent-up rapture over Lives of the Saints, which has amassed a flock of ardent devotees since its 1985 release. But she hopes that the new book will resonate, too. “You don’t want to just rest on your laurels,” she told me, “even though it’s a natural progression to have youthful brio and then slowly decay until you’re just not as good anymore.” When I asked if Lemann thinks she’s lost her brio, she replied that she now has the wisdom of age. Lately, she finds herself revisiting the “apocalyptic thoughts” she had as a child—the kinds that propel ambitious work, like, “Why are we here?” and, “Who planned this?” and, “Where am I going?” Being older, she said, is “bittersweet, because the show is ending,” but she actually finds herself happier now. She’s less consumed by her neuroses, disaffections, and fears, and more alive to everyday wonders, like the stand of flowering trees in her yard.  In The Oyster Diaries, the narrator reflects that the “whole point of everything” is to “notice things more.” There’s a moment where she’s sitting in a courtyard and hears a burst of Bach from a piano. She weeps, thanking God for “reminding me of who I am—a person transfixed by beauty.”The post Cult Novelist Nancy Lemann Emerges From “The Doom” first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less