She staked everything she had on this book. Everything . Denise Nicholas already had a thriving career, with multiple movies, TV series, Emmys and Golden Globe nominations on her résumé -- but she wanted something else. So she gave up acting, blowing off repeated audition requests from her agent, holing up in her house, glued to her computer, living in her pajamas for days on end, hair standing up all over her head. Typing.
"I took five years of my life," Nicholas says, laughing her lyrical laugh. "Spent every penny I had. I'm broke, but I'm published.
"I'm totally broke."
Has it been worth it?
"Oh yes. Definitely worth it."
Call it a second act, by all means. Nicholas doesn't mind. As second acts go, one could do a lot worse. With her debut novel, "Freshwater Road," Nicholas, 61, is garnering stellar reviews, the kind that most first-time authors can only hope to get: Publishers Weekly declared it a "rich, absorbing debut" that marked the arrival of a new talent; The Washington Post Book World said, "It is impossible to praise 'Freshwater Road' too much."
Like many a starving author, Nicholas accumulated a pile of rejection letters before landing her deal with Agate Publishing, a small, independent house in suburban Chicago. But she wasn't a total novice. She had written journals, bad poetry, a few scenes here and there, a two-woman play in which she cast herself. She wrote in the lull between acting gigs after "Room 222," her breakthrough series, ended its five-year run in '74. She wrote after her sister's murder in 1980, when it hurt too much to act. She wrote scripts for her other multi-year TV series, the late-'80s-early-'90s "In the Heat of the Night."
She even went back to school, enrolling in the graduate writing program at the University of Southern California. But the kind of writing that would engage mind, body and spirit -- and transport her far from the vagaries of Hollywood -- eluded her. She had to reach deep into her own past to find the spark, literally. Her inspiration, she says, came after she set fire to the journals she had kept as a young woman during Freedom Summer, 1964, in what she calls "trench Mississippi, gutbucket Mississippi."
"I said, 'You've been dragging this stuff around for years,' " Nicholas recalled on a recent visit to Washington, running her hands through her curls. "I needed a clean slate."
"Freshwater Road" is based on that summer, when, as an actor and civil rights activist, she scribbled down her experiences in journals. So much material to cull from: the time a cop put a gun to her head; the death threats; the constant fear in the back of her throat.
All of that went up in smoke -- but it didn't disappear.
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