I'll Take What She Has
Showing posts with label I'll Take What She Has. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I'll Take What She Has. Show all posts

I Like Weird People

8:32 PM Add Comment

by Samantha Wilde

Here I am. Riding a bike.
When I pick up a book in the bookstore or the library and look it over, deciding if I want to read it, I hope for an interesting character. In fact, I prefer a novel filled with eccentric folk, and by that I mean creative, interesting unusual, complex (not simply a a character who has more sex or happens upon more dead bodies than I do).

One of the masters of creating this kind of character is the incomparable Elinor Lipman. The only problem with her is that she doesn't write fast enough for my book a week habit.

And really what is the difference between a character who is experiencing an interesting or unique challenge and an interesting character? For me, it's the difference between buying a book and leaving it on the shelf-- because a unique, richly complicated character holds my attention even when she's doing the laundry, but an ordinary character requires an elaborate plot to prop her up and give her substance.
My book is SO interesting, cats read it.

Unfortunately, most readers don't want unique characters. One of the readers of my second novel, I'll Take What She Has, wrote about the book and gave me one of the most confusing compliments I've ever gotten. She wrote: "I loved the book and didn't like a single one of the characters." Apparently, my characters were too life-like.  I can still remember my editor looking at an early draft of the novel and erasing a number of scenes in their totality. The trouble with the scenes? They were too close to the truth. I think she wrote something in her notes along the lines of, "no one wants it to feel like their real life."

Most real people are weird in one way or another. Life is mixed-up and crooked in a beautiful, unpredictable way. The stories I've been writing since I was a child come from a desire to understand people in all their infinite, imperfect variety.

This past weekend my family and I went camping. We had many neighbors--and quite close--at this particular campground. I got to engage in some harmless people watching (it was unavoidable). What intrigued me the most? Not the people whose stories I could guess at, but the campers next to us whose story I just could not figure out. It appeared to be a woman camping by herself with her dog. She didn't make any noise. Her dog didn't bark. She spent a lot of time in her camper. I couldn't figure out why she was there. Who would go camping if they didn't like being outside? Her behavior was so curious to me that when I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep, I speculated on her circumstances and then I gave her an imaginary life I invented. That day at the campground with her could open a novel. Would she be running from something? Going towards something? Challenging herself with the trip? Escaping a situation?

Of course, this is my failure as a novelist. I don't get a plot then write a book. I get a character and then hang our with her. When my agent sent out my first novel to a series of editors, she forwarded me a few of the rejections (before I ultimately landed an editor and a two-book deal). I still remember one of the rejection emails she passed along to me. It read: "This is good writing looking for a plot."

Hmmm.

I guess I'll take that criticism. It sure beats, "a plot looking for good writing." Although I know that plot sells commercial novels. And weird people don't. Which is too bad, since most of us are pretty weird.

It begs a question: do we read/love the books that showcase the characters we are, or do we only read the books with characters who reflect what we wish we were (or imagine ourselves to be? In other words, pretty, successful, in love, rich, living an exciting, action-packed life, etc.)?

What do you think?

Samantha Wilde is the author of I'll Take What She Has and This Little Mommy Stayed Home. She is an ordained minister, hosts a radio show called You Are Loved, has taught Kripalu yoga for 14 years, and authored a book of spiritual essays, Strange Gifts. But in her real-life, she is the stay-at-home mother to three young children with a fourth on the way. And yes, that does sound very ordinary. But she assures you that, despite the domesticity of her daily life, she is actually quite interesting. Find her and like her on Facebook.



Don’t Kill The Mother

11:05 AM Add Comment

By Samantha Wilde 
In celebration of my fourth pregnancy (!), a little, fierce, no-holding-back piece I've been working on about mothers, fiction and life....

As my daughter writes, "the famole."
Our age may readlike a time of crumbling walls of prejudice, women emerging from the rubble of all the political—and conceptual—wars of the past century to dust off their hands, wipe the soot off their faces and claim their share of freedom (or Facebook), but one bias sticks to us like jam left on a toddler’s face: we don’t like our stay-at-home mothers, in fiction or life. Quick, name one esteemed novel about a satisfiedstay-at-home mother. Can’t do it? How about giving me the title of one acclaimed book about motherhood that isn’t also about (choose at least one): depression, suicide, kidnapping, mental illness, abduction or drugs? No, take your time. I can wait.

The articles, arguments, books, conversations, and consensus of the past decade seem to conclude that the much over-wrought issue of working versus staying-at-home motherhood has already enjoyed its five minutes in the sunlight of public awareness. That might be true if the country’s literature didn’t fall heavily on the side of the liberated working mother with an intellectual elitism that continues to diminish the contributions of at-home mothers, the vitality of the role and the absolute possibility that feminism and at-home mothering can peacefully, productively coexist.

I have written two novels about motherhood and my second one, I’ll Take What She Has, made some people angry. Of course any person writing about staying-at-home in fiction must endure the disregard of the greater literary community. Nothing could be more boring or less legitimate as a topic—unless the mother kills herself. Scandalously, I wrote a novel about an ambivalent stay-at-home mother who decides to keep staying home and believes she has made the better choice. Also, she lives.


 The progressive, working mothers—feminists, liberals, reinventing modern motherhood with their incredibly hard labor—stand fervently in literature against the folly (ailment?) of a mother's own full-time care of her children. As Judith Newman wrote in her New York Times reviewof Anne Enright’s memoir about motherhood, Making Babies: “To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting. What is interesting is that despite the mind-numbing boredom that constitutes 95 percent of child rearing, we continue to have them.”


It seems that all people of any importance can agree on this matter. Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Ten Year Nap, received immense critical attention and it did nothing so strongly as point out that only one world matters, only one world exists: the world of business, commerce, economy, government. The world of a mother and child is a dream-state, a state of sleep and unconsciousness. It has no consequence, no redemptive value, no worth. That means the five million at-home mothers in this country are sleep-walking. (And is Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, who launching her working-mommy manifesto Lean In not so long ago, the one to save them from this condition?)

I have angered a few people for asserting, in a comic novel, that an intelligent woman would recommit to staying with her children—and that for some of us this is the best choice. If, in her misery, I had led her to the kitchen stove to turn on the gas, I would have a bestseller on my hands. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening springs to mind (it should, I wrote my English honors thesis on it), but yes, of course, let’s think of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jarand her protagonist whose road to healing from mental illness begins with a prescription for a diaphragm.

The prevailing assumption that the tedium of childcare drives us insane only stands to reason if we lie to ourselves and say no other profession regularly assaults us with boredom. Then what of filing? Committee meetings? Government paper work?! Is it impossible that an intelligent person could enjoy spending time with children, could find it interesting, creative, rich? Unfortunately, women do write books about the compelling work of mothering, but you have to cross a political divide to get there. The literature coming out of the Right, from conservative, religious women, encompasses a few of these ideas. But no one is paying attention to that stuff. The important novels, past and present, literary and commercial, loveto kill (or at least torture) the mother. The happy at-home mother is a source of disparagement and embarrassment—she has wasted her good education on a long, useless and dreary nap.

I’ve been wasting my Smith and Yale education for years on my children, not to mention the waste of writing comedies about motherhood (during nap times, no less). The only people who agree with my personal (I-don’t-care-what-anyone-else-does) stance on motherhood, cancel out my vote on every important political issue. This pro-choice, wildly liberal, feminist enjoyed Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s In Praise of Stay-At-Home Moms, and I’m the only one I know who read it.

Here’s what I think true intelligence delivers: the ability to hold together seemingly oppositional elements and see how brilliantly they can co-exist. Black and white is for the dogs. There isn’t only one world that matters. Happiness in at-homeness is not a form of stupidity (and that still doesn’t mean everyone needs to do it). Good books can have living mothers. Good books can even have joyfulmothers. In literature and in life, you don’t need to kill the mother just because she’s the one folding laundry and changing diapers and singing lullabies. Make her happy. Let her live. I dare you.

Samantha Wilde is the at-home mother of three children, the author of This Little Mommy Stayed Home and I'll Take What She Has, an ordained minister and the author of Strange Gifts,a book about love and faith, a Kripalu yoga teacher, creator of the You Are Loved online radio show, the daughter of bestselling novelist Nancy Thayer, and clearly, quite often, a very tired (but happy) person. She loves to be liked on Facebook.
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