LitMinds Blog and Interviews

Dinah Lenney is a well known actor as well as an accomplished writer of creative non-fiction, and now author of a new book, Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir. She received her B.A. at Yale and her Certificate of Acting from the Neighborhood Playhouse where she studied with Sanford Meisner. Her MFA in writing is from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she has published numerous articles and essays in national magazines, anthologies, and newspapers. 

Dinah is probably more widely known for her acting roles, in film and on stage, and more especially on television. On stage she has performed leading roles in plays ranging from MacBeth to The Vagina Monologues. On television she has appeared on shows such as Murphy Brown, Judging Amy, and South of Nowhere. She is best known for her portrayal of Nurse Shirley on the popular television drama series ER, a role for which she was honored by the Screen Actors’ Guild.

Dinah wrote a memoir about her family that revisits the fractures suffered during her father and mother’s divorce when Dinah was still a young girl. This book looks at Dinah’s family through the prism of her  at at father’s murder in 1997. While Bigger Than Life takes the murder as a point of departure, a jolt that forces her to reevaluate her family’s relationships, the book is also a brilliant and entertaining narrative examination of Jewish middle class life in New Jersey, full of poignant and funny anecdotes about colorfully flawed but embraceable people.

Dinah’s father, Nelson Gross, was a political figure with a dramatic life story. He was Republican member of the New Jersey State House of Assembly, a delegate to the Republican National Convention from New Jersey in 1968, and an assistant secretary of state in Richard Nixon’s cabinet.  In 1970 he was the Republican Candidate for U.S. Senator from New Jersey, and in 1974 he was convicted for campaign violations involving the 1969 campaign of Governor William T. Cahill. He spent 6 months in jail for that conviction. He was also a successful real estate developer, political fundraiser, and restaurateur in New Jersey. In 1997 he was abducted and murdered by three teenagers during a botched kidnapping and robbery. Dinah’s new book, Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir places the murder in the context of her family’s history.

Recently, Lewis Klausner approached Dinah to discuss her new book, writing, acting, and family.

Do you think of writing and acting as similar kinds of self presentation? The Dinah Lenney who appears in Bigger Than Life shares your life story, but did you also have to shape her as a literary character, perhaps the same way that you shape the character of Nurse Shirley?

See, this is so interesting to me, the acting-writing link… I didn’t think of myself as a literary character, no, not while I was writing anyway. But I do think acting and writing work on a person in similar ways – whether I’m going from the inside out or the outside in, in either case the goal is the same; to give the audience (or the reader) a full, round, idiosyncratic appreciation of the part… But writing in the first person as I did, with the urgency I felt, with that compulsion to get it all down – well, I kind of barfed myself on the page (pardon me), so I wasn’t watching myself, not at first anyway. Although similarly, at all stages of creating (and performing!) a role as an actor, it’s death to watch yourself; self-consciousness is to be avoided at all costs, which is why the best teachers say “acting is doing” not so different from the writing instructor’s admonition in the margins of every student’s work: “Show, don’t tell.”

It’s the details – the specifics -- that save both writers and actors every time. And as a craftsperson – after the fact – yes, I did have to go back and shape, in that way I was my own director, I guess, although I had teachers and editors all along the way, thank goodness… But I had to be tough with myself (was I tough enough? I don’t know…); as in, this little revelation can go… And this epiphany here might work for me but it won’t for anyone else… And this bit here makes me sound like I’m whining, whereas here I’m just plain showing off. In that way, yes, after the fact, I had to try to be objective about how to keep the reader engaged. With my journey. With me. An actor has rehearsal to work out those kinds of kinks. And I had the first three or four drafts.

 
Your father, it seems to me, was indeed a larger than life character. Had you not written about him, I feel I would still have some approximate knowledge of him from men in novels by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Did that make him easier to write about, or harder?

Once I got going, his huge proportions made it easier. Because even though I didn’t spend loads of time with my Dad (growing up as I did before the days of joint custody) he was a pungent presence in my world, he made sure of that (as if he had to…). And he was larger than life, yes, but in such human ways. He was himself -- always and unapologetically -- and it was good to reveal him in the writing – easy, yes! -- to find his essential person in the most innocuous moments…  

 
There is one part of the book that you had to imagine, the scenes in which your father was kidnapped and murdered. The rest of the book reports either your thoughts or scenes at which you were present. Do you see these as significantly different kinds of writing?

Absolutely. I’ve had trouble writing fiction since my father was killed. I love to read novels and stories, but my own attempts feel trivial and fake. That chapter – which is a fiction of sorts – a conjecture -- is as close as I’ve come since his death to writing a story. Not a great departure from the truth as I understand it, but I did sort of make it up, didn’t I?  

 
The murder and your father’s political career are the parts of your story that made the newspapers. But your book, it seems to me, is much more about family relations, about the ways children, siblings, and parents seek each others’ approval, or manipulate each other to bolster cherished myths about themselves. It seems often about how we strive to fit into our families in ways that will satisfy the hungers of our egos.  Was it healing for you and for the rest of your family to have this family history appear in print?

It was, of course, tremendously cathartic for me, a way of grieving and dealing with grief. But come to find out that part of my healing process – much delayed and unanticipated – has to do with the response from my family now that the book is out and they’ve read it. Because yes, I think it’s been helpful for some (not all!), and to hear from those people has been enormously gratifying. But there are others -- from whom I haven’t heard and never will most likely – who’ve been hurt or angered by the book. That can’t be helped, that’s the nature of the memoir beast.  My own mother, for instance, isn’t nuts for my version of events. Although she continues to be a hero about it…

 
One of the things that first brought your book to my attention were blurbs by two writers I admire, Sven Birkerts and Phillip Lopate. I then saw that you have an MFA in writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. How has the writing community helped you, how is it important to you? What do you think LitMinds can do to help emerging writers?

Well, I wouldn’t have finished this book without that community, that’s all, period, the end… Community – coming together to witness and discuss and respond -- it’s the best reason for school in my book, that and the discipline of reading and writing on a deadline. Look, I love school, I’d go to school all the time if I could, just to be around people who are as churned up by this stuff as I am.  I know – I’ve heard – that there are writers who work in isolation, who are entirely solitary. Not me, though, I rely on my peers, my writing and reading friends, somehow that connection makes the process all the more exciting and worthwhile for me -- and process is everything, isn’t it?

I think LitMinds gives its readers and writers a sense of belonging to a larger community of like-minded people – in that way it reflects and supports and inspires – and that’s a gift.