This story begins in Iowa, as so many stories do, deep in the fall of 1991.  I am still a graduate student, just a budding intellectual, late 20's, with no idea yet of how my time has flown and less of what the future holds.  The air is cold and darkly tinted with the despair of the end of the growing season.  In that part of the United States, the growing season's departure siphons away the hope that filled one's heart just months before and leaves a void of disappointment, loss, and an abiding fear of winter's stamina.  I am walking down the sidewalk in Iowa City, Iowa of all places, going towards the one bookshop in the center of town, there to hear an author read his work.  

It is warm inside the shop, and the light seems bright.  Some chairs are squeezed in amongst the shelves, in makeshift rows.  In the center of the room, a card table sits with two chairs: one for the featured reader and one for the evening's host.  The latter is a smallish woman, with a cheery face and short brown hair.  The shop door shuts off the last icy wave from outdoors as a couple of young undergraduates pile in and fill the final two seats.  We are all in our seats now, all holding our heavy winter coats in our laps or have them draped over the backs of the stiff plastic chairs, we are ready.  

The reader stands, a tall man—to me most every one in the upper Midwest is tall—with jet white hair.  Maybe he's a towhead I think, or maybe he's more aged than he looks.  His face is giant and he is long-limbed and wearing a down-vest which does not quite fit his image. He explains that he has recently published a book of personal essays.  He begins to read one, this one is about photographing an otter-release at a river in a remote part of the state.  The river otter, it seems, is endangered in that part of the country and so the state wildlife commission has taken to restocking this treasured fauna.  He seems sincere in his love of the animals, and he seems to approve of human intervention in the rescue of a species.  The bulk of his essay though is a memoir of his trip to see the release and the problems he encountered taking his photographs.  An hour later I am walking home to my apartment about six blocks away.  

The reader, I think in pensive critique, was just another symptom of the poor state of literature in the 1990's in the USA.  All he could contemplate was his own navel, his own need to photograph and record his own sensations, his own need to publish and be "heard".  I turn the key in my front door; he was introduced as a professor at the University of Northern Iowa I remember.  I chuckle to myself as I slip into bed, he was a professor all right—long-winded and narrow-minded. The lamp at my bedside goes out and I fall asleep with only a fading memory of the reader, Robert J. Waller.

Six months later, the summer of 1992 loomed large in my life.  I was nearly freshly minted from graduate school at the University of Iowa and moving onto my first-ever salaried job at the University of Northern Iowa.  The two schools are only ninety miles away from one another by freeway, but those ninety miles are more than enough to keep them completely separated.  

By the time I finish moving my meager belongings from the lonely apartment of a graduate student, to the lonely apartment of an untenured, young professor, it is July.  I anticipate one last visit to my parents at their home in the southern USA before the new semester begins.  It will be nice to stop lifting and carrying for two weeks and let someone else cook and shop.  And it will be nice to be on a plane again, this time as a laptop-toting member of the white collar workforce rather than a book bag-toting member of the student body.  It is a late July afternoon, a matter of perhaps two weeks until the semester and my career are to launch in earnest.  I wander into the campus bookstore.  I am looking for gifts for my parents and  two sisters, something "local", that will serve as a totem of my new career in their minds.  I grab a sweatshirt with the school's name on it—it is traditional, but tried and true.  I take two coffee mugs as well.  And then I hit the wall.

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One more gift... what else is there?  T-shirts and window stickers do not seem appropriate anymore... what else?  I scour the shelves again and again, but there is nothing in the souvenir end of the store that I want.  My third time around I decide to wander into the book shelves, it is a "book" store after all.  I cross to a wall labeled "local authors".  There is one small nook among the shelves of local English professors' poetry anthologies, this one is devoted to a slender slip of a novel: The Bridges of Madison County.  I pick up a copy.  It is feather-light!  I am surprised to find too that it is "autographed"... in pencil of all things!  

I chuckle a familiar chuckle.   Well, one or the other of my family might like to read this book by the much renowned local Cedar Falls, Iowa author... Robert James Waller.  I never heard of him I think, but that is the point of "local" souvenirs, no?  I buy the book and the shirt and the two coffee mugs.  I am packed and on my way to the airport the next day when I realize that I do know who Robert James Waller is.  He is the self-congratulatory reader that I had heard in Iowa City not six months before.  I board the plane.  It is a tiny buzzing whiner of a toy, which bumps and bruises us all down to St. Louis where we will disperse to all parts of Lindbergh's airport and thereafter to real airliners and into the facelessness of modern life.  I have a layover.  I sit for a time.  Then I put my carry-on in a locker and walk a bit and then I wander into the ubiquitous newsstand.  The first thing I see when I enter is a chest-high display of copies of the latest publishing sensation: The Bridges of Madison County.  Once aboard my second flight of the day from St. Louis to my final destination, I am shocked when I notice three people sitting around me—in coach—reading The Bridges of Madison County.  I chuckle to myself.  What is going on here?

Six months later I get a better picture of what exactly is going on.  I have, by then, as so many millions of others, read the book.  It went by quickly.  It is everything that I was taught in graduate school that a work of narrative fiction ought not be: the book is, fairly, self-interested, self-centered, self-indulgent, and without any depth of character or plotting at all.  Yet it held its readers, it delivered its message, it broke a lot of hearts.  What exactly is going on here, I keep wondering.

The next time I see Robert J. Waller he is far from the quiet, secluded environs of a small, college-town bookshop.  He is on super-syndicated television with the queen of feel-good herself, Oprah Winfrey.  

He is no longer a professor at the University of Northern Iowa—he might have been my colleague, I am left to imagine—but is now a media-empire in the making. He has signed away the film rights for a great deal of money, he has quit his tenured position (though he remains a resident of Cedar Falls for the time being) and he has brought his guitar out from his closet and is cutting a CD.  As the hour of the Oprah Winfrey program—live from Madison County!—goes by, people, mostly middle-aged, stand in the audience and call on the telephone to let the author know how much they appreciate his work.  They want the X-ers to know that the baby-boomers had sex too.  That the world has been a place of romance long before the suicide of Kurt Kobain or the invention of web-chat.  I do not know the author at all to speak of, but I can tell that he is happy up there, that he feels, as he and Oprah both agree, that he has "completed the mission for which he was sent to Earth."  It occurs to me that that must a great, albeit weird, feeling.  I chuckle to myself;  it is nearly October and soon the weather in Iowa will turn cold again, but there is still time.

It is the summer of 1996 and I have decided to leave my career in academics behind.  I have decided that it is time to give myself a chance to focus on the writing and to perhaps fulfill my Earthly mission as well.  I pick up a newspaper and spot a familiar name: "The Bridges of Madison County."  The movie has been made and is playing to lukewarm reviews and flagging ticket sales.  The author, I read at some other time, is no longer in Iowa.  He moved with his soon-to-be-estranged wife to somewhere in south Texas.  Perhaps he was right, perhaps his mission is accomplished.

I turn back to the computer, the insertion-point (cursor we used to call it in my day) is blinking back at me, chuckling maybe at my struggle to find my way through the latest episode of romantic love I have written myself into.  In the story I am working on there is a man and a woman, the man lost his one true love in another life, the woman has never had a true love, but feels something for the man.  The couple takes a great many pages to meet, even more to kiss still more to fall in love.  I type a line or two... they will fall in love though, sometime before the cold hits, they will fall in love.  I feel as though I were sent to Earth for the express purpose of bringing them together and making them fall in love.  They will fall, they will love one another... I guarantee it.

About the author:
N. Christopher attended the University of Iowa from 1987-1993.  He was a member of the University of Northern Iowa faculty from 1992-1994.  He is at work on his fourth sci-fi novel and his first romance novel.