COURTESY PHOTO
Gina Berriault, Sausalito author
Sausalito Author Gina Berriault had a prolific writing career crafting stories, novels and screenplays. Focusing largely on life in and around San Francisco. Her book Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. The book was praised in the New York Times as "jewel-box perfect." In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre, and won the fiction category at the National Book Critics Circle Awards
She taught writing at San Francisco State University and also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.
She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984 starring
Robert Duval and Glenn Close.
She was also a contributor to Contact, the West Coast literary quarterly, edited and published by Sausalitans Bill Ryan and Calvin Kentfield in the 1960s.
Berriault died in 1999, at age 73, at Marin General Hospital. In her obituary, the Washington Post reported: “Throughout her career, critical notices for Ms. Berriault were generally positive, though book sales were not. Andre Dubus called her ‘a splendid but unheralded writer.’ Another critic, Molly McQuade, writing in the Chicago Tribune, lamented that Ms. Berriault's work had not ‘met with a splashy success or even with the sustained respect that it deserves’."
Another review, on enotes.com, states: “Gina Berriault is known for the complexity and compassion with which she weaves her characters, and her stories are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic.
“Berriault employs her vital sensibility―sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw―to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? Her writing is spare, evanescent, pulsing with life and shimmering with life's strange hope. Her stories illustrate the depth of her emotional understanding.
By all accounts a private person, Berriault kept a low profile in Sausalito. On her death, the Historical Society’s Phil Frank wrote, “a shy, reclusive woman, she quietly rose- to prominence as one of this country’s premier short story writers, while remaining relatively unknown in her own community. Only upon her death did many of her neighbors learn the respect she commanded among leading literary critics nationwide.”
One exception to that rule came in 1997 when she appeared before the City Council to protest amplified music being played at the Ferry Plaza. The volume exceeded the City’s noise control ordinance and distracted her from her work. Her cause was taken up by friends and neighbors including fellow writer Bill Broder who wrote to this newspaper: “Sausalito is fortunate to have one of this country’s finest living writers living among us.” He added: “I feel that every household in Sausalito should own at least one work by Gina Berriault.”
Today, the Gina Berriault Award, created by Peter Orner and Fourteen Hills Review at San Francisco State University in 2009, honors her legacy. Her books are available through the Marin County library system and can be ordered through Sausalito Books by the Bay.