By Ellen Booraem
Special to The Ellsworth American

BROOKSVILLE — Daniela Kuper, living in Boulder, Colo., at the time, was delighted when she finished her first novel in just three and a half years.

That seemed like fast work, considering that she was working full time running her own successful ad agency. “I thought I’d beaten all the odds,” Kuper said.

Then, without even consulting her, a novelist who was judging a fellowship she’d applied for sent some of her work to his agent. The agent contacted Kuper and took her on as a client.

Daniela Kuper (child) with her parents and aunt. Daniela Kuper (right) and her best friend. Daniela Kuper of Brooksville is the recipient of five literary fellowships. Her new book is “Hunger and Thirst.” PHOTO BY ELLEN BOORAEM “HUNGER AND THIRST,” By Daniela Kuper. 2004 St. Martin’s Press, Hardcover, 288 pages, $23.95. Author appearances Brooksville resident Daniela Kuper will read and sign copies of her new book, “Hunger and Thirst,” at Border’s in Bangor Thursday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 p.m. Information: 990-3300 She will read at Camden Library on Tuesday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m. Information: 236-4769 On Friday, Nov. 12, at 4 p.m., Kuper will be at the Ellsworth Public Library. In addition to reading, she will give a talk on “Writing Your Second Career: Writing Life Over 40.” She will address “busting demons, zapping inertia, turning life experience into story and taking your work to the marketplace.” Information: 667-6363 REVIEW 'Hunger’ Deserves High Praise By Ellen Booraem Special to The Ellsworth American BROOKSVILLE — Here’s the Trout family’s annual picnic at the Forest Preserves outside Chicago: “They didn’t hike. They didn’t roast on an open fire. They sprayed each other down with 6-12 before, calamine after and called Nature the out-of-doors and planned for it the way countries planned for war.”    Irwina Trout and the women-in-the-building take turns hosting the Friday night kalooki games. “Each apartment had its forward smell, furry as any mohair and each woman tried to hold back her secrets with Air Wick and company bedspreads.”    They play kalooki, we learn, because ma jong “didn’t leave the brain free for sniffing.”    Also on Friday night: “Buddy liked getting to temple early so he could get a good shot at the arc. He sat as far as he could get from the cheap seats where pale Jews who knew Hebrew sang unto heaven, which in their case was just above the acoustical tile.”    Apart from the fact that it’s a tragedy, “Hunger and Thirst” is hilarious.    Author Daniela Kuper has delicate senses and a truly amazing memory of what life was like in the 1950s. A horrible, frightening war was just over and now there was a bomb. Everyone was running for the good times and the quickest route was through Betty Crocker, the right table settings and any approximation of what some debutante was wearing in Life Magazine.    The Trouts come from Jewish immigrant stock and live in a Chicago neighborhood. There’s some danger that this book will be pegged as a “Jewish novel.”    But the ’50s experience was similar no matter where you lived and who your grandparents were. There’s a lot of it hanging around still. The Trouts’ tragedy is everyone’s, regardless of age or ancestry.    The Trouts are fighters. Buddy, the father, wooed Irwina, the mother, with plans for a dress shop that will bring beauty into their lives. He whispered “Chanel” and “Shiaparelli” into her hair while they were dancing.    They have a water fountain in their living room, although it is of angels peeing blue. They slice the crusts off their bread and Irwina mortifies the kalooki crowd with caviar and too many flowers.    When their only child, Joan, is 12, the dream starts to decay. Each parent unhinges in his or her own way.    Joan tries to hold things together, terrified in that unique ’50s way that the neighbors will hear, see, smell or otherwise “notice.”    Kuper tells their story from three perspectives: Buddy’s, Irwina’s and Joan’s. She shifts point of view from one to the other seamlessly, sometimes in mid-chapter. The reader notices right on time but is not distracted from the story.    She pulls off this technical feat because she is a deft writer who chooses her words the way Irwina looks for “bigger, more recently dead fish” in Joan’s description of the fish market.    Kuper’s characters can descend from unhappiness to near-madness in a couple of pages, thoughts whirling in sentence fragments. They are annoying and endearing at the same time. Watching Irwina slave over cookie-cutter sandwiches that you know are going to subject her to ridicule, you want to jump into the page and try to help Joan make her stop.    The only possible defect in the book is in a slightly mad character called Sophia Fitt, who steps in to guide Joan when she needs a little crazy insight. She’s a little bit too much of a device sometimes. But there are other times when she seems like a necessary voice. You decide.    “Hunger and Thirst” came out last month and is already a best-seller in Denver and Boulder, Colo., where Kuper used to live. Booklist gave it a rave review. Joyce Carol Oates calls it “one of the most vividly imagined and moving novels I’ve read in recent years.”    More to the point, it’s on the staff-recommended rack at Blue Hill Books.     It deserves every bit of praise it receives.

“I thought, ‘This is going to be great! This is going to be easy!’”

And then, at the end of a fancy business lunch to conclude the book’s sale to St. Martin’s Press in New York, Kuper’s new editor shook her hand, told her how much everyone loved her writing and said, “Now, of course, you’re going to make it a book.”

Kuper’s novel “Hunger and Thirst” hit bookstores in September, boasting jacket blurbs by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates.

But it took five years of rewrites and a move to Maine before she finally did “make it a book.”

And nothing was easy.

“Hunger and Thirst” follows the fortunes of the Trout family, a plucky but tormented father, mother and daughter living on Chicago’s north side. In her first draft, Kuper was telling the story from the daughter’s perspective as she grew up in the 1950s.

St. Martin’s wanted her to try telling it from the daughter’s point of view as a present-day adult searching for her mother. They also wanted more detail about what happened to everyone in the family after the original story ended.

“I got writer’s block … well, I didn’t have writer’s block but I froze,” Kuper said. “I really, really struggled.”

Every time she tried to write from the modern perspective, “I fell asleep at the computer. I just couldn’t wait to get back to the `50s.” 

She kept writing new versions that didn’t work either for her or her editor. “I now have two complete novels that the world will never see.”

A year ago, Kuper decided to follow her heart. She remembered a comment novelist Jane Smiley had made once about “having faith in the first draft.”  She remembered what had excited her about the story in the first place.

She went back to the ’50s. “I finally realized, ‘If that’s where the juice is, what are you doing? Go there.’”

For the next year, “I wrote like a fiend.” She finished the novel last December and turned it in to the editor at St. Martin’s.

The editor “didn’t change one word.”

Kuper is right at home in Brooksville now, in a farmhouse she bought and renovated three years ago after she’d lived in East Blue Hill, in a cabin without running water, for about three years.

Like the daughter in her book, however, she grew up in the East Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, surrounded by immigrant Jewish families like her own. Her parents were older than most, her father a chocolate salesman who immigrated from Russia as a child.

Although her own family life inspired parts of the book, the Trout parents’ dress shop and quest for elegance refer back to the parents of Kuper’s best friend from second grade.

Kuper never saw the real dress shop, but she and her other friends did see the mother’s stiletto heels, diamonds and fancy wigs. The daughter had “piles of pastel sweaters.”

“We thought her family was rich,” Kuper recalled. It was only years later that Kuper found out about “the alcoholism, suicide attempts and abuse behind her great life.”

After the novel was finished, Kuper discovered that she knew more than she realized about her friend’s family. At one point in the book, Joan’s father, Buddy, is seen writing with a tiny golf pencil. Reading that passage, her friend started screaming.

“She said, ‘How did you know? My father had boxes and boxes of those little half pencils.’ I was privy to something unexplainable.”

She had an equally startling experience with one of her characters, an outcast wise-woman who provides pivotal insights to the daughter in the book.. The character was called “Mrs. Gordon” until she appeared to her author one night and said, “What kind of a name is that? My name is Sophia Fitt if you want me to talk to you.”

Later, Kuper realized that “Sophia” means “wisdom” and her character’s formal name would be “Miss Fitt” — a crazy wise-woman if ever there was one. She figures the name was in her consciousness somewhere “but not clear enough to get through.”

That experience confirmed her ideas about how she liked to write. “I am not a John Irving,” an author who knows how everything will come out before beginning to write.

“Other writers sit down and say, ‘What have you got for me today?’ I tried to follow where the characters asked to go.”

When she began to write fiction, Kuper had no intention of returning to her Chicago roots and the claustrophobic family life she fled for college. Her adult life included being a research “gofer” for architect, engineer and practical philosopher Buckminster Fuller, teaching other “seekers of truth” at Naropa College in Colorado, marriage, divorce and single parenthood of two children, now 28 and 29.

But, like many new writers, she found that her childhood was “the first knot to untie.”

“I was horrified, but that’s what came out.”

By the time the novel was under way, Kuper had developed a style that she describes as “a combination of memory and imagination.”

Her first published short story, “Holy Ghost,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. It also won her a pile of letters from readers “assuming this was a memoir, wanting to know how I could be married to a man like this.”

She got a similar response to another short story about a dying father. “I received letters from women saying, Forgive your father! It’s time!”

“Hunger and Thirst,” she said, is “80-percent fiction.” But she acknowledges the thin line between truth and fiction. “There was a time, a color of history I wanted to describe, emotions I wanted the reader to feel. I hope, in doing so, I was true to the story.”

She’s now in what she calls “The Ethel Merman Stage” of promoting her book: A nine-city tour started the end of September and continues through November.

Every now and then she has to head back to Colorado, where she still has advertising clients who help her keep body and soul together.

Waiting for her at home is a stack of notebooks full of ideas for her next novel, which will be based on the characters in “Holy Ghost.” 

“It’s haunting me,” she said, but she’s content to give “Hunger and Thirst” the launching it deserves.

“I dreamed about these characters, loved them, lived with them for nine years,” she said. “They continually surprised me. The hard part was saying good-bye.”