An Author is Born
Screenwriter Dianne Dixon cracks open a Pandora’s box from her past to write her debut novel, The Language of Secrets.
By B.J. Lorenzo 03/01/2010
Dianne Dixon says she can pinpoint the exact moment 18 months ago when she was “born as an author. I was in the produce aisle of Gelson’s in the Paseo. I was holding a cabbage. My phone rang, and a person in New York said ‘Hello, I’m your editor at Random House.’ “
That’s when the longtime Pasadena resident knew for sure that her first book, a novel, had been bought and would be published. Titled The Language of Secrets, it’s a mystery wrapped in a family saga with a dark psychological undertow. It hits bookstores March 23 and will be a featured selection of the Doubleday Book Club, the Literary Guild, the Mystery Guild and the online book club, BOMC2. Not bad for a first-time Arroyo-land author who was already in her 50s when she quit her day job to take a stab at the work she’d always wanted to do.
As the title suggests, the plot spins around truths withheld. A young man, who seemingly has the perfect life — loving wife, healthy baby, pots of money — has only one imperfection: He doesn’t know who he is. His memories of childhood have all been erased; his past is a total blank. A rhyme with his name and address, which he believes his birth mother repeatedly sang to him, is all he remembers of his early life. When he finally finds the courage to visit the address in the rhyme, nobody there knows who he is. To top it off, he discovers his own gravestone with an inscription indicating he died at age 3.
As his parents’ torrid secrets unravel, the young man learns they discarded him like garbage. For no apparent reason, they considered him dead. But they kept their two daughters (his sisters) and lived a so-called “normal” family life. What could have happened that caused them to reject him and never look back?
The Language of Secrets is a taut and well-told tale of distorted love and a lack of candor, which offers searing insight into the emotions of a child who was abandoned and abused. It also illuminates a condition known as dissociative identity disorder, which causes memory and identity loss due to severe early childhood trauma.
This is not exactly the kind of grim subject matter you’d expect from a woman whose career, until now, has been devoted to upbeat animated TV shows for kids. Dixon has written dozens of them, along with after-school specials and other scripts. She won the 1993 Humanitas Prize honoring family entertainment for her work on the series The Legend of Prince Valiant. Along the way, she also taught creative writing at Pitzer College in Claremont and co-hosted a drive-time talk-radio show with Peter Tilden on KABC for five years.
So why did she choose this oddly disturbing saga for her first novel? Where did it spring from? What was her own childhood like?
“I’d rather not discuss it,” the author says, with a tone of finality. Her attitude is surprising. So far in this interview, her first as a published author, she has been warm, smart and good-natured, with an exuberant sense of humor. Her petite frame, blonde pixie haircut and easy laugh have radiated a kind of casual, college-girl air, as has her favorite outfit: a cashmere sweater and jeans.
It turns out she’s too empathetic to let her interviewer dangle for long. “Okay, I’ll tell you this much,” she says, breaking an awkward silence. “I came from a situation that was horrific. I was shipped around the world like a U.P.S. package. I left home as a babe in arms, lived in South America and England, then back in the U.S. I know the subject I wrote about firsthand. It’s really dark and unpleasant, a Pandora’s box I don’t care to open. Let it exist only in the book, if that’s okay with you.”
If the subject is so difficult, why open that Pandora’s box by writing a novel about it? And why now?
Dixon laughs and relents: “I remember even as a small child thinking that I must always remember what was happening to me now, so that I never inflict this kind of pain on anyone else,” she says. “I was an avid reader as a child — which was lucky, because I could live a lot of my life in my imagination. Who knows why I survived, when a lot of other kids in that situation might not? I think it was my love of language and books. In fact, authors became my idols. To me, novelists were the pinnacle, and I always wanted to be one. But I wasn’t sure I could do it. Writing for TV isn’t the same as writing a novel. I knew I’d need a really good story to tell, and I didn’t think I had one to spin out over two or three hundred pages.”
Dixon says the turning point came when she took a freelance job with a producer who had a contract at Sony. “He wanted me to rewrite a script for a feature film, a romantic comedy. So I do the job and he’s very happy with my work. We’re going to meet the next day and he says, ‘When you come in tomorrow, bring your own idea for a script.’
“So I go home and I’ve got other work to do, and suddenly it’s nighttime. I’ve forgotten to think of a script idea. I had nothing in my head. So I ask my husband, Dan, ‘Give me an idea — anything. I don’t want to go in there tomorrow looking like a moron.’”
Her husband of 25 years, Dan DiStefano, is a hospital administrator. He’s also an ardent reader and lover of tall tales. He quickly came up with a line that got the ball rolling: “What if a guy thinks he knows where he’s from, but he goes back and nobody knows who he is?” It was a plot that had been in his head since his college days, when he wanted to be a writer, Dixon says.
The author believes that during the night, she subconsciously put together her husband’s premise, her own true story and the tale of a friend from her undergraduate days at Occidental College — the friend had been given up by her birth parents who’d kept their other children. “The whole novel just poured right out of my head as if it had been there all along,” she says.
She seasoned the book with other real-life stories she’d gleaned during her years working for children’s causes. Dixon has volunteered at Hillsides, a Pasadena foster-care and treatment center for abused children, and for Our Saviour Center in El Monte, which supports low-income families. “It magically all came together that morning,” she recalls. “I felt I had a story worth telling.”
The freshly minted author dedicates her book to her husband, from whom she says she keeps no secrets. With his encouragement, she gave up a lucrative career in TV writing to pen a novel that might never sell. “The house got downsized, our two cars became one and at times we worried how to pay our bills,” says Dixon, who is now at work on her second book. “It was all worth it in the end, but we couldn’t have known that at the start. I asked him to take a leap of faith with me, and he did.”
The Language of Secrets by Dianne Dixon (Doubleday; $24.95) is available at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Call (626) 449-5320 or visit vromansbookstore.com.
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