Trouble with `The Ladies’ > Cathie Pelletier, an `American writer with ties’, untroubled by reaction in the Allagash to her novels

In her newest book, “The Bubble Reputation,” Cathie Pelletier is sure going to be in trouble with The Ladies again. They were riled with her first book, “The Funeral Makers,” because it whimsically poked fun at the people and practices of Allagash. And The Ladies — the name Pelletier has given to an anonymous group of complaining women in Allagash — were mad. They even wrote letters to the newspaper.

“That Cathie Pelletier doesn’t tell the truth in her fiction,” they chirped.

Just wait until they meet Pelletier’s newest characters such as Uncle Bishop, a 300-pound gay man whose boyfriend wears high heels. Or Lizzie, whose husband and lover are under the same roof. Or mother, who babies a Cabbage Patch Doll. Or Miriam, who only wears green, chain smokes, and has a collection of ex-husbands.

Pelletier, 40, isn’t worried though. Her trouble with The Ladies began long before she became a writer. It began when she skipped sixth grade.

“The ladies in the town decided it was not cool — their kids didn’t skip and I shouldn’t either,” Pelletier explains smiling. “That began my battle with that little group in Allagash. It’s been a battle ever since. So when people say to me, `Oh, this group of women in town are mad at what you write,’ — well, they’ve been pissed off at me since I skipped that grade and have hated everything I’ve done since. My ambition just didn’t fit in with them.”

Then she sighs and smiles. “It’s life, and it goes on, and you can’t please everybody.”

She recounts another story, this one about skipping senior year in high school and how, a year into studies at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, she was kicked out because of disagreements with the president and “difficulty” with adjusting to curfews. At 17, she thought life was over for her, and she left Maine for a hitchhiking tour of the country. When she returned, she moved to Canada and, later, finished her degree at UMFK.

In 1986, “The Funeral Makers,” was published and reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

As with many local colorists, Pelletier, who is currently on a book tour in Maine, refers to her own growing-up experiences to develop the characters and settings in her novels. In “The Bubble Reputation,” the fictional town of Bixley is based on Frenchville, the lead character is based on one of Pelletier’s five siblings, and the humor is based on the Scot-Irish wit of her ancestors and neighbors in the Allagash.

Still, she implores, it’s all fiction.

“There are no real people in my books,” she says, and her eyes sparkle. “The only thing those characters really have in common with those Allagashers is the humor and the wit and the need to see something funny in things.”

But she is not — as some critics have suggested — making fun of Maine people. That understood, she says she can deal with The Ladies. She expects them to be upset with her, and between novels, they generally calm down — at least until the next book or interview.

Pelletier seems proud of the fact that some of The Ladies have even become her fans.

The thing that really bugs her, however, is when she is called a “regional writer” or a writer who writes about “the real Maine.” You also wouldn’t want to make the mistake of calling her a Maine writer, or a Franco-American writer, either. Because she so often refers to the particular brand of humor of her works, and her childhood in the Old McKinnon Homestead, it seems that it might be mildly acceptable to say she writes with Scot-Irish wit. (You can’t help but notice, too, that although she has adopted a slightly southern accent after living in Nashville for 17 years, there’s still a trace of the Irish lilt peculiar to her hometown region.)

Yes, she is from Maine. Yes, she is Franco-American. Yes, she is Scot-Irish.

But Pelletier will only permit the label “an American writer with ties.”

Those ties have brought her back to Maine each year at Christmas and in the summer to teach writing courses at her alma mater.

She and Jim Glaser, whose name is nearly always followed by the addendum “with whom I have lived and fought for 17 years,” are looking for land in Maine. They currently live in “an old hickory forest in timber rattlesnake country” 30 miles west of Nashville.

Although that suits Pelletier’s habit of picking up stray animals and watching wildlife, she misses Maine, her family, Bee-Jay’s (the local tavern) and the St. John River, the banks of which gave her endless fascination as a child.

Pelletier has always written, but wasn’t always sure she was going to take on writing as a career.

“I didn’t think of writing as a profession,” she says. “I though of it as an exorcism.”

During her life’s adventures, she has wanted to be a veterinarian, a race-car driver, and an astronomer.

But, in just six years, she has found success as an American writer — with ties.

Cathie Pelletier will give book signings 10 a.m.-noon May 16 at Mr. Paperback in Caribou; 1-2 p.m. May 17 at Mr. Paperback on Union Street in Bangor; and 7:30 p.m. May 18 at Colby College bookstore in Waterville.