Joan Frank May 31, 2024 Updated: May 31, 2024, 4:14 am - SF Chronicle
San Francisco-born Molly Giles stands as a Bay Area literary legend.
The droll, feisty author of seven prizewinning books of fiction, longtime creative writing professor at San Francisco State University and much-sought literary mentor, has been beloved for decades to that many readers and writers, both local and national.
Now, thanks to the astute WTAW Press, we can relish Giles’ first nonfiction. “Life Span: Impressions of a Lifetime Spent Crossing and Recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge” will vacuum up your heart and mind from its opening words: “If I start to behave like a normal three-year-old girl, my father will let me sit in the front seat of the moving van with him.” This sparkling, salt-and-peppery memoir won’t let you go until you’ve mowed straight through it. Then — like me — you’ll want to read it again. It was even better the second time.
At “Life Span’s” 1945 outset Giles’ father, just back from World War II, moves the family to Sausalito where he “will start his new job at the stock exchange (in San Francisco) and my mother will start a new novel and I will start preschool.” His cigarette smoke in the van’s cab “tastes warm and burnt toasty and I like it.” Giles’ tart, shrewd voice feels close and urgent as if we’re right beside her.
The book’s title does double duty: Our glorious Golden Gate Bridge, central to Giles’ North Bay existence most of her fourscore-and-counting years, serves as symbol, connector and prime witness. Like the watchful monolith in the film “2001,” the famous landmark marks Giles’ countless crossings — from toddlerhood, gawking as “one by one the bridge towers overhead hug us and let us go,” to pondering “that long orange stick that keeps Sausalito so far away.” Later, Giles recounts the day her drunken mother nearly kills everyone in the car en route to the bridge’s toll booth — and much later, more happily, “Driving across the Golden Gate … I reminded myself that I was exactly where I belonged, in the perfect center of my life,” with three grown daughters and grandchildren thriving.
Chapters pop forth as sharp, powerful scenes; sometimes as a single paragraph. Many are perfect, complete mini-stories, each a distilled bio-sample of sequential worlds: parents, husbands and lovers, school, babies, jobs, homes — above all, writing. They ring brave, funny, and hair-raising. “A teaching assistant I admired said I had no business being in college … blondes like me should marry, he said, and stay at home.”
Some descriptions sadden and shock — but we trust them: They allow zero self-pity. “Oh for god’s sake. Get over yourself. Dump Mike before he dumps you,” she snaps at herself in the wake of an imploded relationship. As fortunes eventually improve, she considers the mixed blessing of a devoted, responsible man sharing her life — “I don’t do love well. … But I’m trying” — alongside the fact that if she leaves his place early enough, “I can use the day to get some writing done.” On balance? “Who knows. Miracles happen. Two tall orange towers poke above the green swath of the park. … Hello, dear bridge. Escape route? Lifeline? Here I come.”
Pages turn fast. Giles’ truth-bombs ring crisp, piquant, self-ironic. While juggling early pregnancy, child-rearing, difficult men, teaching, bills and parental deaths, Giles keeps writing. That’s a feat because demands are relentless. Good thing, for instance, that her first husband leaves her the VW as they divorce: “I need it for my morning job answering phones at the janitors’ office and my weekend job cleaning houses in Tiburon and my night classes in the city. … I turn (the car’s radio) up as I cruise off the bridge exit … for my first fiction workshop at San Francisco State.”
As Giles finally completes a rich teaching career, finds a doting partner (with seasoned caution), savors exhilarating travel, and sees her books published and acclaimed, she also faces startling new physical challenges: “Thank God for cortisone.”
Always, however, she obeys a raison d’etre steely as the Golden Gate itself: “To be a writer! … To have a book! To be read! … just a few perfect pages of a few perfect words … to say what I don’t yet know how to say in a way that says it so well even I understand it.”
Reader, she made it happen. “Life Span” takes us on a victory lap across that fabled bridge.
Joan Frank is a freelance writer.
Lauded Bay Area writer measures her life’s journey in trips across the Golden Gate Bridge
Greg