Women Weaving A Tale of Their Own
Va. First Lady's Book Club Survives Births, Deaths, Elections

By Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 20, 2006

WINTERGREEN, Va. -- Sprawling in the high-ceilinged living room of a log cabin, Anne Holton and her eight friends admitted it had been a few months since their book club actually talked about books.

At their January meeting, they were scheduled to discuss "The Known World," a novel about slavery set in Virginia. Instead, they crowded into the kitchen and bathroom of their host's home, trying on gowns and swapping fashion tips for the coming inaugural ball for Holton's husband, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

In February, club members pledged once again that they would get to "The Known World." That time, they got distracted by a tour of Holton's new home -- the 1813 executive mansion of Virginia.

"We do read the books in this group," said Holton, 48, over a brunch of blueberry oatmeal and smoked salmon a few weeks later, at the group's annual retreat to the Wintergreen resort in western Virginia. "We usually even talk about them. Unless . . . "

"Someone's being elected governor!" jumped in Irene Carney, 54, a preschool director who is known in the group for her service as the club's scribe.

"Yes, births. Inaugurations. Those do interfere," Holton laughed back.

For 13 years, Holton's book club has met monthly to laugh, eat and talk about husbands, children, parents, jobs and, usually, books. The nine women have sustained their long friendship by building their own narrative wrapped around that of the fictional characters they gather to discuss. They have compared deeply personal experiences, argued and giggled, shared and dreamed, all while debating the meanings of the tales of others.

"The discussions are intense," said Patty Nicholas, 51, who has been friends with Holton since they were both were starting out as lawyers in their twenties. "It's formed bonds and a sort of intimacy that some of my other relationships, as honest as they have been, that they just didn't have."

Made up mostly of neighborhood friends who live on the north side of Richmond, the club was organized in the early 1990s when six of the women took part in the same babysitting co-op. Several got to chatting about books and how much they missed finding time to read.

So they came up with an idea -- a monthly Sunday evening meeting, with assigned reading. There would be no formal book reports, no publisher-distributed question guides, but instead a resolve that after a good bit of eating -- always eating -- and chatting about life as busy mothers, someone would say, "What did you think of the book?" and the conversation would turn.

Janet Geldzahler, 51, who owns the Wintergreen cabin, was working long hours as a lawyer for a New York firm and spent years commuting. Marty Gravett helps Carney run a 76-pupil preschool. Denna Joy is a social worker. Holton served as a juvenile court judge until shortly after her husband's November election.

"People knew us as mothers or workers," said Joy, 54. "We needed a way to connect outside of that."

The first years were tenuous. Attendance was not always high. Not every book got read. One of the original 10 members moved away. But as the years went on and meetings passed month by month, an unusual closeness developed.

"You need to have something for yourself," Holton said.

They started holding an out-of-town trip each year, first a weekend at Virginia Beach, then the yearly excursion to Wintergreen, a resort in the mountains west of Charlottesville.

They now meet every month except December and hold a summer pool party and a fall potluck with their families. Once a year, they return to Geldzahler's cabin, accessible off a long, steep, winding dirt road tucked behind a vineyard, where they choose books for the year.

"There's a rare resilience to this," Carney said. "It's partly shared history, and it's partly that it's so comfortable."

They have shared milestones. The book club is mother to 23 children, three of them born since the group's formation, including the youngest of Kaine and Holton's three children. Parents have aged; four have died. Children have been shepherded through tough middle school years. The oldest are tackling college applications.

There was the time Geldzahler's brother was injured on the job and spent months in a Charlottesville hospital recovering. The group drove 70 miles west to deliver a massive basket of food to the family.

"I didn't do anything for five months but sit in the hospital," she said. "Except this. I came to this."

In this group, it is the books that take precedence. Their selection process takes hours, involving passionate arguing and a coffee table covered with dozens of paperbacks nominated by each woman.

They write titles on butcher paper and tape them to the cabin's floor-to-ceiling windows, which look out on the steep, wooded hillside. They try to balance fiction with nonfiction, harder books with easier reads, classics and modern hits. They choose a biography every year. It took Joy and Gail Casselton, a guidance counselor whose dry humor keeps the others rolling, four years of lobbying to get a Doris Kearns Goodwin biography of Lyndon B. Johnson on the list.

At Wintergreen this month, they decided next year's list will include Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent," Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and short stories by Flannery O'Connor, including her famed "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." ("But now, Virginia has found its good man!" said Nicholas to groans from the group, whose members shared the political sentiment but found it a bit much.)

To celebrate their 10th anniversary in 2003, the women drove to New York City, where they visited museums, took long walks in Central Park and chose books for the following year in the van on the way home. For their 20th anniversary, they've settled on Paris.

"I haven't told my husband that yet," fretted Casselton when the trip was revealed.

"None of us have told our husbands yet," Geldzahler cracked back. "But they do have until 2013 to brace themselves for it."

The women joke that someday, when they've all outlived their husbands, they'll buy a house together and spend all their time reading. Lynalise Woodlief, who at 41 is the youngster of the group, will check up on them.

"We'll have bibs with Jane Austen on them," Casselton said.

Since the group first started meeting, Kaine has ascended from successful Richmond lawyer to city council member to mayor, and finally, to governor. With her new role, Holton said it will be helpful to have old friends with whom she can laugh, knowing she'll be treated no differently than before she got a state police bodyguard.

"My book club and neighborhood friends will help us stay normal," she said. "They'll kick me when I need it."

And the women have promised to do just that. All Kaine supporters, they said it is nevertheless easy to think of the family the way they always have.

Well, mostly.

"Her walk-in refrigerator," said Geldzahler. "We are sort of in awe of that."