When my grandmother—my mother’s mother—was dying, she was in
and out of consciousness, not always lucid, and she often confused my mother for
other people from her past: her own mother, a cousin, one of her sisters. She
said things that must have come from memories and had no place in the present.
And although sometimes my mother seemed hurt when she wasn’t properly
recognized, I found my grandmother’s jumbled mental state—a series of moments, people and places, in no determined
order—well, I found it to be of some comfort. It’s what's meant by
“her life flashed before her eyes,” the most indelible moments rising up
to illustrate who you have been.
Long ago, I had a wall hanging that said “Life is not lived
in hours, days, or years, but in moments.” And I thought that to be a very deep
concept, and I still do. Think about when you meet someone at a party. You
don’t sit down and begin a linear introduction: Hello, my name is Mary and I
was born in Los Angeles…. What organically happens with people is that we find
things in common and we tell stories about our lives. For almost two decades I
have been friends with a certain woman who recently told me something about
herself I had never known, something that seemed so fundamental I couldn’t
believe we had never discussed it. Such are life, and people, and the ways we
can know them or never will know them.
I’m telling you all of this in a roundabout way of talking
about Bellflower, my
“novel-in-moments,” which will be published next month, and to perhaps give you
some help if you decide to get a copy of the book (thank you!) and might be
perplexed by its form. These musings about life and its moments (among other
things) pointed me towards the method of the novel. But let me give you an
illustration of what I mean.
Let’s say I want to tell you about a character, a person.
I’m making him up now, as I type this. His name is David Price. I will tell you
five brief things about him, five moments from his life.
1. When David was 41, he had a nervous breakdown.
He was out of work for two months, and along with therapy and medicine, he took
up woodworking. He made beautiful wall-to-ceiling bookshelves for the den in
his house.
2. David’s mother often tells the story of when he
was four years old, and she came into his room to find him arranging his
picture books into straight columns and rows on his carpeted floor. He
explained the ordering of them, which had something to do with animals and
also, children with and without both parents.
(Now,
I’ll take a pause here to ask whether you are already drawing some inferences
from these facts? Perhaps that David was an orderly sort of guy and maybe his
breakdown had something to do with his sense of order, or perhaps from missing
a father? This is the way our mind works, filling in the white space when we
are given clues.)
3. For David’s 70th birthday, his three
children threw him a surprise party. He’d been quite antisocial for many months
after the loss of his wife of 41 years; he hadn’t been in his wood workshop, or
reading, or going to the gym regularly as he had most of his life, and they
hoped to cheer him up.
(Are
you thinking: Oh, good, he had a nice wife and a full life, despite that
breakdown? Or did he? How did the wife handle his mental state? And were books
a big part of David’s life?)
4. When David was 54, his book about Vietnam was
published by a university press. They threw a launch party for him but he was
unable to attend when he developed a bad stomachache. David’s father had died
in the war, and David had majored in history, eventually became a history
teacher, because of this fact most likely.
(And
now we have a timeframe, and can fill in some details about when David was
born, etc. We can start thinking about what it meant to grow up without
a father, the breadth of this loss.)
5. David met his wife, Jeanette, at a faculty party,
when he was 28. She was a science teacher, environmental. He brought her a
glass of wine and told her about his mother’s recent marriage to a pastor. She
asked if David believed and he said he’d have to think about it.
(Ah,
this Jeanette. A scientific sort of person, serious and straight to the point.
How did they counteract each other? And the mother remarried—how did this
affect him?)
Five moments and somehow, a pretty full sketch, at least, of
David Price. And this is the method of Bellflower,
which tells stories from the lives of three main characters and the family and
friends in their orbit. The moments and stories can range from a few paragraphs
to many pages. You may read the chapters, and the sections within them, in any
order. And there is white space, plenty of it, and sometimes the characters
reach across it to touch each other. I hope, if you decide to give the novel a
go, you’ll let me know how you
decided to read it and of course, what you thought.
