The way author and radio journalist Heather McElhatton sits just so in the back booth at La Belle Vie -- soft light glinting off her copper hair and making her blue eyes even bluer -- you'd think Shea Inc. designed her into the restaurant when they drew up plans.
In fact, the chic place fits her so well it makes a cameo in her recently released "fractured fiction" novel, "Pretty Little Mistakes," a participatory book in which the reader is the main character and gets to choose from 150 plots, some of them drug-fueled sexcapades.
McElhatton is fresh off a mention in Vanity Fair ("Below Michael Chabon!") and that day had signed another six-figure deal with HarperCollins to write "Average American Female," the counterpoint novel to the controversial guy-centric, gal-loathing "Average American Male."
She's in a celebratory mood, and orders a cocktail.
"What's the one with the foam on it?" McElhatton asks the waitress.
"The Parlez-vous?"That's the one," she says.
A manager passes by: "We looooove Heather," he coos.
Apparently, so does the book world. "Pretty Little Mistakes," with its gritty/sexy flashes, is set to become a series of books, and "AAF" is guaranteed to generate more attention. McElhatton's promoters seem to be grooming her to be their racy "it" provocateur.
A smart, young, (36), well-educated writer with an uncensored mind and mouth, she seems retrofitted for the talk-show circuit that drives sales among her target audience: other young women.
Her heroes remain Faulkner and Capote, but McElhatton cops unapologetically to writing a work her publishers think will resonate commercially. Literature, with foam on it.
Living with mom
The seemingly sudden success came after a low point for McElhatton. Her first novel, written for her master's degree in fine arts in 2002 at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, went nowhere.
"I was crushed, shocked it was not published," says McElhatton. "Looking back on it, I was naive. I believed that if you sacrificed and worked on something, it would all come together."
Although she was a successful freelancer, doing radio stories and essays for Minnesota Public Radio and others (a favorite is the time she took a pastor to the Mall of America and asked him what God would buy; the answer was Victoria's Secret), she felt like a loser.
"I was 30, living with my mother, never married, had no children," she says. "This wasn't funny anymore. I thought, 'Heather, you're a cautionary tale.' "
So, she did what she always does to "process the world." She started writing about her life, starting with the day she graduated from high school.
She played "what if?"
What if she'd married her high-school sweetheart? Could have been wonderful. Or, he could have abused her and she could have killed him. At each fictional turning point, she created two new potential directions. That became the skeleton for the 500-page book.
"I didn't know I was writing anything," says McElhatton. "But it was helping me feel really good."
She took stories she'd heard from girlfriends. Some had done everything right, yet their lives turned out badly. Others had committed mistake after mistake, only to have their lives turn out swell.
"I hope the message is, 'just do what you want to do because it's all a gamble anyway,' " she says
Like her book:. "I handed my agent a big, old messy manuscript and said, 'Sorry, this is what happened.' "
She had four offers in four days. She got the call from HarperCollins editor Allison Callihan while shopping at Ikea. Callihan had "joined the cult of 'Pretty Little Mistakes.' " They wanted McElhatton to write a series of books (the next is "A Million Little Mistakes").
"I had to sit down in one of those little living-room setups" at Ikea, she says. Then she got the hiccups. "It wasn't just my ship coming in; her majesty's royal army was coming in.
"Some wanted it less gritty, less sexy," says McElhatton. "I said, 'Hey, if you can make all women's lives cleaner, then yeah, I can do that. You know what? Life is messy, life is gritty. We've all taken a trip on the dark side, or thought about it."
Playboy mansion next door
McElhatton's "dark side" certainly wasn't plumbed at home. A Chicago native, she grew up in a religious family. But her neighbor was Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
Hefner's bodyguards used to hand out big bags of M&Ms at Halloween, but McElhatton's' mother would take them away.
And thus began the battle of good and evil over McElhatton's soul.
She moved to the Twin Cites and attended Minnehaha Academy, a Christian school. "But I'm better now," she deadpans. Then she smiles mischievously. "Do you know how many people are not going to like this book?"
Like, perhaps, Mom?
"She's a lovely Christian woman," says McElhatton. "I said, 'You know, I need you to be my mom. I've got lots of people to read the book, and there's nothing in it that will make you happy.' She happily agreed not to read it."
During high school, McElhatton went to church three times a week, but hasn't for years.
"We were told premarital sex was a notch below murder. No condoms, no birth control. There was nothing I could really use going into the world," she says. "So [classmates at Minnehaha Academy] are all going to be shocked as hell."
Sometimes novelists crib from their own life for material. Sometimes it's all fantasy. So, what about all the drugs and sex scenes in "Pretty Little Mistakes?"
McElhatton plays with the foam in her glass and smiles. "It's all true," she says in a voice that makes you think some of it might be.
"Well, maybe not the monkey-sex scene."
Since McElhatton has written more than 150 endings to her characters' life stories, how might she write her own?
She offers two options.
One would be to die happily on a farm surrounded by a bunch of friends and animals.
The second: "The Christian Coalition has a sniper and I'm taken out in Texas, probably when I'm giving a speech to a group of women who are about to become emancipated," she says. "You know what? I'm down with that. I elect me."
Jon Tevlin • 612-673-1702 • jtevlin@startribune.com© 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
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