Real People See Themselves In `Bridges'

I ask Nancy Brant why so many women want to believe that "The Bridges of Madison County" is about real people. Right on the cover is stamped, "A novel."

She lives 80 miles southwest of Winterset, the small Iowa hamlet that is the setting for a book that has sold 9 million copies worldwide, and now is a hit movie.

It was the publisher of the local newspaper, the Madisonian ("Let's see, our circulation is 4,002; no, wait, Bill McDonald died, it's 4,001."), who told me about Nancy Brant.

"We ran her letter, and it sent off megagoosebumps through Madison County," Ted Gorman tells me.

He faxes me the letter. It is an essay in which Brant tells about her life as an Iowa homemaker, whose life is devoted to her husband and their six children. If you've read "Bridges," you recognize the similarities.

But in real life, in 1989, Brant's life was shattered when she and her husband were in a car accident; for 2 1/2 years, Jim Brant was in a coma before he died.

"Now my buffer was taken away," Brant says.

When Robert James Waller's book came out, Brant read it in one sitting, and has read it half-a-dozen more times.

She read about Francesca Johnson, the fictional Iowa farm wife; Nancy Brant could identify with Francesca.

Affected lives

Brant knows that reviewers have cut Waller's book to pieces, saying it's literary trash. But then, she asks, why has it affected so many people?

"He writes about what women think and feel," Brant tells me. "You think, `A woman must have told him all this.' Like how she fixes dinner, about driving to Des Moines to pick out something to wear."

And then there is the section that begins on page 105. Nancy Brant long ago memorized the page number.

For five pages, there is a description of the lovemaking between Francesca and Robert Kincaid, the fictional National Geographic photographer with whom she has a four-day affair.

"He's so attentive, and takes his time," Brant says.

She is, by the way, returning my call from the office in an elementary school, after classes are over. When her husband died, Brant renewed her teacher's certificate, went about supporting her family.

Brant laughs on the phone. The principal has overheard her talk about the section that begins on page 105, and looks a little embarrassed, she says. That's just the way it is.

In her letter to the Madisonian, she explained, "Francesca gave me permission to be who I am . . . to feel OK about myself again . . . room to dance again."

Brant knows that Francesca is a fictional character, even though she writes as if she's real. For many other women the distinction is even more blurred.

Asking for the impossible

They contact The National Geographic. They call the madison County courthouse records department, and the chamber of commerce, and the local newspaper.

". . . if I am asking the impossible, I am sorry to have troubled you," one woman wrote the National Geographic, which provided me with samples of the several hundred letters and calls it has received.

The requests are for back copies containing the work of the fictional Robert Kincaid. It is an impossible request.

The letters are from articulate women who should know that a novel is fiction. But it's as if writing the letters will make Robert Kincaid a real person.

"Maybe their lives are so lacking that they want such a guy to have existed," Nancy Brant says.

I ask Brant what she'd tell men - say a man reading this on a Sunday morning - about what Robert Kincaid might have done on a Sunday morning, reading the paper alongside Francesca. Since writing that letter in 1993, Brant, 46, says another man has entered her life.

"Touch her, look her right in the face, move slowly, talk, listen, tell her what you like best about her, let her know that she's important," Brant says.

And if it all sounds too syrupy for some men, she says, consider the rewards.

"Rewards, oh, yes, there will be rewards," Nancy Brant says.

As another letter to the National Geographic says, "Thank you, thank you, thank you in advance for any help."