Wanda's Book World

SIBA is delighted to have authors guest blog leading up to the SIBA Trade Show.  Kim Wright’s novel, Love in Mid Air is coming from Grand Central in March of 2010 (That would make this book a potential candidate for a future Okra Pick.  Meet her at SIBA’s Moveable Feast of Authors!

I love the quote by the filmmaker Pedro Almodovor (Bad Medicine, Talk to Her) who says “Anything that is not autobiographical is plagiarism.”

He’s kidding….I think.  But like a lot of writers, I steal stories from my life and the lives of my friends.  I slice them and dice them of course, but I still get a little uneasy when I’m asked that inevitable novelist question “Where do you get your ideas?”

When I got divorced twelve years ago, two weird things happened.  First of all, women started spontaneously telling me their bad marriage stories, even women who I thought were perfectly happy.  If you get divorced smack dab in the middle of a small Southern town, you’ve screwed up in a very public way.  All of a sudden you become the person it’s okay to confess to and women were practically flagging me down in the supermarket, leaning over my cart and saying “You know, things aren’t that great at home….”  I became the repository of a hundred women’s secrets, and the notes I kept from that period became the basis of Love in Mid Air. 

The other thing I realized is that there were very few books that dealt with divorce in a realistic manner. Most of the books were about men leaving women, even thought it’s more statistically likely for a woman to initiate divorce, especially after the age of 40.  And there was often some sort of quick fix – the deserted woman ended up falling in love with her attorney or some hunky handyman who showed up to help at her new house.  I resented this whole idea that divorce is about swapping one man for another – ideally as fast as possible – with little exploration of the affect a woman’s divorce has on her friends and the whole social web.  I knew that needed to make it into the story as well.

I worried that my friends might recognize the stories they told me, fractured and drastically altered though they are…but that hasn’t happened.  (Although I still laugh at the advice one of my writer buddies gave me about basing characters on real-life friends.  “Just make the character fat,” she told me “and nobody will claim to be her.”)  Instead I’ve encountered a problem I didn’t predict when I decided to base my narrator Elyse on my own diaries:   People might not like her.  Then your ego gets hit a double whammy…people don’t like your book and people don’t like you.  I still get a sick twist in the gut when I remember the time after a reading when a woman raised her hand and cheerfully asked “Did you ever worry about using the point of view of such an unsympathetic heroine?”

I gripped the podium a little tighter and said “Uh….unsympathetic?”

And she said “Yeah, because she’s shallow and selfish and kind of crazy.”

Ouch.

Elyse has a bucketload of flaws but I’ve never seen her as unsympathetic.  It goes back to the realism I was talking about earlier.  People who are getting divorced – even the most sane and rational of people – start taking risks and exploding emotionally in ways they never would have predicted.  A friend once told me “When you’re driving away from a marriage, there’s no way to avoid going through Crazytown.”   And that’s my take on Elyse – she’s a perfectly normal woman who just happens to be driving through Crazytown.