Storytellersunplugged

While I’m waiting for my first novel, THE UNWELCOME CHILD, to be published this December, I have begun writing a second novel that has a somewhat autobiographical plot line. It’s about an ex-professional dancer who teaches Pilates in New York, and returns to the Midwest to take care of her critically-ill mother. Stranded in her childhood home, she makes a discovery that compels her to find out whatever happened to an older sister who, ostracized from the family at nineteen, was never heard from again.

As you can guess, it’s a mystery. There will be plenty of plot twists, interesting characters, (including a turtle with OCD), entertaining dialogue (I wrote plays before I wrote prose), but most importantly my heroine, in attempting to find out whatever happened to her sister, will end up finding herself as well.

I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to stick my finger down my throat while writing that last sentence. After all, I’m writing fiction not fantasy, and what happens in my story has to be believable, it has to ring somewhat emotionally true. However, because the story has autobiographical elements, I’m having a hard time allowing my heroine to solve the mystery behind her sister’s disappearance. Because if I’m never going to be at peace with what happened to my sister, then why should my fictitious alter ego?

Like my heroine, I was once a professional dancer. I now teach Pilates in New York and at one time my mother had bladder cancer. I also had an older sister, Julie Ann, but as to her fate, there’s no mystery there. If anything, it’s actually pretty banal. I was eight years old when Julie Ann fell in love while at college. She didn’t want to come home, but when she did all her belongings were packed up and put out in the garage. The last time I saw her was when she and her ‘hippie’ boyfriend, as my mother referred to him, had picked me up from school to say goodbye. She was crying and I was upset, mainly because I’d been forbidden to speak to her. When I told Julie Ann we weren’t allowed to be sisters anymore, she assured me that no matter what, we’d always be sisters. Unfortunately, over the years instead of softening the bitterness between my sister and mother solidified, and we never did get to see or speak to each other again. Just before her twenty-ninth birthday Julie Ann, while trying to get rust stains out of a toilet bowl, mixed a fatal concoction of Ammonia and Clorox. She died instantly.

Although it is a sad story, the events in themselves are hardly mysterious. For me, the real mystery lies in how does a parent cut a child out of the family as easily as pruning a branch from a tree? Furthermore, how does the rest of the family allow her to do it? To this day, there’s never been a satisfactory explanation and I don’t believe there ever will be one, so I guess that’s why I’ve decided to come up with my own. That’s what’s so great about writing fiction. Not only do we get to edit lives, cut and paste truth and delete whatever’s not to our liking, we also get to bring our loved ones back from the dead. Given that, I probably will give my heroine the answers she needs to find resolution. After all, it’s a novel, not an autobiography. And who knows? Maybe in its writing, in some small measure I too will be able to come to peace with the past.