Tag Archives: reading

I’m completely re-writing a novel I’ve been working on for two years, and this is the beginning of what I’ve come up with. I’ve been super busy the past week, and need some encouragement to get rewriting! So what do you think?

If the end justifies the means, I will never understand why people go to such lengths for family. If you ask me, families are more trouble than they’re worth, and I’m sure Machiavelli would have agreed with me. All expectation, imagination, and pretention. A group of people who continually hurt each other, while still dutifully sending birthday cards and putting up with each other’s company. Like estranged friends or divorced couples forced into the same room, who truly have nothing in common but continue with the niceties for tradition’s sake, or for the sake of the children. But children grow up quickly and are more observant than they are given credit for. It does not take long for them to understand that family is nothing more than a charade, no more real than Santa Claus, and they begin to play along like the best of them. A vicious cycle of broken hearts and poker faces through the generations of nostalgic people who hope that if they act well enough, the facade will become real. Far more trouble than its worth in this short life, yet every fictional character’s problem, from Jane Eyre to Harry Potter, seems to be their lack of a family, and their ultimate quest is either to find one or make one. It makes me wonder if this is more wishful thinking on the part of the authors, or if some families are really that desirable.
I suppose the shells of my own family look happy enough: two parents with steady jobs who have been married to each other for twenty years, their one almost-grown up daughter who gets straight A’s, a pale green house in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Virginia, a family pew at the church we’ve been attending since I was born, a row of family portraits on the wall showing the three of us in sweaters, our faces and bodies bearing the weight of additional years from frame to frame. Although these seemed to be the prerequisites for a perfectly happy domestic environment, I found my family life incredibly hollow, like a brightly colored plastic egg that a child eagerly picks up on an Easter egg hunt and opens, expecting a coin or jelly bean, only to find it completely and disturbingly empty.
Neither of my parents was willing to take on that labor of love, that constant balancing that goes along with being a family, and so we remained a trio of strangers living under the same roof, each attempting to create our own support systems within ourselves, and never truly succeeding. As any student of biology will tell you, a group of organisms living in the same ecosystem can either cooperate or destroy each other. There is no way for living things to have absolutely no relationship with each other, given their proximity. No matter how hard my parents tried to remain distant, we constantly affected each other, and because they were unwilling to support me, I always knew that our only option was destruction.
NOTE: I’m really trying to make this story from the point of view of my main character. She is anxious, intelligent, a hypochondriac, dramatic, and extremely well-read. This causes her to dwell on subjects and also to make obscure allusions that few people understand. She is the narrator, so I’m attempting to make the way the book is written match up with her identity. It doesn’t always make it readable, but I think it makes it honest and true.