I’m feeling a little schizoid these days, at least in a
literary sense.
My first novel, A More Obedient Wife, was set in the late 18th century and based on the
lives of some real, albeit obscure, historical figures. After it came out a few
years ago I started a second novel, set in the early 19th century
and, once again, based on a real person’s life.
But after I’d begun that second novel, I had an idea for a
contemporary social satire about mother-daughter relationships. And THAT novel,
The Mother-Daughter Show, is due to
come out in December from Fuze Publishing. So at the same time that I’m trying
to gear up for the launch of The
Mother-Daughter Show in the near future, I’m trying to launch myself back
in time to continue work on my second historical novel.
It’s a little dizzying. What all three novels have in common
is that the main characters are women. Otherwise, though, they’re definitely
apples and oranges, or maybe even applesauce and kiwi.
For one thing, in my historical novels my goal has been to
reconstruct as much as possible, from letters and other documents, what my
characters were really like. With The
Mother-Daughter Show, I started with real people in a real situation—a
musical revue at my daughter’s school—but to a large extent I tried to depart
from that reality. I didn’t want to write about what really happened, because what
really happened wouldn’t have made a good novel. Life rarely hands you a tight
plot. And while certain things happened that were amusing, to make the book
really funny it was necessary to exaggerate—and invent.
Nor did I want to write a roman a clef, with thinly veiled fictional characters standing in
for real people. For my novel to work, I needed fully developed characters with
rich and complicated lives, and I just didn’t know enough about the people
involved in the real Mother-Daughter Show (aside from myself) to write about
them successfully. Nor, of course, did I want to hurt anyone’s feelings, even
inadvertently. Some novelists may be out to settle scores—I once saw a T-shirt
that said “Be Nice to Me, or I’ll Put You in My Novel”—but that wasn’t my
motivation.
But while I know that my characters are products of my
imagination, I don’t have control over the reactions of readers. And that’s
another difference between this book and my other projects: when you write a
novel that’s set two hundred years ago, you don’t have to worry too much about readers
thinking you’re actually writing about them,
or people they know. So, despite my disclaimer, there may be people who think
they recognize themselves or others in The
Mother-Daughter Show.
And in a sense, they may be right. The fact is, I recognize myself, or parts of myself, in each of
my main characters. That’s true, I think, of any author’s fictional creations,
because as a novelist you need to find a strand in yourself that corresponds to
each of your characters. And my hope is that readers will also find aspects of
my characters—including my 18th- and 19th-century
characters—with which they can identify. Beyond that, while there’s no
one-to-one correspondence between the characters in The Mother-Daughter Show and real individuals, I’ve certainly
lifted bits and pieces of real things I’ve heard and observed at various points
in my life and put them in the novel. All writers do that—we’re like magpies.
Of course, there’s at least one other difference between
this novel and the others: The Mother-Daughter
Show is a satire. I hope all my characters come across as sympathetic, but
they’re also flawed—and those flaws are often a source of humor, or at least I
hope they are. And I hope that if readers think they recognize themselves, or
parts of themselves, in my characters, they’ll be able to laugh—just as I was
laughing at myself as I created them.
One final note: I’ve decided to create a second blog that
will focus on matters having to do with the general themes of The Mother-Daughter Show, and keep this
blog focused on writing fiction based on the lives of historical figures.
Astute readers will notice that I’ve renamed this blog—instead of “Natalie
Wexler’s Blog,” it’s now called “Imagining the Past.” I don’t have a name yet
for the new one. Stay tuned.