First Love and the Poet

She hadn’t married the Poet. She’d married Peter instead, his fresh good looks, his blue-eyed blondness seeping underneath her skin, erasing nights spent with the dark, sad Poet in his room with the broken wall. Where is he now? She wonders sometimes, nights when the sky is streaked with pink and she is nothing but a pocket wife.

In THE POCKET WIFE, Dana thinks of her first love when she’s feeling lost or when her mental illness is beginning to kick in. Although the Poet wasn’t a beacon of stability himself, he was exactly that for Dana. Or maybe it was because he wasn’t particularly rooted in a world that was becoming increasingly confusing that he made sense to her when no one else did.  

First love is different from the others. There’s an innocence and, in Dana’s case, trust that makes the impossible nearly possible, the unreachable at our fingertips. With the Poet beside her, Dana was able to stare down her demons. Almost.

Her thoughts of the Poet involve more than missing him, this person who was once in her life. It’s a yearning for a time as well, a place, perhaps – nostalgia for the way she felt when she loved him, for the girl she was.

More from My Back Pages

The Pocket Wife includes elements from different times and places in my life. Like a dream, a novel gathers disconnected thoughts, glimpses of a green couch, an all-night diner, a ruby tie clip, snippets of a conversation from the next table or a couple on a train ride home –fragments that will tap into the reader’s own thoughts and reminiscences and dreams and connect us through words. Our experiences and memories are different, but we meet at the corners and I love it when we do! I also love hearing from my readers – even if we haven’t met, you’re never strangers!

Glam

The front door closes with a noisy squeak. I turn from my computer, still in my pajamas, my hair escaping the clip on top of my head and flying out in dry, desperate strands that scream for a good moisturizer, a trip to the beach, for anything besides this room with overly-conditioned air. The phone collects messages I’ll never hear before they’re out of date. Stacks of books and papers hide the cat until he lunges up to catch a flying bug. He misses, slips and falls across my computer, hitting several letters on his way down. Dddddddddduuuuuuuuuuuuuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooooo, he types, and I stare at the screen, feeling like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

“Nice day?” my husband wonders from the doorway after a quick glance at the sad, expired contents of the fridge, and I snarl, rearrange my hair into the nearly toothless clip. Ahhh. Rewriting!

Unreliable Narrators

Dana is the main character in my book The Pocket Wife. She is bipolar and off her medication; she’s also going through lots of “stuff,” and this toxic mixture is beginning to bring on a manic episode. In Chapter One, Dana is poised for flight. Still, she is quite lucid. In fact, except for a few oddities–reading a novel in two hours, feeling the “offness” of things in the air– she is a fairly normal housewife, bored, missing her son who has recently left for college, and annoyed with her workaholic husband.

Many stories told from the unreliable narrator’s point of view are written in first person. The Pocket Wife is told in third person, so Dana isn’t speaking directly to the reader. Nonetheless, we are often in her head and privy to her thoughts and conversations.

I think it’s important not to open a story or novel with the unreliable narrator already obviously a bit wonky because then the reader is less apt to really invest in him, or, for the sake of simplicity and because Dana is a woman, in her. If she’s too bizarre right off the bat, we’re far less likely to relate to her, and relating to a character, at least for me, is necessary if I’m going to climb inside her life for the next three hundred or so pages. For me, this has very little to do with age or race or gender. E.T. was one of the most popular movies of all time. Its main protagonist, for whom the film was named, is a very short, mud-colored alien. But we can relate to him! The poor little guy is homesick. He yearns for something. Pines for it. It doesn’t matter that in E.T.’s case it happens to be a galaxy we’ve never seen; we relate to that feeling, that yearning. When he has to leave his new best friend, we feel his pain. It’s these raw emotions – the nostalgia, the hope, the loss, and his unflagging humor – that make us gladly sniffle along for the ride.

That initial bonding is incredibly important. If we like a character, we want her to be right. We want to believe her; we’re loyal to her. If we relate to the narrator, we’ll give her quite a bit of leeway. Maybe the lamp with the broken bulb really is coming on and off intermittently. Maybe the dead mother really is sitting in the back seat of the car. Even if it’s clear that the main character is going off the deep end, we’re willing to go along with her because we know this woman. We understand her. We identify with her. When things go badly for her we’re right there next to her. We’re rooting for her. And if she’s dead drunk, or crazy, or she suddenly develops amnesia after knocking herself in the head with a cupboard door, we’ll make allowances for her. We’ll enable her with everything we’ve got because we understand her. She’s like us. She’s one of us.

It can be very interesting to write from the point of view of someone on the fringes of society, and, as such, a less reliable narrator. The lost and misbegotten might have far more fascinating things to say than characters who never miss a step, who never question their lives. Perfect people in fiction as in life can be unnerving and, really, a little boring unless or until they run up against a problem that throws them off track. Bad characters sprinkled with a little goodness and good characters who occasionally fall hard off their pedestals are much more realistic and, again, relatable, if unreliable, narrators.

Truly, no narrators are completely trustworthy in my opinion. Even the most balanced protagonist has had life experiences that color her perceptions and that give her a slight bias, as has the author who creates her. And that’s okay. That’s good. The character is sharing a glimpse of her life, of her honest and unfiltered essence. She allows herself to be vulnerable; she reveals her secrets to the reader. Perhaps there is a direct correlation between how deeply and on what level we, as readers, know the protagonist and how deeply we invest in her or in her story, and, ultimately, the outcome of her journey.

"Maybe We're Crazy Probably" Gnarles Barkley

"They make her heart beat far too fast, all these losses, these holes inside her soul. Lately, every aspect of her life is blowing off like petals in a breeze. She feels as if she's in a constant state of watching them fly away, of holding in her spread arms nothing more than empty stems of missing things." (excerpt from The Pocket Wife)

My novel depicts a woman losing control. Marginalized and invalidated, views of herself and of the world around her begin to blur. Although we're all impacted by the perceptions of others, I think this is especially true for people who don't fit inside the lines.

A cluster of homeless people lives not far from my exit. They sleep under a bridge with their flimsy cardboard shelters and scant belongings – an ancient photograph, a rusty pocket knife, a Bible with ripped pages. They come and go; the faces change from day to day, month to month. For a while there was a woman, pale and thin, with faded hair and vacant eyes. She stood on the corner where the cars stopped at the end of the exit ramp.

On Thanksgiving I brought her two huge plates of food – turkey and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and beans with almonds, hills of pecan pie and cheesecake. There was nowhere to pull over, really. When the light turned red I got out of my car and ran across the street with my foil-covered heaping plates. I wished her a happy Thanksgiving, and the two of us just stood there for a minute with the plates wobbling in the air between us. We hugged. We both cried. Drivers honked and yelled and gestured at my car, at the green light. After a minute, we turned and walked away, back to our own worlds. But something passed between us, some common human thread that told me she was visible and viable and sane. And so, for that small space of time, she was.  

 

Truth Be Told

The Road to Publication always seemed a little mystical to me, and published authors had a cloud of mysticism draped around them too, like perfume or auras. I learned a lot from what they shared at conferences and book signings. Still there were a handful of common experiences, common perceptions, common truths, things I thought were carved in stone that turned out not to be. Two of these spring to mind:  When an agent turns down your manuscript, give up on that agent and move on to the next one. Also:  Write what you know. 

When Jenny Bent passed on my first draft of The Pocket Wife, she told me if I didn’t find representation for it in its (then) present form and if I decided to make significant changes, she would look at it again. I asked if we could speak on the phone, just so I would know exactly what she had in mind, and we did. Ultimately, I decided to make the changes; she decided to represent the book. 

As far as the second statement goes, what happened to me ran counter to that as well. Men in my critique group complained that there was entirely too much strolling around and sighing and not enough action in my stories. “Fine,” I said. “The next thing I write will start out with a dead body,” which was a total deviation from the tea-drinking and strolling – from what I knew. I was feeling my way along, dancing in the dark. I was totally out of my element and I loved it!

I think authors find their own truths. Follow your instincts and write what you love to write. When your book says what you want it to, when you can turn to almost any page and read aloud to your friend or your spouse or your cat without skipping over half the sentence, look for an agent that will be a good match for you. And don’t give up.  

Christmas

Christmas.  A time of joy and angst, of stress and eggnog, of little voices sharp and near, and of others faint and far away.  It's a time when we wish for snow and ice, but hate it as we slip and slide through Christmas shopping, when we swear this year we'll bake bread and make our cards and have an old fashioned celebration and then run out at the last minute to buy what everybody really wants. We embrace the ones we have around us and miss the ones we've lost, put antlers on our cats and stockings on our walls. We set our jaws and stride gamely into the nearest mall only to hyperventilate because we've no idea what to buy - the people we know best are suddenly complete enigmas. It is the best of times and the worst of times, the season of holly and folly.

Copyright © Susan Crawford.      Web Design Jill Evans      Background Image for Site: Stock, Background Image for The Pocket Wife: Christophe Jacrot.