Fact and Fiction

Novelist Porter Shreve and his wife, nonfiction writer Bich Nguyen, are Purdue's rising literary power couple.

By Sarah Layden

Married authors Porter Shreve and Bich Minh Nguyen know well the intricacies and improvisation of the sit-down dinner, which, like writing, is something they strive to do daily. On an autumn weeknight following a typically hectic day, the two reconvene in the kitchen of their West Lafayette house and get to work.

Nguyen clatters the cookware and bustles about the brightly lit room. She’s mentally measuring: which pan for the green beans, which for the potatoes? Utensils are pulled from drawers, returned, replaced with other implements. She asks Shreve to pour the wine. He opens a bottle of red and makes a snack of soft cheese and crackers.

Shreve and Nguyen, both creative-writing professors at Purdue University, frequently revise the goal of dinner by 7:30 p.m. On busier nights, they prep and plate the meal as late as 10 p.m. “We really do not mean for that to happen,” Shreve says. “We get lost in work, trying to catch up. There’s none of this grabbing your Stouffer’s pizza, going back to your computer, the crumbs falling into your keyboard.”

“Hey!” Nguyen protests. “I’ve done that.”

“But not often,” Shreve says.

“Not often,” Nguyen concedes. “We do try to have a proper dinner.”

Tonight, the makings of such a meal cover the countertops. The oven warms the room as Nguyen chops, sautes, and caramelizes. She turns the beef in its marinade and prepares a cherry compote. Little wonder that she enjoys cooking—and eating. Her first book, last year’s Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (Viking Press), is a memoir that explores her search for identity via food, following her family’s flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Meanwhile Shreve, who directs Purdue’s creative-writing program, will publish his third novel this fall. Working around teaching schedules, public appearances, writing time, and playing host to visiting writers (they recently hosted a reception for Joyce Carol Oates, brought in Sherman Alexie for the annual Purdue Literary Awards, and scheduled Michael Chabon for next month), the twosome insists on dinner together each night. Nguyen cooks 75 percent of the time. Shreve handles the dishes and the other 25 percent.

The kitchen is their daily decompression zone. Like any couple, they discuss their days. How well a lesson plan worked. The faculty meeting. That other faculty meeting, followed by a literary reading. But eventually, the talk between these two up-and-coming stars in the Purdue English department shifts into the fog-shrouded world of fiction: plot, character development, metaphor. They delve into the storehouse of memory, recovering details like two gold-miners with sieves.

And this is all before the first course.

Nguyen has written for Gourmet magazine and regularly cooks multi-course meals, yet her memoir equates her childhood desire for American junk food with a longing for acceptance. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, winner of the PEN/Jerard Award, comes out in paperback this month; her first novel, Short Girls (Viking Press), follows soon after. Shreve’s latest book, When the White House Was Ours (Houghton Mifflin), is due to reach shelves by election season. He also penned The Obituary Writer (2000, Houghton Mifflin), a New York Times Notable Book, and Drives Like a Dream (2005, Houghton Mifflin). Together the two have co-edited three anthologies, and Shreve has co-edited three more with his mother, novelist Susan Richards Shreve.

Collaboration is part of Nguyen and Shreve’s routine. Across the kitchen table, the two seem always to be telling stories and revising details. Take the story of how they met in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. Shreve was a fiction student; Nguyen studied poetry.

“I have a very clear memory of meeting Bich, and she does not have a clear memory of meeting me,” Shreve says, grinning. He’d seen his future wife at an orientation. Nguyen remembers only seeing Shreve’s name included in a letter about the incoming class.

“I thought, ‘Porter Shreve? What kind of a name is that?’” she laughs. “Which is funny, because I’m the person with the worst name.”

Nguyen, 33, was a baby when her family fled Saigon the night before the city fell. Growing up in Grand Rapids, she was called “bitch” by taunting classmates (Her first name, Bich, is actually pronounced “bit.”) She sometimes wished for an American name, perhaps that of one of the characters from her beloved Little Women, or Little House on the Prairie. But when she and Shreve married in 2002, the New York Times wedding announcement declared: “Ms. Nguyen … is keeping her name.” As Nguyen says, names carry power and identity. In writing nonfiction, she saw the importance in staying true to that identity. “I always tell students you have to know what’s yours,” she says. “All the literature I had ever read was always literature about white people.”

She read hungrily, tackling Jane Austen before she’d reached her teens. Then college courses in Asian-American literature—like the one in which she and Shreve grew acquainted as teaching assistants—provided new perspective. “Partly, it’s understanding what contemporary literature is,” she says. “At some point I had to realize, ‘Wait a minute, you are not a little blond girl living in an East Coast city, or living in London, or living on a lovely estate with pheasants and other assorted fowl.’”

Shreve, 41, describes a vastly different background. Raised largely in Washington, D.C., he grew up in a house filled with his mother’s writer friends, like Anne Tyler, John Gardner, and Honor Moore. As he describes it, the house’s communal feel brought the 1960s experience well into the ’70s. “Bich talks about having no models, but I had models in my living room from the time I was 8,” he says. “We had a free room for visiting writers.”

He mainly read contemporary authors, some of whom stayed down the hall. Later, he gave himself the assignment of reading the core curriculum, modeled after the St. John’s College Great Books program in nearby Maryland. He caught up on Dostoevsky and Aristotle while writing for The Washington Post; that journalistic experience influenced The Obituary Writer. This first novel, described by The New York Times as “noirish,” follows naive young journalist Gordie Hatch as he gets involved with a mysterious widow. Gordie chased the next big story, but Shreve soon realized that journalism was not for him. He decided to switch to creative writing at age 30, and studied under Nicholas Delbanco, Charles Baxter, and Lorrie Moore at Michigan. “I was not a good journalist,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I could do justice to the person I was profiling. I was rolling the dice on that MFA in creative writing. I had no plan if it didn’t work out.”

But it did. Teaching gigs followed at the University of Oregon and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Both Shreve and Nguyen landed spots at Purdue in 2004, a campus best known for its engineers, not its writers. But the school is in a competitive market where tenure-track university positions are scarce, particularly for a couple trying to find jobs at one place.

However, since their arrival, the pair’s own growing notoriety has brought more and more attention to their school. The two have traveled all over the country for book-signings, readings, and conferences, and along the way, they’ve worked to raise the profile of Purdue’s MFA in creative writing. Nguyen is the program’s first nonfiction writer, and Shreve, as program director, promotes Purdue at national events such as the yearly Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. Results are tough to quantify, but the surge in applications seems a fair gauge of success. Purdue’s program generally accepts eight new students a year, four each in fiction and poetry. In 2005, the office fielded 42 applications. Two years later, applications were up to 116. “Our program is a very good one, but Porter has made sure people know it’s a good one,” says Irwin Weiser, head of Purdue’s English department. “He’s done an excellent job being an ambassador and a spokesperson.”

Weiser also praises Nguyen’s teaching experience in Asian-American literature and her membership on a committee to form a minor in Asian-American studies. “They bring a lot of enthusiasm, individually and collectively,” he says.

Professor positions and book contracts certainly rank among the career highs for Shreve and Nguyen. But there have been inevitable lows, particularly in a career where steady rejection is the norm. A bad review—or perhaps worse, a book that’s ignored by the critics—can chip away at confidence. “Nevertheless,” Nguyen says, “rejections can’t compare to the low points a writer can create. You can give yourself severe self-doubt.”

Upstairs in their offices, the two are free to plot and puzzle over a line. Shreve, whose latest novel is set during the Jimmy Carter administration, might ponder his black-and-white photo of the presidential inauguration, or the campaign button declaring “I’m Your Peanut Pal.” Nguyen might nibble on a stray bar of Trader Joe’s chocolate as she types, or remind her husband to turn on the fan that drowns out the sound of his muttering (he talks while he writes). They can forget, temporarily, the process of getting a book to print: agent, editor, publicist. Critic and reader responses. A bad review, even if it’s the single negative among 50 raves. “It can’t derail you,” Shreve said. “You have to block that out and get on to the next project.”

Each has several books in mind. There’s no overlap, and neither is proprietary. “I don’t think we’ve said, ‘Oh, that’s mine,’” Nguyen says.

In writing, their differences actually complement one another. Shreve, his wife says, helps her see the big picture in fiction. And it was he who suggested that Nguyen develop her essays on food and family origin into a memoir. Meanwhile, Nguyen “is really good on the line,” says her husband. “She came from poetry, from the word.” One line she provided for Shreve: the title of his second novel, Drives Like a Dream, which had eluded him for months.

“I think both of us are writing about the deep past,” Shreve adds. “This might become an issue in 20 years.” Their latest writing has become less and less autobiographical. “We’re college professors,” Shreve says. “Frankly, our lives are not that interesting.”

Others might disagree. People want a glimpse inside the world of highly creative people, and Shreve and Nguyen, who are relatively private, have become more well-known in recent years. Life changes when the private, solitary act of writing turns public. “You’re always a version of yourself,” Nguyen says of book-promotion. “You’re constantly living in the land of persona. But this—hanging out in the kitchen—”

“—the dull routine,” Shreve supplies.

“This is where you’re most real, home alone with your spouse,” Nguyen says.

Their comfort shows. After the candle- lit meal and final salad course, dessert consists of homemade apricot palmiers and store-bought creme brulee ice cream. Nguyen’s face makes clear that the new flavor does not fit the mouth-watering description on the carton.

“This is one of the most vile things I’ve ever tasted,” she says.

“I’m surprised you went for that,” Shreve says.

“Too sweet,” she says. “This is all kinds of wrong.”

They propose alternate menus. There’s talk of a strongly worded letter to the ice-cream manufacturer. Who knows? Maybe someday one of them will create a character equally disenchanted by her dessert. Together in their kitchen, they laugh over the possibilities, still revising, still collaborating.