.The Serial: That ’70s book

Cyra McFadden’s ‘The Serial,’ which originally ran in the Pacific Sun, is out in e-form—but Kate and Harvey still haven’t found their mojo…

The Serial

Once, ten years ago, Marin County had been something they could regard with a mixture of wistfulness and detachment through the haze of smoke at the Buena Vista on Sunday mornings while they drank aquavit and decided where to go for dim sum.

Now they lived in Mill Valley. Not in the house they had in mind when they moved, though: the old canyon house with the view of Mount Tam, the leaded windows, the decks and the immutable Marin ambiance—a sunny blend of affluence, redwoods, bohemianism and the golden oak furniture bought for a song on McAllisterStreet…

And so begins Cyra McFadden’s New York Times best-seller The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County, the saga of Kate and Harvey Holroyd and their quest for the perfectly mellow, perfectly hip, perfectly go-with-the-flow life in Marin, circa 1976.

The novel, originally published that year as a weekly, serialized column in the Pacific Sun, follows the Holroyds through disastrous attempts at an open relationship, consciousness-raising groups, primal therapy and even through drama over an asparagus steamer. Insert the words “Pilates,” “kombucha,” “Prius” and “BOB jogging stroller” and the novel could be a contemporary satire of the affluent self-improvement community that Marin was, is and likely will be into the future.

It’s this timeless aspect of the book—and Marin—that British e-book publishing company Apostrophe Books is counting on. Late last year, Apostrophe marked the 35th anniversary of The Serial by releasing the quintessential ‘70s book in the quintessential 21st century book format. And, yes, the e-edition still features the immortal illustrations of former Pacific Sun artistic director Tom Cervenak.

Apostrophe is banking on the idea that reading about bourgeois egocentric Americans never goes out of style.

Yet prior to the release of McFadden’s original, such a genre had been relatively untapped.

So in the I’m OK—You’re OK days of the Me Decade, the book provided, for many, an early look into the burgeoning culture of privileged Marinites and their idiosyncratic lifestyles—a glimpse through the peacock feathers at a decadence that many flaunted openly and self-righteously.

And was ripe for biting satire.As it often happens in the book world, McFadden happened to be the right kind of writer, living in the right place at the right time.

“It wasn’t so much my friends or the events in my friends’ lives that I made notes about or that seeped into The Serial, it was more bits of overheard conversation. I eavesdrop a lot,” says McFadden at a downtown San Rafael cafe. “I didn’t use it in the book but I remember I heard someone say earnestly to someone else at the next table: ‘You’ve just gotta be you because if you’re not gonna be you, who is going to be?’ And I was just stunned—that kind of vaporous language was floating around Marin all over the place.

“The eye-rolling Marin-speak of the day certainly influenced the content of The Serial, but it was young San Francisco writer Armistead Maupin who first penned “The Serial” in the Pacific Sun’s short-lived S.F. edition—a fictionalized saga of Marina-neighborhood hipsters, which would soon open the door for McFadden’s Marin skewering. After impressing Sun editors with a few humor pieces, the Mill Valley mom was approached to fill the void left when the Sun pulled out of San Francisco and Maupin moved his short-lived narrative to the San Francisco Chronicle (where it would go on to fame as Tales of the City).

McFadden agreed to write a single installment, covering “A Week in the Life of Marin County,” to test the waters. It was an overnight success and “The Serial” continued throughout the year—until a publishing house came calling and her Sun column was novelized as The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County.

Of course no column can exist without content and McFadden was sitting on a velvet-lined gold mine when it came to available material for a send-up of Marin. The entire human potential movement of 1970s Marin could have been a novel in itself. Add to that Rolfing sessions, EST forums, macrame, waterbeds, New-Age commitment ceremonies inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and the works of Federico García Lorca—the comic possibilities were practically endless. (“I remember Heliotrope University, which had courses like participatory salad making,” recalls McFadden.)

••••THOUGH THE BOOK was well received around the country and abroad (the book has been translated into Dutch and rumored to be bootlegged into Japanese), The Serial was no laughing matter for many in Marin. McFadden was the target of resentment and harassment from locals who felt that the column poked too much fun at their attempts to shape a new existence in the post-Vietnam era.

At one point, McFadden unlisted her telephone number because of threatening calls. Her home was pelted with eggs. She was even “banned” from local businesses and received scores of letters admonishing her for her scathing “value judgments.” Today McFadden, 75, has a sense of self-reflective humor about her Serial days—though she admits that the animosity was difficult to cope with at the time.

“Rightly, they felt that I was poking fun at something they took very seriously and that was very important to them,” says McFadden, who returned to Marin 15 years ago after leaving Mill Valley for stints in San Francisco, New York and London. “I should have anticipated that reaction. I was so new and green, really, as a writer. I had some publication credits, but I’d never stuck my thumb into the waters locally quite like that and—oh man! It was just astonishing!”

The column, says McFadden, caused Marin to step back and deeply reflect upon, well, itself.

“The IJ ran a big series about ‘what Marin means to me,’” says McFadden. “And people wrote about picnics on the beach with their little rosy-cheeked children.”

There was a lot of “love it or leave it,” she says.

“My biggest disappointment was that, at one point, Mill Valley was building a new sewage treatment plant and somebody wrote a letter to the Mill Valley Record suggesting that it be named for me,” McFadden says. “I would have loved that!”

A movie version of The Serial (starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld!) and a 1978 NBC documentary about Marin did little to keep McFadden’s critics at bay. The NBC film—titled I Want It All Now—featured an interview with McFadden and portrayed Marin residents as wealthy, self-obsessed, overly indulgent narcissists. In perhaps the documentary’s most infamous segment, a woman lies on a table while a pair of nude Adonises massages her with peacock feathers (“How could I be so lucky?” she wonders aloud.)

“I want to go on record, yet again, that there were no peacock feathers in The Serial. People chased me around with peacock feathers for years,” she says. “Every place I went, people waved peacock feathers.”

It was that type of furor, she says, that helped the column get the recognition she needed to hit the radar at Alfred A. Knopf and land a book deal. “It worked to my advantage eventually,” she says.

McFadden went on to have a second book published—Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir, which was a Pulitzer finalist in 1986—and later wrote a column for the San Francisco Examiner.

Peacock feathers and all, McFadden says there is little she would do differently as a writer, though looking back, penning under a pseudonym might have been a good idea. Still, the book has continued to find an audience, with several editions published both in the United States and England, where it’s retained its notoriety through the years, which is why Apostrophe Books approached her about a digital edition.

“One of Apostrophe’s missions is to republish brilliant books that deserve new life, and The Serial was always top of my wish list,” says Martyn Forrester, who launched Apostrophe Books in February of last year. “I was in my 20s when the book first came out to rave reviews, and I can remember buying a copy straight after I saw Newsweek describe it as ‘one of the most delicious acts of cultural sabotage since Mark Twain.’ That was a bold statement, because I loved Mark Twain, but it turned out to be true. The Serial is that good—it’s iconic, right up there with Catch-22, Dr Strangelove and Huckleberry Finn.

“In preparing the e-edition, Apostrophe tracked down Tom Cervenak (via a call for his current whereabouts in the Pacific Sun‘s letters page), who illustrated a new piece of artwork for the edition, and readers have been busy downloading The Serial—complete with McFadden’s new intro—since it first became available in late December.

“It’s tough to write consistently good satire, but Cyra McFadden is a master. She satirizes an entire self-obsessed age, page after page—polarity balancing, Zen jogging, pet psychiatry, she skewers the lot,” says Forrester.

“The Serial is also as relevant today as it ever was because human basics haven’t changed that much. All of us know a Kate and Harvey Holroyd.”

“I knew why they liked it so much,” says McFadden, of her British fan base. “Because it confirmed their conviction that [Americans] were all materialistic airheads!”

Today, McFadden enjoys a relatively low-profile life in Sausalito, where she works as a book editor and has been “noodling” with a new novel. Marin is her home, a place she refers to as beautiful and full of people who have “mellowed out.” McFadden looks back at the past 35 years with gratitude, and only one major regret.

“Anyone can get the National Book Award…but a sewage treatment plant? I would have been unique in the universe!”

The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin CountyThe book is available for download for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and other e-readers at apostrophebooks.com ($5.99).