Lessons from Fire and Ice

“Once I discovered film I thought, ‘My god, this has all these visual elements, it has music, it has movement, it has stories, it has ... ’ because before then I had hardly seen any movies in my life. Our family just didn’t go to movies. You read books, you painted, you sailed, you rode a horse, but you didn’t go to movies — unless it had been raining for two weeks.”

We’ve been chatting at her dining table, over tea and the remnants of breakfast. Gaby pants and Ehrlich says to her, lovingly, “If you’re too hot, maybe you should go outside.” Gaby complies. Ehrlich watches, then blurts, “Antonioni died today. Bergman yesterday.” I’m surprised. I ask if her art films were in any way Bergmanesque. “Yeah, also like Antonioni’s. The first one I did was called Autopsy.” She laughs. “The second was called By Pass. They were about these fractured, alienated, devastating relationships between men and women. And about death. They certainly were a reflection of how I was feeling about life and love.”

In 1979, during treatment at a Santa Barbara hospital after the near-fatal lightning strike, Ehrlich had an experience akin to witnessing her own death: “I was in a coma and I could hear the nurses counting down my heart rate and saying, ‘We can’t find a pulse.’ I knew that I was dying. I could feel my mother stroking my hair. And I could hear the cardiologist saying to her, ‘Gretchen, you better call Grant. I don’t think she’s going to make it.’ But I was completely awake in my mind. I was pissed off! I thought, ‘God don’t let me die! I’m fine, I’m completely awake ... there’s nothing wrong with me! Just because I can’t see or talk or move, I can hear.’ Afterward, I would lose consciousness many thousands of times, and had to be resuscitated in the hospital three times ... so I really lived day to day with the prospect of death ... the fearful part is leaving, the goodbyes. I didn’t want to leave my dog, and I didn’t want to make my parents suffer.”

She would survive, but “lost everything” in her divorce from her first husband, Press Stephens. “I’d hired a crappy little country lawyer, and he hired a Harvard lawyer from Jackson. I thought, ‘I don’t care.’” But by losing her ranch, she “lost the font from which everything was coming,” she says. “My world was taken away, totally. It was like another ‘David’ situation. And I was hit in the middle of where I thought I was coming into being as a writer.”

She’d published a novel, Heart Mountain (1988), about a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming, and a short fiction collection, Wyoming Stories (1986). Within six months of starting Match, she had finished the book. “My editor had come out and I said, ‘Of course, I really want to write another novel. But my body is trying to heal.’ So I just wrote Match every day in the mornings. And I was exhausted.”