THE OTHER WIDOW - Dorrie

The train roars down the track, jerking as it turns a corner, jerking back again. The lights flicker. Brakes squeal. A woman gazes at a dirty heart carved in the wall, at the initials knifed inside. She leans her head against the window, lets herself drift back inside the small hotel room she’s just left, clinging to the carved heart of the afternoon. The train squeals to a stop, snow slides through the freezing night. The moon hangs low between two buildings as she walks into the penance of her life:

"She looks behind him at the door popped back open by the wind. It stands ajar. She stops. Panic sends a chill along her spine beneath her heavy sweater, beneath the quilt that used to lie across the bed she shares with Samuel. She feels as if she’s sliding, plummeting, that there is no one anywhere to catch her. And then she remembers staring through the snow at Joe’s wrecked Audi, the clumps of people pointing, shouting, as she took small steps back toward the car. There was something different then from the way she’d left it only a moment or two before, but at the time she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. And now she can."  –The Other Widow

THE OTHER WIDOW - Karen

I grew up near the ocean. I loved the sea. I even thought I was a mermaid that got lost somehow and ended up on land. There was peace in the sound of the waves, the circling gulls, the hum of the South Beach bus. They drowned out all the harsher sounds of home and made me want to go, to fly. Everywhere. Anywhere.

I think they are there still, pieces of the past, preserved, the dead alive, the silenced voices singing me away. The parts of me that overlap with Karen Dempsey are in her memories of a cardboard house with hard blue rugs.

  She closes her eyes, and sees his face, and then, for just a fraction of a second, she sees her father’s face, the round white moon of it, shining through a murky window, her father, ripping through the early fabric of her life. Preparing her. Setting her up. For this. For the lie that was her husband. – The Other Widow

It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas . . .

I was wandering around Barnes & Noble in my usual Christmas daze – Who ARE these people I’ve known half my life? What do they like to read? Do they even LIKE to read? What does any of this have to do with Bethlehem and peace and love and pecan pie ANYway? – and I saw the most amazing thing! My blurb on the back of Chris Carter’s new book. I mean, I knew I wrote one. I knew I read the book and e-mailed my response back to the publisher. Still, to see my NAME there, my own personal gut reaction, my fear, spelled out in black and white (orange, actually) was really exciting.

In fact, I was SO excited, I had to tell someone. There were throngs of people there, crowding the aisles, but no dawdlers in that section. There wasn’t anyone I could just casually tell, “Oh. Huh. You might try this one. I read it. Actually, I read it and then I blurbed it. See? Right over here . . .” It wasn’t that kind of crowd. Everyone seemed a little desperate, glazed eyed, rushed.

Finally, I walked up to the guy managing the lines to the cashiers. “I wrote this!” I announced, pointing to my blurb. He looked at me like I’d gone a little mad, but this was clearly not his first rodeo. He’d seen what Christmas shopping can do to people, make them think they wrote books written by Chris Carter, who isn’t even the same gender, actually. “Ohhhhh,” he said, and then he looked again and saw my name, and since I’ve been in that store to visit THE POCKET WIFE on the shelf many times, he caught on. I told him I just had to tell someone and he laughed and turned around to point the next person in line to the next available cashier and I danced out into the parking lot with my jumble of gifts.

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.

What if?

Come join my "what if" discussion on Amazon. Here's the link:  http://www.amazon.com/What-if/forum/Fx2EJL3618I2N13/Tx2XK1SNZQ3SMB5/1/ref=cm_cd_fp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B00L7X6ZQC