It’s the birthday of Gail Godwin (b. 1937), three of whose thirteen novels have been finalists for the National Book Award. She is known for examining the roles of women in society and family and has drawn heavily on her own life when writing about relationships and religious experience.

Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents divorced when she was very small, and her mother and grandmother moved the family to Asheville, North Carolina; Godwin didn’t see her father again until high school. Her mother taught creative writing and wrote for newspapers and magazines to support the family. Watching her mother work as a writer influenced Godwin to become a writer too.

Godwin studied at Peace Junior College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1959 with a B.A. in journalism. During her college years, Godwin lived at least briefly with her father, who committed suicide soon after. After a year at the Miami Herald and then working for the U.S. Embassy in London, Godwin entered the famed Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa (genuflect please), where she studied with Kurt Vonnegut. Her Ph.D. dissertation became her first novel, The Perfectionists (1970).

In addition to her many highly-acclaimed novels, including the National Book Award finalists The Odd Woman (1974), Violet Clay (1978), and A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), Godwin wrote libretti for ten musical works with composer Robert Starer, her longtime partner. Starer died in 2001 and Godwin wrote Evenings at Five based on their life together.

Though she’s an important figure to feminist scholars, she once denied being a feminist writer in an interview with Kathleen Welch, adding, “I’m not an Episcopalian writer. I’m not a Democratic writer. I’m not a southern writer. I’m a novelist interested in the inner life.” Godwin said in a 2017 NPR interview, “My last two books I have noticed I am writing shorter, sharper, and crisper, and truth…truth on an essential level is more important to me than ever before.” Her most recent novel, Grief Cottage, came out in 2017 and is a ghost story.

(On a personal note: my favorite Godwin novel, though I haven’t read many, is The Good Husband, 1994, but my favorite quotation is from Father Melancholy’s Daughter, 1991. The kind but melancholy priest, Father Gower, watches the quirky and annoying members of his vestry troop away from his house after a meeting one night and says to his daughter, “There goes the corporate body of Christ, God help him.”)

Godwin continues to live in Woodstock, New York, where she’s lived since 1976.

Have a fine Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.