Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 7
March 15, 2018
How a Flight and a Drink Inspired My Latest Novel
by Chris Bohjalian
The following confession is either going to make my life sound unbelievably glamorous or suggest that at mid-life I’ve become someone’s embarrassing drunk uncle: My new novel, The Flight Attendant, was born in a bar.
That’s actually appropriate given the amount of tequila – and vodka, gin, and vermouth – my fictional flight attendant tosses back in the course of the book. (Just for the record, very little of that booze is consumed when she’s at 35,000 feet. I mention this because the flight attendants I interviewed for the novel were pretty clear: You don’t ever want to fail a random drug test, or what one called the “whiz quiz,” while working.)
I had just flown into New York from Europe and was meeting a friend for dinner at an Armenian restaurant in Manhattan. I was an hour early and so I went to the bar and ordered arak, an anise-flavored alcohol from the Middle East that is clear until you add ice. Then, magically, it becomes the feathery white of a cirrus cloud.
Often, I’m not sure what the precise inspiration for one of my novels really is. I usually begin with but the vaguest of premises, and then depend upon my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. (Exhibit A? My novel, Midwives. I started that book knowing only that it would be narrated by the daughter of a hippie midwife. But I had absolutely no idea that it would be about a woman who would die in labor and become a courtroom drama.) “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way,” E. L. Doctorow observed, and that is certainly how I work.
In the case of The Flight Attendant, however, I had three ingredients at the restaurant bar that combined almost alchemically for me. First of all, there was the reality that I had just landed after a transatlantic flight. I fly a lot, but I have never lost my wonder at the miracle of aviation. Likewise, I have always been a little awed by those women and men who choose to become pilots and flight attendants, especially these days – an era of regional jets, airline consolidation, and passengers willing to get into cage fights to the death over space in the overhead bins. Some people assume that a flight attendant’s life is a glamorous world of escape to faraway lands, but it’s not.
Maybe in 1965 it was more exciting and more romantic, because the layovers were longer and we passengers were less likely to travel in sweatpants and flip flops, but for most flight attendants it was never really a world of bacchanalian splendor. (And for women who once upon a time who were stewardesses – a.k.a., “trolley dollies,” “sky muffins,” and “air mattresses” – it could be a horrific, sexist, #metoo moment waiting to happen.) While researching the novel, the more I learned about flight attendants, the more I grew to respect them.
Second, there was the booze before me. I was at a handsome bar and I was jet-lagged just enough to see the aesthetic beauty in the rituals around which we drink: The colors, the bottles, the labels, the glasses. The impeccable rows of shakers and jiggers and stirrers and spears.
And, third, there was the arak before me, an alcohol I am most likely to drink when I am in the Middle East, in such cities as Istanbul and Beirut.
So here was the premise: a flight attendant who is a functioning alcoholic – but otherwise an absolute mess and blackout drunk – wakes up in Dubai after drinking a lot of arak. She’s in bed beside the passenger from seat 2C, a fellow she had picked up on the plane, and he’s dead. Someone has cut his throat and he has bled out on the white sheets and pillow beside her.
I asked the bartender for whatever scrap paper he had and I started to write. I wrote for the next half an hour, completing what would prove to be the first three pages of the novel.
It was two days later, when I was home in Vermont, that I began my research into the life of a flight attendant and why my fictional character’s hook-up might have been executed in Dubai.
One of my goals as a novelist is never to write the same book twice. I’ve written twenty now and some are certainly better than others. But they’ve ranged from historical fiction about the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, to contemporary literature about domestic violence, animal rights, and human trafficking.
This new one? I wanted to combine my obsessions with aviation and travel with my fascination with espionage and, yes, the Russian soul. There are plenty of urban legends about flight attendants as CIA and KGB spies, and great stories (or myths) about the role Pan Am played in the Cold War. Likewise, there are tales of flight attendants as drug couriers and money launderers and all manner of international criminal.
But I was after something different: a flight attendant who isn’t a criminal and is, in fact, a wounded bird who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was thinking of that wonderful Alfred Hitchcock movie, “North by Northwest,” in which hard-drinking ad man Roger Thornhill (the always impeccable, even when soused, Cary Grant) is drawn into a dangerous whirlpool of Russian and American spies, and he’s unsure precisely who wants to kill him and why.
I was well into the novel when two narrative gifts fell into my lap: the news stories of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 Presidential election and the absolutely terrifying anecdotes a commodities trader told me while we were traveling together in Armenia of what happens when a business deal goes bad in places like Donetsk and Dubai. Suddenly, I had anchors for the novel that were at once timely and universal.
My daughter once said to me that my sweet spot as a novelist is “seriously messed up young women.” She was on to something. In the case of The Flight Attendant? My heroine is just a little bit older – and, yes, in a lot more trouble.
But the good news for anyone who has a fear of flying? All that danger and all that trouble occurs at sea level.
++++++
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 20 books. This essay appeared originally in "Signature Reads."
The following confession is either going to make my life sound unbelievably glamorous or suggest that at mid-life I’ve become someone’s embarrassing drunk uncle: My new novel, The Flight Attendant, was born in a bar.
That’s actually appropriate given the amount of tequila – and vodka, gin, and vermouth – my fictional flight attendant tosses back in the course of the book. (Just for the record, very little of that booze is consumed when she’s at 35,000 feet. I mention this because the flight attendants I interviewed for the novel were pretty clear: You don’t ever want to fail a random drug test, or what one called the “whiz quiz,” while working.)
I had just flown into New York from Europe and was meeting a friend for dinner at an Armenian restaurant in Manhattan. I was an hour early and so I went to the bar and ordered arak, an anise-flavored alcohol from the Middle East that is clear until you add ice. Then, magically, it becomes the feathery white of a cirrus cloud.
Often, I’m not sure what the precise inspiration for one of my novels really is. I usually begin with but the vaguest of premises, and then depend upon my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. (Exhibit A? My novel, Midwives. I started that book knowing only that it would be narrated by the daughter of a hippie midwife. But I had absolutely no idea that it would be about a woman who would die in labor and become a courtroom drama.) “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way,” E. L. Doctorow observed, and that is certainly how I work.
In the case of The Flight Attendant, however, I had three ingredients at the restaurant bar that combined almost alchemically for me. First of all, there was the reality that I had just landed after a transatlantic flight. I fly a lot, but I have never lost my wonder at the miracle of aviation. Likewise, I have always been a little awed by those women and men who choose to become pilots and flight attendants, especially these days – an era of regional jets, airline consolidation, and passengers willing to get into cage fights to the death over space in the overhead bins. Some people assume that a flight attendant’s life is a glamorous world of escape to faraway lands, but it’s not.
Maybe in 1965 it was more exciting and more romantic, because the layovers were longer and we passengers were less likely to travel in sweatpants and flip flops, but for most flight attendants it was never really a world of bacchanalian splendor. (And for women who once upon a time who were stewardesses – a.k.a., “trolley dollies,” “sky muffins,” and “air mattresses” – it could be a horrific, sexist, #metoo moment waiting to happen.) While researching the novel, the more I learned about flight attendants, the more I grew to respect them.
Second, there was the booze before me. I was at a handsome bar and I was jet-lagged just enough to see the aesthetic beauty in the rituals around which we drink: The colors, the bottles, the labels, the glasses. The impeccable rows of shakers and jiggers and stirrers and spears.
And, third, there was the arak before me, an alcohol I am most likely to drink when I am in the Middle East, in such cities as Istanbul and Beirut.
So here was the premise: a flight attendant who is a functioning alcoholic – but otherwise an absolute mess and blackout drunk – wakes up in Dubai after drinking a lot of arak. She’s in bed beside the passenger from seat 2C, a fellow she had picked up on the plane, and he’s dead. Someone has cut his throat and he has bled out on the white sheets and pillow beside her.
I asked the bartender for whatever scrap paper he had and I started to write. I wrote for the next half an hour, completing what would prove to be the first three pages of the novel.
It was two days later, when I was home in Vermont, that I began my research into the life of a flight attendant and why my fictional character’s hook-up might have been executed in Dubai.
One of my goals as a novelist is never to write the same book twice. I’ve written twenty now and some are certainly better than others. But they’ve ranged from historical fiction about the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, to contemporary literature about domestic violence, animal rights, and human trafficking.
This new one? I wanted to combine my obsessions with aviation and travel with my fascination with espionage and, yes, the Russian soul. There are plenty of urban legends about flight attendants as CIA and KGB spies, and great stories (or myths) about the role Pan Am played in the Cold War. Likewise, there are tales of flight attendants as drug couriers and money launderers and all manner of international criminal.
But I was after something different: a flight attendant who isn’t a criminal and is, in fact, a wounded bird who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was thinking of that wonderful Alfred Hitchcock movie, “North by Northwest,” in which hard-drinking ad man Roger Thornhill (the always impeccable, even when soused, Cary Grant) is drawn into a dangerous whirlpool of Russian and American spies, and he’s unsure precisely who wants to kill him and why.
I was well into the novel when two narrative gifts fell into my lap: the news stories of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 Presidential election and the absolutely terrifying anecdotes a commodities trader told me while we were traveling together in Armenia of what happens when a business deal goes bad in places like Donetsk and Dubai. Suddenly, I had anchors for the novel that were at once timely and universal.
My daughter once said to me that my sweet spot as a novelist is “seriously messed up young women.” She was on to something. In the case of The Flight Attendant? My heroine is just a little bit older – and, yes, in a lot more trouble.
But the good news for anyone who has a fear of flying? All that danger and all that trouble occurs at sea level.
++++++
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 20 books. This essay appeared originally in "Signature Reads."
March 13, 2018
The Flight Attendant Has Landed
“Filled with turbulence and sudden plunges in altitude, 'The Flight Attendant' is a very rare thriller whose penultimate chapter made me think to myself, 'I didn’t see that coming.' The novel — Bohjalian’s 20th — is also enhanced by his deftness in sketching out vivid characters and locales and by his obvious research into the realities of airline work."
— Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
13 March 2018
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,
Tray tables up, seatbacks in the upright positon. We are now in our final descent..
The Flight Attendant has landed. What’s the novel about? If you have thirty seconds, watch the television commercial. I love it. You can watch it right here:
http://chrisbohjalian.com/the-flight-...
This is my twentieth book, and my goal has always been never to write the same book twice. Yes, it’s a thriller about a functioning alcoholic – a flight attendant – who wakes up in bed beside a dead body. It’s about the beauty and allure of alcohol, and the devastating consequences of addiction. (I watched Sia’s video for her song, “Chandelier,” a lot while writing this novel.)
And so I love the idea that Kaley Cuoco of The Big Bang Theory and Warner Brothers have optioned it. I can’t think of a better actor to bring my hot mess of a flight attendant to life than Kaley.
But I hope also that the novel explores the precarious state of our souls in a world of drones, chemical weapons, social media manipulation and terrorism.
Let me know what you think. Say hello if I visit your town.
Please know that I’m grateful for our friendship and our shared love of books.
And, of course, thank you, as always, for your faith in my work – and in what words and reading and books can mean to the soul.
All the best,
Chris B.
“The author provides enough twists for a roller coaster fan…The beauty of the book is that, along with the politics of the plot, Cassie’s humanity comes through…the last 100 pages turn tense as you try to follow the unexpected but believable surprises Bohjalian has in store and answers whether Cassie can find salvation.”
— Amanda St. Amand, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
— Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
13 March 2018
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,
Tray tables up, seatbacks in the upright positon. We are now in our final descent..
The Flight Attendant has landed. What’s the novel about? If you have thirty seconds, watch the television commercial. I love it. You can watch it right here:
http://chrisbohjalian.com/the-flight-...
This is my twentieth book, and my goal has always been never to write the same book twice. Yes, it’s a thriller about a functioning alcoholic – a flight attendant – who wakes up in bed beside a dead body. It’s about the beauty and allure of alcohol, and the devastating consequences of addiction. (I watched Sia’s video for her song, “Chandelier,” a lot while writing this novel.)
And so I love the idea that Kaley Cuoco of The Big Bang Theory and Warner Brothers have optioned it. I can’t think of a better actor to bring my hot mess of a flight attendant to life than Kaley.
But I hope also that the novel explores the precarious state of our souls in a world of drones, chemical weapons, social media manipulation and terrorism.
Let me know what you think. Say hello if I visit your town.
Please know that I’m grateful for our friendship and our shared love of books.
And, of course, thank you, as always, for your faith in my work – and in what words and reading and books can mean to the soul.
All the best,
Chris B.
“The author provides enough twists for a roller coaster fan…The beauty of the book is that, along with the politics of the plot, Cassie’s humanity comes through…the last 100 pages turn tense as you try to follow the unexpected but believable surprises Bohjalian has in store and answers whether Cassie can find salvation.”
— Amanda St. Amand, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
January 27, 2018
Right now Goodreads and Doubleday are giving away signed galleys of THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT
Greetings,
In case you missed it: right now Goodreads and Doubleday are giving away signed galleys of THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT.
They're giving away ten copies, each of which has my (sound of throat clearing) impeccable penmanship.
Click here to enter:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.
All the best,
Chris B.
In case you missed it: right now Goodreads and Doubleday are giving away signed galleys of THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT.
They're giving away ten copies, each of which has my (sound of throat clearing) impeccable penmanship.
Click here to enter:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.
All the best,
Chris B.
December 31, 2017
This Year, Take a Deep Breath and Focus on Others
When I was a boy, my parents’ New Year’s Eve parties were not precisely chaotic studies in dissolution and debauchery, but once when I was in elementary school, I walked in on two of their married friends necking in the bathtub in an upstairs bathroom. This wouldn’t have been quite so disturbing for the three of us if the couple in the tub had been married to each other.
The parties were actually pretty standard fare for that era and that geography: the hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-playing suburbs of New York City in the 1970s. Moreover, it didn’t have to be New Year’s Eve for the parties to cross the line between boisterous and bacchanalian. They had doozies in the summer, too.
My parents loved their neighbors and they loved to entertain, but I always suspected there was something a little desperate in their friends’ behavior at those parties, especially the ones on Dec. 31. I had the sense that for many of the grownups, all that alcohol and all those cigarettes and all that forced bonhomie was a camouflage for wistfulness and regret.
The reality is that New Year’s Eve has the potential to be spectacularly depressing. Often we look back on the last year with a combination of disappointment and self-loathing. We make resolutions for the purpose of trying to will the coming year to be better — to see if we can somehow stop making the same mistakes year after year.
Consequently, I rarely make resolutions, and it’s not simply because I know I’m a lost cause. One year I resolved to stop biting my nails, but by Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I was back on the keratin. Likewise, I tend to steer clear of New Year’s Eve parties because there are too many middle-aged ghosts from my childhood at the punch bowls.
If we are lucky, we can find a moment on the 31st to take a deep breath and sit very still. We can focus on all that is right with the world and all that is wrong — on all the ways we have striven for personal decency in our lives and, alas, on all the ways we have failed. We can recall the people we have loved who we have lost, and ponder the friends and family who deserve more attention than we give them.
And maybe those are the only resolutions that matter: the ones that focus on others.
+++
This article ran originally in the New York Times on December 30, 2015. Chris's new novel, "The Flight Attendant," lands on March 13, 2018. You can read all about here right here on Goodreads or at www.ChrisBohjalian.com .
The parties were actually pretty standard fare for that era and that geography: the hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-playing suburbs of New York City in the 1970s. Moreover, it didn’t have to be New Year’s Eve for the parties to cross the line between boisterous and bacchanalian. They had doozies in the summer, too.
My parents loved their neighbors and they loved to entertain, but I always suspected there was something a little desperate in their friends’ behavior at those parties, especially the ones on Dec. 31. I had the sense that for many of the grownups, all that alcohol and all those cigarettes and all that forced bonhomie was a camouflage for wistfulness and regret.
The reality is that New Year’s Eve has the potential to be spectacularly depressing. Often we look back on the last year with a combination of disappointment and self-loathing. We make resolutions for the purpose of trying to will the coming year to be better — to see if we can somehow stop making the same mistakes year after year.
Consequently, I rarely make resolutions, and it’s not simply because I know I’m a lost cause. One year I resolved to stop biting my nails, but by Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I was back on the keratin. Likewise, I tend to steer clear of New Year’s Eve parties because there are too many middle-aged ghosts from my childhood at the punch bowls.
If we are lucky, we can find a moment on the 31st to take a deep breath and sit very still. We can focus on all that is right with the world and all that is wrong — on all the ways we have striven for personal decency in our lives and, alas, on all the ways we have failed. We can recall the people we have loved who we have lost, and ponder the friends and family who deserve more attention than we give them.
And maybe those are the only resolutions that matter: the ones that focus on others.
+++
This article ran originally in the New York Times on December 30, 2015. Chris's new novel, "The Flight Attendant," lands on March 13, 2018. You can read all about here right here on Goodreads or at www.ChrisBohjalian.com .
December 24, 2017
1968: The Year Christmas Eve Meant the Moon
Forty-nine years ago tonight, December 24th, the three astronauts from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon were approaching the lunar sunrise.
Yes, it was Christmas Eve.
In the United States, it was nighttime.
It was 1968.
Cue the space music.
My family and I were living in a Connecticut suburb of New York City, and we were spending that Christmas Eve with family friends who lived nearby, Bob and Mary George. I was a little boy whose biggest concern as the evening dragged on was that we were going to leave so late at night – so deep into the early morning – that we would get home precisely when Santa Claus coasted to a stop on either our roof or our long, straight, invariably iced-over driveway. Imagine a patch of airport runway made of black ice.
Somehow, of course, Santa and his reindeer always landed safely. Sure, my mother and father would annually take off a side mirror as they careened to a stop in the red Falcon or the white Impala, or skid at least once each into the garage door. But Santa Claus? As far as I knew, he had always nailed the landing. Think an Olympic gymnast’s ten-point-oh dismount.
At the same time, we couldn’t possibly risk arriving home while Santa was at our house: I understood well the rules. You leave out the cookies and milk for the big guy, but you don’t try and catch him. You leave out the carrots for the giant sleigh’s engine room, but you don’t stay up and expect Rudolph to eat from your hand. There are. . .consequences. By remaining at Bob and Mary George’s, my family was not merely playing with fire: we were risking the very cosmological foundations of Christmas – because wasn’t Christmas all about. . .Santa Claus?
The Georges meant a great deal to my parents and (yes) to me, which was why we often spent Christmas Eve with them. But their children were a lot older than I was. Their daughter was actually old enough to have been my older brother’s babysitter and was now a grownup herself: She was married to a soldier who was spending that Christmas across the globe in Vietnam.
That’s how different the world was forty-seven years ago: As a nation we were fighting in Southeast Asia and as a species we had yet to walk on the moon. Easily half of you reading this essay this evening were yet to be born.
But, oh, that night long ago my concern wasn’t for the safety of my brother’s babysitter’s husband in a rice patty on the other side of the globe or for the three astronauts in a spacecraft roughly a quarter of a million miles away. I was focused only on the five adults — my parents, their friends, and their friend’s daughter — drinking scotch in the living room by the fireplace.
I was watching the clock and I was fretting about the time. I was worried about whether our car would be able to navigate the Georges’ driveway, which was the exact opposite of our own: Their house was nestled like the base lodge for a ski resort at the bottom of a steep and wooded hill. The driveway was a black diamond trail with a garage at the end. It wasn’t snowing that night, but it had the day before and when we had arrived at the Georges’ on Christmas Eve, our car had slid down that driveway as if we were riding a barely controlled toboggan.
Now, hours later, I was reaching that moment when the little boy mind moves from mild to meltdown. I was desperate to leave.
The reality is that like most children, I had never been especially patient as Christmas neared. I always had advent calendars – and I always had opened all twenty-five doors by the third of December. (And I was always somewhere between disappointed and miffed by what I found behind them: A drawing of an apple? A painting of an elf puppet? Seriously? Behind those doors I hoped to find terrifying robots and plastic models of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. That’s what I wanted from an Advent Calendar.)
My family always had two Christmas trees those years in Connecticut, one that my father, my older brother, and I were allowed to trim, and one that my mother alone would decorate. Why? Hers were themed – white Christmas, Victorian Christmas, green and gold Christmas, and (one year), napkin rings, nothing but napkin rings – and she spent serious amounts of time on those trees. The males’ tree? I recall one year my father, my brother, and I trimmed the whole thing during a football game halftime.
In any case, I know I was not unique: what little boy or girl actually wants to wait for Christmas?
So, Christmas Eve 1968.
The Georges’.
The adults.
The scotch.
I was at my wit’s end when abruptly Mr. George rose from his living room chair and went to the radio. In my memory, the radio is the size of a cement block and covered in gold-colored fabric. The dial was the diameter of the palm of my hand. He was smoking a cigarette — all of the adults but my father were smoking cigarettes — and with great excitement he spun the dial until he found the station he was looking for. He insisted I sit down on the ottoman before the fireplace and listen.
I did and that instant would become for me a moment of revelation that I can liken without hyperbole to Charlie Brown watching Linus stand center stage in the school auditorium and explain the meaning of Christmas by reciting the second chapter of Luke. Mr. George wanted us all to hear a transmission from outer space — from astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders. We were listening to men almost (but not quite) on the moon.
Anders began by sharing how they were flying over one of the future landing sites, the poetically christened Sea of Tranquility, watching the “long shadows of the lunar sunrise” on the ground. Then, after a pause, he said that the crew had a message for the people back on earth:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Anders said. For the next few minutes, the astronauts read from the first chapter of Genesis. There was light. Firmament. Water. Land.
There was Earth.
The transmission was scratchy and occasionally hard to understand, but that only added to what a marvel it was. There were atheists then who questioned the decision, but has the poetry of Genesis ever been more rich than when read by three men in a cramped space capsule, orbiting the moon for the first time in human history? This was the mission when Anders took that now classic photograph, “Earthrise,” a color image of our spinning blue marble from the lunar orbit. The idea of reading from Genesis? Poignant and powerful, the intersection of aspiration and awe. Of hope. This was one of those rare instances when the world together could exhale in wonder at the miracle that is mankind at its best. My father sat perfectly and uncharacteristically still. My mother’s eyes, I saw, were damp.
Even though I was at an age when I still waited desperately for Santa Claus, I understood that 1968 had been a terrible year. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Of Robert Kennedy. The cities in flames.
And, of course, Vietnam – and Bob and Mary George’s son-in-law, a soldier in harm’s way on the other side of the globe.
When the transmission was over, no one moved for a long moment. Then my mother motioned me over: she wanted me – she needed me – to sit in her lap.
Make no mistake, I was probably as greedy a child after that reading from space as I was before it. I would love here to offer alliteration and call it a sermon from space, but that would in some way diminish its magic, and I believe it would misrepresent the three astronauts’ intent. It wasn’t a sermon; it was – by its simple existence – a testimony to what remarkable beings we are, and what a gift it is to breathe. To stretch. To not merely gape at the moon, but ascend to it.
And yet if I remained as acquisitive a little boy on December 26th as I had been on December 23rd, I was reminded of something I had managed to miss in Sunday School, obvious as it was: the foundation of Christmas begins in a crèche – not a sleigh. (Yes, it’s a different testament – but you know what I mean.)
Our car would make its way up that black diamond of a driveway and then coast to a stop without incident in our own. We would be home before Santa.
The historical record shows that Borman concluded the reading by telling his listeners, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”
Indeed. Merry Christmas. May our world somehow find peace in 2018.
Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, “The Flight Attendant,” will be published in March.
Yes, it was Christmas Eve.
In the United States, it was nighttime.
It was 1968.
Cue the space music.
My family and I were living in a Connecticut suburb of New York City, and we were spending that Christmas Eve with family friends who lived nearby, Bob and Mary George. I was a little boy whose biggest concern as the evening dragged on was that we were going to leave so late at night – so deep into the early morning – that we would get home precisely when Santa Claus coasted to a stop on either our roof or our long, straight, invariably iced-over driveway. Imagine a patch of airport runway made of black ice.
Somehow, of course, Santa and his reindeer always landed safely. Sure, my mother and father would annually take off a side mirror as they careened to a stop in the red Falcon or the white Impala, or skid at least once each into the garage door. But Santa Claus? As far as I knew, he had always nailed the landing. Think an Olympic gymnast’s ten-point-oh dismount.
At the same time, we couldn’t possibly risk arriving home while Santa was at our house: I understood well the rules. You leave out the cookies and milk for the big guy, but you don’t try and catch him. You leave out the carrots for the giant sleigh’s engine room, but you don’t stay up and expect Rudolph to eat from your hand. There are. . .consequences. By remaining at Bob and Mary George’s, my family was not merely playing with fire: we were risking the very cosmological foundations of Christmas – because wasn’t Christmas all about. . .Santa Claus?
The Georges meant a great deal to my parents and (yes) to me, which was why we often spent Christmas Eve with them. But their children were a lot older than I was. Their daughter was actually old enough to have been my older brother’s babysitter and was now a grownup herself: She was married to a soldier who was spending that Christmas across the globe in Vietnam.
That’s how different the world was forty-seven years ago: As a nation we were fighting in Southeast Asia and as a species we had yet to walk on the moon. Easily half of you reading this essay this evening were yet to be born.
But, oh, that night long ago my concern wasn’t for the safety of my brother’s babysitter’s husband in a rice patty on the other side of the globe or for the three astronauts in a spacecraft roughly a quarter of a million miles away. I was focused only on the five adults — my parents, their friends, and their friend’s daughter — drinking scotch in the living room by the fireplace.
I was watching the clock and I was fretting about the time. I was worried about whether our car would be able to navigate the Georges’ driveway, which was the exact opposite of our own: Their house was nestled like the base lodge for a ski resort at the bottom of a steep and wooded hill. The driveway was a black diamond trail with a garage at the end. It wasn’t snowing that night, but it had the day before and when we had arrived at the Georges’ on Christmas Eve, our car had slid down that driveway as if we were riding a barely controlled toboggan.
Now, hours later, I was reaching that moment when the little boy mind moves from mild to meltdown. I was desperate to leave.
The reality is that like most children, I had never been especially patient as Christmas neared. I always had advent calendars – and I always had opened all twenty-five doors by the third of December. (And I was always somewhere between disappointed and miffed by what I found behind them: A drawing of an apple? A painting of an elf puppet? Seriously? Behind those doors I hoped to find terrifying robots and plastic models of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. That’s what I wanted from an Advent Calendar.)
My family always had two Christmas trees those years in Connecticut, one that my father, my older brother, and I were allowed to trim, and one that my mother alone would decorate. Why? Hers were themed – white Christmas, Victorian Christmas, green and gold Christmas, and (one year), napkin rings, nothing but napkin rings – and she spent serious amounts of time on those trees. The males’ tree? I recall one year my father, my brother, and I trimmed the whole thing during a football game halftime.
In any case, I know I was not unique: what little boy or girl actually wants to wait for Christmas?
So, Christmas Eve 1968.
The Georges’.
The adults.
The scotch.
I was at my wit’s end when abruptly Mr. George rose from his living room chair and went to the radio. In my memory, the radio is the size of a cement block and covered in gold-colored fabric. The dial was the diameter of the palm of my hand. He was smoking a cigarette — all of the adults but my father were smoking cigarettes — and with great excitement he spun the dial until he found the station he was looking for. He insisted I sit down on the ottoman before the fireplace and listen.
I did and that instant would become for me a moment of revelation that I can liken without hyperbole to Charlie Brown watching Linus stand center stage in the school auditorium and explain the meaning of Christmas by reciting the second chapter of Luke. Mr. George wanted us all to hear a transmission from outer space — from astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders. We were listening to men almost (but not quite) on the moon.
Anders began by sharing how they were flying over one of the future landing sites, the poetically christened Sea of Tranquility, watching the “long shadows of the lunar sunrise” on the ground. Then, after a pause, he said that the crew had a message for the people back on earth:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Anders said. For the next few minutes, the astronauts read from the first chapter of Genesis. There was light. Firmament. Water. Land.
There was Earth.
The transmission was scratchy and occasionally hard to understand, but that only added to what a marvel it was. There were atheists then who questioned the decision, but has the poetry of Genesis ever been more rich than when read by three men in a cramped space capsule, orbiting the moon for the first time in human history? This was the mission when Anders took that now classic photograph, “Earthrise,” a color image of our spinning blue marble from the lunar orbit. The idea of reading from Genesis? Poignant and powerful, the intersection of aspiration and awe. Of hope. This was one of those rare instances when the world together could exhale in wonder at the miracle that is mankind at its best. My father sat perfectly and uncharacteristically still. My mother’s eyes, I saw, were damp.
Even though I was at an age when I still waited desperately for Santa Claus, I understood that 1968 had been a terrible year. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Of Robert Kennedy. The cities in flames.
And, of course, Vietnam – and Bob and Mary George’s son-in-law, a soldier in harm’s way on the other side of the globe.
When the transmission was over, no one moved for a long moment. Then my mother motioned me over: she wanted me – she needed me – to sit in her lap.
Make no mistake, I was probably as greedy a child after that reading from space as I was before it. I would love here to offer alliteration and call it a sermon from space, but that would in some way diminish its magic, and I believe it would misrepresent the three astronauts’ intent. It wasn’t a sermon; it was – by its simple existence – a testimony to what remarkable beings we are, and what a gift it is to breathe. To stretch. To not merely gape at the moon, but ascend to it.
And yet if I remained as acquisitive a little boy on December 26th as I had been on December 23rd, I was reminded of something I had managed to miss in Sunday School, obvious as it was: the foundation of Christmas begins in a crèche – not a sleigh. (Yes, it’s a different testament – but you know what I mean.)
Our car would make its way up that black diamond of a driveway and then coast to a stop without incident in our own. We would be home before Santa.
The historical record shows that Borman concluded the reading by telling his listeners, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”
Indeed. Merry Christmas. May our world somehow find peace in 2018.
Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, “The Flight Attendant,” will be published in March.
December 17, 2017
The Ladies Room Just Inside Tomorrow Land: A Christmas Story
The following is a holiday tale -- a short story.
A slightly different version of this story appeared originally in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in the year 2000.
Happy reading.
++++++++
by Chris Bohjalian
HE LEANED AGAINST THE cement wall, a father who was no longer young with a daughter who was, and listened briefly to the sounds of the toilets flushing. He stared for a long moment at the impeccable streams of Christmas lights and a wreath awash in bulbs the size of chili peppers. He was relieved that at the moment there were no carolers, but he feared the respite would be brief.
He checked his watch, noting the speed with which the second hand was traveling around the small clock’s face – the black line was moving in tiny fits and starts, and he wondered if it had always moved like that and he had simply never noticed, or whether the battery was about to go – and memorized the exact time.
It was 5:17. Five-seventeen in the afternoon.
His daughter had ventured alone into the ladies’ room at 5:17 – 5:17 and seven seconds, if he was going to be precise (and he was) – in the afternoon, the sky just starting to darken as the sun fell somewhere far to the west of Frontierland.
It was December and the days were short, and the fake snow and glass icicles had been draped upon the scenery with precision. He realized that if they stayed for the fireworks at seven p.m. (and it was inevitable, they would), he would have to hold on tight to his daughter’s hand as they tumbled into the roiling stream of people leaving the park at one time for their cars. He’d never witnessed the exodus firsthand, but he’d heard, he’d heard: virutally the entire human contents of Disney World converging on Main Street at once – a horde tens of thousands strong being funneled together toward the turnstiles and the trams and that ridiculous, retro metro monorail.
It was like a fight for the lifeboats, he’d been told, in which a man’s most noble instincts would be subsumed completely by the urge to flee. . .and live.
Yes, he decided, he would insist that his daughter hold his hand. Or allow herself to be carried. Or accept the fact that he was going to tie her to his back like a 38-pound, three and one half foot tall papoose. But he would not lose her.
She had just turned six, and – though she still believed that Snow White was precisely who she said she was, and Cinderella really did live in that phantasmagorically garish castle that served as the capital of the Magic Kingdom, and Santa Claus was as real as her friends in school – these days she was feigning the walk, the distance, and the incredulity that marked an adolescent.
She was an only child, the youngest girl in her first-grade class, as well as the smallest. And though there were other girls and boys who lived with only a mother or a father, she was the only one who lived with a single parent because half the equation had died.
The two of them had been in the park since 10:15 a.m., and this was the first time the girl had expressed any interest in going to the bathroom. After a lengthy discussion before leaving Burlington the day before, they had agreed that she would be allowed to enter the ladies’ rooms alone when she had to pee, and he would wait outside. He had wanted her to use the men’s room so he could keep her – or, at least, her ankles beneath a stall door – in plain sight, but she had fought hard against this indignity.
And, in truth, he wasn’t sure that he wanted her in the men’s room with him anyway. How in the world do you explain a urinal to six-year-old girl? Why in hell would you want to?
But this was their first trip alone, just the two of them, the first time, in fact, that they had ventured together beyond Vermont – beyond their street in Essex, practically – since the girl’s mother had died in October. They were still figuring things out, and bathrooms were a part of the puzzle. Christmas was a part of the puzzle, which was why they had come to Orlando. They’d be home for the holiday, but not in the days leading up to it.
“And what’ll I do when you have to go to the bathroom?” she had asked, once they had agreed that she would be allowed to venture alone into ladies’ rooms. “I don’t want to wait around inside the men’s room!”
He didn’t want that, either. The truth was they had never been one of those peace-love-and-tie-dye Vermont families in which parents and children bathed together or swam naked together or – God forbid – went to the bathroom with anything like visual or aural proximity. She hadn’t seen him naked since she was seven or eight months old and he would take her into the bath with him when he’d come home from work, and bounce her around in the shallow water in the tub. He hadn’t seen her naked since she’d been in preschool – and, he imagined, she would be appalled if she understood that as recently as two years ago she hadn’t cared if he walked into the bathroom to hand her a towel before she started the long climb over the porcelain side of the tub.
“I won’t go to the bathroom until we return to our hotel, I promise,” he’d said, convinced that this was the only workable solution. After all, what was he going to do, hand her off to some stranger while he disappeared inside the men’s room? Leave her standing alone in the open air in the midst of Disney World’s crowds and chaos and rides? Not a prayer. He’d sooner cause permanent kidney damage than lose his little girl because he’d had a second cup of coffee at breakfast.
He glanced at his watch. Five-eighteen.
She’d been alone in the ladies’ room for just under a minute. Perhaps half a dozen women – old and young, some with gray hair, one with a stud in her nose and lines of steel balls along the cartilage of both ears – had come and gone through the arching entrance in the time that he’d stood there.
He wished he’d been able to find a family bathroom like the one they’d discovered at the airport. It was as big as a studio apartment, but housed a single stall, which meant that he could be there with his daughter while giving her the privacy she demanded.
A pair of elves passed by. They grinned and waved. He waved back.
He wondered suddenly if he looked like a pervert. Here he was, a slightly plump 41-year-old in khaki shorts, standing outside one of the ladies’ room in Tomorrowland. A balding guy whose thinning, straw-colored hair was largely hidden by an aging Red Sox cap. He realized he was wearing sunglasses and quickly removed them. He didn’t need them at this time of the day, unless he had something to hide.
Which, of course, he didn’t.
He wished a mother with a little girl – one child, just one, so it wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience – would approach the bathroom so he could ask her if his daughter was okay. Someone like his own wife, perhaps. But there didn’t seem to be a doppelganger present right then.
A thought crossed his mind, and the vague unease he’d been feeling about allowing his daughter to leave his sight abruptly became more pronounced: somewhere in this world there were bathrooms with two entrances. It was inevitable. And, perhaps, he had inadvertently stumbled upon one. He had escorted his little girl, that single person on the planet he cherished above all others, to a bathroom that was a Fast Pass ticket to separation or abduction or (it was possible) something far worse.
He felt his skin growing clammy, because he understood with certainty that one of two things was about to happen: Either his daughter was going to emerge from that second entrance, wherever it was, and become lost forever in the massive amusement park as she searched for her father in the chaos before Christmas. Or a child molester or serial killer was waiting just outside that other entrance for a child exactly like his, because child molesters had known all along what he had just discovered: This rare, dual-entranced bathroom was a playground for perverts. A rec room for psychos.
Either way, unless he went into the ladies’ room that very second and rescued his daughter, she would be gone from him forever. Unless he took a deep breath that moment and ventured inside the concrete-and-stucco inner sanctum, he would never see his little girl again. This reality was obvious.
He shook his head as the loudspeakers began blaring “Winter Wonderland” and reminded himself there was no reason to believe there was a second entrance. He was being ridiculous. It was barely 5:19. His daughter had been inside the bathroom a mere two minutes. Any second now, she would shuffle out in her sandals and shorts, pushing her hair behind her ears exactly the way her teenage babysitters did back home. The two of them would find a place in the park for dinner and then settle in for the fireworks.
His daughter was fine. Yes, indeed.
Unless there was a window.
Maybe that was how she would be taken from him. Through a window. He realized that he had seen lots of women exiting the bathroom, but he wasn’t sure he had seen any go in who hadn’t already come out, meaning his daughter might be alone in there with no one to protect her from – How could he have missed it? – that kidnapper with the rolling bucket and mop. That kidnapper who had been pretending to be a park employee all day, just waiting for the moment when he’d be alone in the bathroom with a small child. In an instant he’d have her gagged and they’d be gone, the two of them disappearing forever into the December twilight while Mickey and Minnie danced in their holiday finest and Chip and Dale wore faux garlands like scarves.
He saw an older woman with bluish hair and a sweater awash with dancing reindeer approaching the bathroom, her mouth working hard on what had to be an apple-fritter-sized piece of chewing gum. She wasn’t a young mom with a child in tow, but she would do, and he was about to ask her to check on his little girl, make sure she was all right – Good God, simply make sure she was even still inside the damn bathroom! – but before he could make his own mouth open, she was through the archway and gone.
But that was good, too. It meant that the criminally insane, incompetent-to-stand-trial sociopath who had spent his day in the bathroom just waiting for a small child on whom to prey could no longer operate with impunity. There was a third person inside there. Did it matter that his daughter’s protector was a gum-chewing senior citizen in a garish sweater with dancing reindeer? Certainly not.
Unless this woman happened to be dangerous. He knew from an article he had read a year ago that 43 women were on death row, and some of them were senior citizens. Child murderers.
And, clearly, the woman with bluish hair was strong enough to steal or murder his child, if that was something she wanted to do.
But why would anyone do that, ever? Why would anyone want to hurt a child, especially his? Yet bad things happened all the time, and they happened to kids every bit as adorable as his. Look at what she was already having to endure.
The epilogue to the Christmas story itself was rife with the slaughter of children: Herod’s massacre of the little boys of Bethlehem.
He could make no mistake about this: a bad thing – a very bad thing – could happen at any moment, and there was no way he could even begin to explain or justify or rationalize the grotesque bits of tragedy that appeared in this world out of nowhere. A physical exam with something unexpected in the blood work. That was all it had taken to begin the slide – and slide was precisely the right word, he decided, with its connotations of a quick and slippery and out-of-control descent – that had done in his wife. Five months, start to finish. Five months.
Every single day, children disappeared in a positively incalculable fraction of that amount of time. A blink. They disappeared on their way home from school, they disappeared as they played on their front lawns, they disappeared from grocery stores while their parents pressed their thumbs into melons in the extra-wide aisles of fruit.
And, he had to assume, they disappeared from Disney World. The only reason you never heard about those kids or saw them on milk cartons or the TV news was because the Disney empire controlled the world. Didn’t they own ABC? Of course they did. And ESPN and the Disney Channel and Lifetime and who knew what else. They probably owned all 500 channels on the satellite dish that sat outside the guest-bedroom window back home.
It was 5:19 and 55 seconds. Almost 5:20. She’d been in there three minutes.
Her bladder couldn’t possibly hold three minutes of pee. Something clearly had happened, and that’s when it hit him: No one was interested in abducting her from the bathroom, because that wasn’t possible. There was no second entrance; there weren’t even any windows. Instead, someone had hurt her and left her bleeding or unconscious in a far corner stall. It had been one of the last women he’d seen leave the bathroom. The tall woman in the sunglasses and the leather jacket. The one with the neck tattoo of a skull.
He knew firsthand there was no need for sunglasses at this time of day, unless your intentions were suspect. (Hadn’t he taken his off?) That woman had done something; she had done something awful.
He resolved firmly that if his daughter wasn’t outside in 60 seconds, he would go in after her. Four minutes was his limit; it was all he could endure.
But what if four minutes was too long and he lost her – lost her forever? Then what? He couldn’t imagine. He just couldn’t imagine. He tried to slow his breathing while wiping his forehead under his cap with his handkerchief. He was sweating, sweating profusely – a human fountain oozing fluids from every pore – even though it was the end of the day and he was in the shade. The cotton square in his hand was now the color of oatmeal from his perspiration, and it was as damp as a used beach towel.
Inside, he heard another great whoosh of water, and a moment later the woman in the reindeer sweater strolled through the arch, applying a coat of burgundy-colored lipstick across her mouth as she walked. She had eyeglasses the size of coffee cup saucers, and he decided to ask her if she had seen a little girl in the bathroom, a charming first-grader in a gray denim baseball cap with what looked like a fish on the front but was in actuality a whale – a souvenir from the summer trip to Cape Cod, their last as a family of three.
He lunged toward the woman, one hand before him, and stumbled, recovering awkwardly.
“Harold!” she cried, moving quickly away from him, her eyes wide behind the goggles that passed for eyeglasses. An older man appeared out of nowhere, wide-shouldered and robust, with a mound of hair on his head the color of ash from a woodstove. He took the woman by the elbow and led her away, where they disappeared quickly into the crowds that milled by the souvenir stands and ice cream carts, and the conga lines that snaked around almost every ride.
He wondered if they were going to report him to security, and he was about to meet the Disney World Secret Police. But he didn’t care about that, all he wanted was to see his daughter – all he wanted was to see that little person with eyes as green as her mother’s, scuffing her sandal-clad feet through the ladies’ room arch.
He turned, oblivious to his resolution to wait a full four minutes, uncaring that he still had a solid 15 seconds to go, and started into the ladies’ room – was he crying out her name as he walked? He hoped not, but he thought he might be, when he realized he could see the line of white sinks opposite the stalls, and she was standing on her toes, whipping the last drops of water from her small fingers.
In his head he murmured thank you, thank you, and it was all he could do not to fall on his knees or, perhaps, spread wide his arms in a giant V. Victory. Hallelujah. Amen. He turned, hoping to retreat before she would know he was there, but it was too late. She’d seen him.
She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. He sensed that she was about to chastise him for checking on her, for worrying, but she saw his tears and she paused. She looked up at him, then straight at him, because he was kneeling before her, and understanding everything she touched her palm to his cheek. He lifted her and stood, and held her against him for a long time, trying to make light of his panic but not really caring that his jokes must have sounded pathetic and lame.
He promised her that he would try not to worry next time, though he was quite sure that he would.
“I keep thinking about Santa in the parade today,” she murmured as they emerged from the ladies room just inside Tomorrowland.
“Uh-huh.”
“How will he get everything done by Christmas next week if he’s in parades here?”
“He always does, Sweetie. Always. It’s part of his magic.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” he told her. “I’m as sure of that as I am of anything in the whole world.”
He felt her nodding before she buried his head in the small pillow of flesh where his shoulder met his neck, her chin a pear against his collarbone, and then her body relaxed completely in his arms.
* * *
Chris’s next novel, “The Flight Attendant,” lands on March 13, 2018 from Doubleday Books. You can learn more about it right here on Goodreads, on Chris's web site, or at any of the online bookstores.
A slightly different version of this story appeared originally in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in the year 2000.
Happy reading.
++++++++
by Chris Bohjalian
HE LEANED AGAINST THE cement wall, a father who was no longer young with a daughter who was, and listened briefly to the sounds of the toilets flushing. He stared for a long moment at the impeccable streams of Christmas lights and a wreath awash in bulbs the size of chili peppers. He was relieved that at the moment there were no carolers, but he feared the respite would be brief.
He checked his watch, noting the speed with which the second hand was traveling around the small clock’s face – the black line was moving in tiny fits and starts, and he wondered if it had always moved like that and he had simply never noticed, or whether the battery was about to go – and memorized the exact time.
It was 5:17. Five-seventeen in the afternoon.
His daughter had ventured alone into the ladies’ room at 5:17 – 5:17 and seven seconds, if he was going to be precise (and he was) – in the afternoon, the sky just starting to darken as the sun fell somewhere far to the west of Frontierland.
It was December and the days were short, and the fake snow and glass icicles had been draped upon the scenery with precision. He realized that if they stayed for the fireworks at seven p.m. (and it was inevitable, they would), he would have to hold on tight to his daughter’s hand as they tumbled into the roiling stream of people leaving the park at one time for their cars. He’d never witnessed the exodus firsthand, but he’d heard, he’d heard: virutally the entire human contents of Disney World converging on Main Street at once – a horde tens of thousands strong being funneled together toward the turnstiles and the trams and that ridiculous, retro metro monorail.
It was like a fight for the lifeboats, he’d been told, in which a man’s most noble instincts would be subsumed completely by the urge to flee. . .and live.
Yes, he decided, he would insist that his daughter hold his hand. Or allow herself to be carried. Or accept the fact that he was going to tie her to his back like a 38-pound, three and one half foot tall papoose. But he would not lose her.
She had just turned six, and – though she still believed that Snow White was precisely who she said she was, and Cinderella really did live in that phantasmagorically garish castle that served as the capital of the Magic Kingdom, and Santa Claus was as real as her friends in school – these days she was feigning the walk, the distance, and the incredulity that marked an adolescent.
She was an only child, the youngest girl in her first-grade class, as well as the smallest. And though there were other girls and boys who lived with only a mother or a father, she was the only one who lived with a single parent because half the equation had died.
The two of them had been in the park since 10:15 a.m., and this was the first time the girl had expressed any interest in going to the bathroom. After a lengthy discussion before leaving Burlington the day before, they had agreed that she would be allowed to enter the ladies’ rooms alone when she had to pee, and he would wait outside. He had wanted her to use the men’s room so he could keep her – or, at least, her ankles beneath a stall door – in plain sight, but she had fought hard against this indignity.
And, in truth, he wasn’t sure that he wanted her in the men’s room with him anyway. How in the world do you explain a urinal to six-year-old girl? Why in hell would you want to?
But this was their first trip alone, just the two of them, the first time, in fact, that they had ventured together beyond Vermont – beyond their street in Essex, practically – since the girl’s mother had died in October. They were still figuring things out, and bathrooms were a part of the puzzle. Christmas was a part of the puzzle, which was why they had come to Orlando. They’d be home for the holiday, but not in the days leading up to it.
“And what’ll I do when you have to go to the bathroom?” she had asked, once they had agreed that she would be allowed to venture alone into ladies’ rooms. “I don’t want to wait around inside the men’s room!”
He didn’t want that, either. The truth was they had never been one of those peace-love-and-tie-dye Vermont families in which parents and children bathed together or swam naked together or – God forbid – went to the bathroom with anything like visual or aural proximity. She hadn’t seen him naked since she was seven or eight months old and he would take her into the bath with him when he’d come home from work, and bounce her around in the shallow water in the tub. He hadn’t seen her naked since she’d been in preschool – and, he imagined, she would be appalled if she understood that as recently as two years ago she hadn’t cared if he walked into the bathroom to hand her a towel before she started the long climb over the porcelain side of the tub.
“I won’t go to the bathroom until we return to our hotel, I promise,” he’d said, convinced that this was the only workable solution. After all, what was he going to do, hand her off to some stranger while he disappeared inside the men’s room? Leave her standing alone in the open air in the midst of Disney World’s crowds and chaos and rides? Not a prayer. He’d sooner cause permanent kidney damage than lose his little girl because he’d had a second cup of coffee at breakfast.
He glanced at his watch. Five-eighteen.
She’d been alone in the ladies’ room for just under a minute. Perhaps half a dozen women – old and young, some with gray hair, one with a stud in her nose and lines of steel balls along the cartilage of both ears – had come and gone through the arching entrance in the time that he’d stood there.
He wished he’d been able to find a family bathroom like the one they’d discovered at the airport. It was as big as a studio apartment, but housed a single stall, which meant that he could be there with his daughter while giving her the privacy she demanded.
A pair of elves passed by. They grinned and waved. He waved back.
He wondered suddenly if he looked like a pervert. Here he was, a slightly plump 41-year-old in khaki shorts, standing outside one of the ladies’ room in Tomorrowland. A balding guy whose thinning, straw-colored hair was largely hidden by an aging Red Sox cap. He realized he was wearing sunglasses and quickly removed them. He didn’t need them at this time of the day, unless he had something to hide.
Which, of course, he didn’t.
He wished a mother with a little girl – one child, just one, so it wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience – would approach the bathroom so he could ask her if his daughter was okay. Someone like his own wife, perhaps. But there didn’t seem to be a doppelganger present right then.
A thought crossed his mind, and the vague unease he’d been feeling about allowing his daughter to leave his sight abruptly became more pronounced: somewhere in this world there were bathrooms with two entrances. It was inevitable. And, perhaps, he had inadvertently stumbled upon one. He had escorted his little girl, that single person on the planet he cherished above all others, to a bathroom that was a Fast Pass ticket to separation or abduction or (it was possible) something far worse.
He felt his skin growing clammy, because he understood with certainty that one of two things was about to happen: Either his daughter was going to emerge from that second entrance, wherever it was, and become lost forever in the massive amusement park as she searched for her father in the chaos before Christmas. Or a child molester or serial killer was waiting just outside that other entrance for a child exactly like his, because child molesters had known all along what he had just discovered: This rare, dual-entranced bathroom was a playground for perverts. A rec room for psychos.
Either way, unless he went into the ladies’ room that very second and rescued his daughter, she would be gone from him forever. Unless he took a deep breath that moment and ventured inside the concrete-and-stucco inner sanctum, he would never see his little girl again. This reality was obvious.
He shook his head as the loudspeakers began blaring “Winter Wonderland” and reminded himself there was no reason to believe there was a second entrance. He was being ridiculous. It was barely 5:19. His daughter had been inside the bathroom a mere two minutes. Any second now, she would shuffle out in her sandals and shorts, pushing her hair behind her ears exactly the way her teenage babysitters did back home. The two of them would find a place in the park for dinner and then settle in for the fireworks.
His daughter was fine. Yes, indeed.
Unless there was a window.
Maybe that was how she would be taken from him. Through a window. He realized that he had seen lots of women exiting the bathroom, but he wasn’t sure he had seen any go in who hadn’t already come out, meaning his daughter might be alone in there with no one to protect her from – How could he have missed it? – that kidnapper with the rolling bucket and mop. That kidnapper who had been pretending to be a park employee all day, just waiting for the moment when he’d be alone in the bathroom with a small child. In an instant he’d have her gagged and they’d be gone, the two of them disappearing forever into the December twilight while Mickey and Minnie danced in their holiday finest and Chip and Dale wore faux garlands like scarves.
He saw an older woman with bluish hair and a sweater awash with dancing reindeer approaching the bathroom, her mouth working hard on what had to be an apple-fritter-sized piece of chewing gum. She wasn’t a young mom with a child in tow, but she would do, and he was about to ask her to check on his little girl, make sure she was all right – Good God, simply make sure she was even still inside the damn bathroom! – but before he could make his own mouth open, she was through the archway and gone.
But that was good, too. It meant that the criminally insane, incompetent-to-stand-trial sociopath who had spent his day in the bathroom just waiting for a small child on whom to prey could no longer operate with impunity. There was a third person inside there. Did it matter that his daughter’s protector was a gum-chewing senior citizen in a garish sweater with dancing reindeer? Certainly not.
Unless this woman happened to be dangerous. He knew from an article he had read a year ago that 43 women were on death row, and some of them were senior citizens. Child murderers.
And, clearly, the woman with bluish hair was strong enough to steal or murder his child, if that was something she wanted to do.
But why would anyone do that, ever? Why would anyone want to hurt a child, especially his? Yet bad things happened all the time, and they happened to kids every bit as adorable as his. Look at what she was already having to endure.
The epilogue to the Christmas story itself was rife with the slaughter of children: Herod’s massacre of the little boys of Bethlehem.
He could make no mistake about this: a bad thing – a very bad thing – could happen at any moment, and there was no way he could even begin to explain or justify or rationalize the grotesque bits of tragedy that appeared in this world out of nowhere. A physical exam with something unexpected in the blood work. That was all it had taken to begin the slide – and slide was precisely the right word, he decided, with its connotations of a quick and slippery and out-of-control descent – that had done in his wife. Five months, start to finish. Five months.
Every single day, children disappeared in a positively incalculable fraction of that amount of time. A blink. They disappeared on their way home from school, they disappeared as they played on their front lawns, they disappeared from grocery stores while their parents pressed their thumbs into melons in the extra-wide aisles of fruit.
And, he had to assume, they disappeared from Disney World. The only reason you never heard about those kids or saw them on milk cartons or the TV news was because the Disney empire controlled the world. Didn’t they own ABC? Of course they did. And ESPN and the Disney Channel and Lifetime and who knew what else. They probably owned all 500 channels on the satellite dish that sat outside the guest-bedroom window back home.
It was 5:19 and 55 seconds. Almost 5:20. She’d been in there three minutes.
Her bladder couldn’t possibly hold three minutes of pee. Something clearly had happened, and that’s when it hit him: No one was interested in abducting her from the bathroom, because that wasn’t possible. There was no second entrance; there weren’t even any windows. Instead, someone had hurt her and left her bleeding or unconscious in a far corner stall. It had been one of the last women he’d seen leave the bathroom. The tall woman in the sunglasses and the leather jacket. The one with the neck tattoo of a skull.
He knew firsthand there was no need for sunglasses at this time of day, unless your intentions were suspect. (Hadn’t he taken his off?) That woman had done something; she had done something awful.
He resolved firmly that if his daughter wasn’t outside in 60 seconds, he would go in after her. Four minutes was his limit; it was all he could endure.
But what if four minutes was too long and he lost her – lost her forever? Then what? He couldn’t imagine. He just couldn’t imagine. He tried to slow his breathing while wiping his forehead under his cap with his handkerchief. He was sweating, sweating profusely – a human fountain oozing fluids from every pore – even though it was the end of the day and he was in the shade. The cotton square in his hand was now the color of oatmeal from his perspiration, and it was as damp as a used beach towel.
Inside, he heard another great whoosh of water, and a moment later the woman in the reindeer sweater strolled through the arch, applying a coat of burgundy-colored lipstick across her mouth as she walked. She had eyeglasses the size of coffee cup saucers, and he decided to ask her if she had seen a little girl in the bathroom, a charming first-grader in a gray denim baseball cap with what looked like a fish on the front but was in actuality a whale – a souvenir from the summer trip to Cape Cod, their last as a family of three.
He lunged toward the woman, one hand before him, and stumbled, recovering awkwardly.
“Harold!” she cried, moving quickly away from him, her eyes wide behind the goggles that passed for eyeglasses. An older man appeared out of nowhere, wide-shouldered and robust, with a mound of hair on his head the color of ash from a woodstove. He took the woman by the elbow and led her away, where they disappeared quickly into the crowds that milled by the souvenir stands and ice cream carts, and the conga lines that snaked around almost every ride.
He wondered if they were going to report him to security, and he was about to meet the Disney World Secret Police. But he didn’t care about that, all he wanted was to see his daughter – all he wanted was to see that little person with eyes as green as her mother’s, scuffing her sandal-clad feet through the ladies’ room arch.
He turned, oblivious to his resolution to wait a full four minutes, uncaring that he still had a solid 15 seconds to go, and started into the ladies’ room – was he crying out her name as he walked? He hoped not, but he thought he might be, when he realized he could see the line of white sinks opposite the stalls, and she was standing on her toes, whipping the last drops of water from her small fingers.
In his head he murmured thank you, thank you, and it was all he could do not to fall on his knees or, perhaps, spread wide his arms in a giant V. Victory. Hallelujah. Amen. He turned, hoping to retreat before she would know he was there, but it was too late. She’d seen him.
She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. He sensed that she was about to chastise him for checking on her, for worrying, but she saw his tears and she paused. She looked up at him, then straight at him, because he was kneeling before her, and understanding everything she touched her palm to his cheek. He lifted her and stood, and held her against him for a long time, trying to make light of his panic but not really caring that his jokes must have sounded pathetic and lame.
He promised her that he would try not to worry next time, though he was quite sure that he would.
“I keep thinking about Santa in the parade today,” she murmured as they emerged from the ladies room just inside Tomorrowland.
“Uh-huh.”
“How will he get everything done by Christmas next week if he’s in parades here?”
“He always does, Sweetie. Always. It’s part of his magic.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” he told her. “I’m as sure of that as I am of anything in the whole world.”
He felt her nodding before she buried his head in the small pillow of flesh where his shoulder met his neck, her chin a pear against his collarbone, and then her body relaxed completely in his arms.
* * *
Chris’s next novel, “The Flight Attendant,” lands on March 13, 2018 from Doubleday Books. You can learn more about it right here on Goodreads, on Chris's web site, or at any of the online bookstores.
October 5, 2017
Here's what I've been reading -- and writing
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,
To paraphrase a Chinese proverb – or, in some translators’ opinions, a Chinese curse – these are indeed interesting times.
Either way, this has been a great year for satirists, comics, and survivalists.
Also? It’s been a pretty good year for readers. When I haven’t been writing or riding my beloved bike, I’ve been reading. The corn is high – way higher than my bike – which means soon the National Book Awards will be revealed. Among the finalists?
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyne Ward, a poignant story of an odyssey across Mississippi that wrestles with ghosts, drug addiction, and the horrific legacy of history.
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, a sweeping saga of New York City during the Great Depression and the Second World War, with the story centered on a remarkable female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard.
And, of course, Kazuo Ishiguro today won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What I find extraordinary about his work is the way that he finds such courage and beauty in wistfulness. He has a deep affection for his characters and their frailties -- the way they live with missed opportunities. He understands the importance of memory -- how we crave it and need it like air -- and how even beautiful memories are tinged with sadness because the moment they conjure is unrecoverable.
Other new books I can highly recommend?
Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo, a beautiful, gripping debut about a marriage being torn apart by infertility and tradition.
The Baker’s Secret by Stephen Kiernan, a magnificent re-imagining of life in a small village in Normandy in the years before D-Day.
Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips, a terrific novel about one mother’s desperate attempts to protect her son from shooters who have come to the zoo.
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, another debut that awed me. It’s the story of a 14-year-old girl, her knife, her Sig Sauer, and her sadistic, survivalist father.
Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta, a timely and moving exploration of suburban America, centered on a middle-aged mother’s sexual re-awakening and her son’s discovery of his sexism.
Testimony by Scott Turow, a taut legal thriller set against the possibly genocidal slaughter of gypsies in the 1990s.
My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul, the only non-fiction book I’ve put on this list. It’s one voracious reader’s memoir of her “book of books,” and the way that different novels, memoirs, and histories have bookmarked key moments in her life.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, a wistful tale of two Middle Eastern refugees working their way west through magic doors.
Another book to consider adding to your nightstand? The paperback of my novel, The Sleepwalker, arrived this week. It’s a beautiful new edition.
I have appearances throughout the autumn, which you can find on the Events page of my website. You can pick up a copy of the paperback wherever you buy books or download the ebook or audio…now.
And if you’re in a book group, now’s the time to sign up for me to join you. I have slots in November and December if you want to dive into (and debate!) the mysteries of sleep and one sleepwalker’s devastating disappearance. Again, just visit my website and fill out the form.
Finally, brace for impact: I have a new novel arriving this spring – wheels down on March 13, 2018 – about some of the most remarkable people in the world: flight attendants. I fly a lot and I can tell you they are among the hardest-working, nicest, and most dedicated professionals around. Their stories are amazing. And so this novel is called, fittingly I hope, The Flight Attendant.
It’s the tale of Cassie Bowden , one of my favorite women in any of my books, a flight attendant who wakes up in bed in a hotel in Dubai beside. . .a dead man. Someone has slit his throat rather expertly. An alcoholic mess who fears she is capable of almost anything in a blackout, Cassie puts the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and leaves. Afraid to call the police – she's a single woman alone in a hotel far from home – she begins to lie. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it's too late to come clean – or face the possible truth about what really happened back in Dubai.
The Flight Attendant unveils a story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol – and the devastating consequences of addiction.
You can read all about The Sleepwalker and The Flight Attendant here on Goodreads or at:
www.chrisbohjalian.com
Yes, these are indeed interesting times. We can’t escape them because this is our world. But books? They do make it better.
See you on the road or the social networks. Follow me on my website or right here on Goodreads to see what I’m reading, watching, or writing!
Sincerely,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Also? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, List
To paraphrase a Chinese proverb – or, in some translators’ opinions, a Chinese curse – these are indeed interesting times.
Either way, this has been a great year for satirists, comics, and survivalists.
Also? It’s been a pretty good year for readers. When I haven’t been writing or riding my beloved bike, I’ve been reading. The corn is high – way higher than my bike – which means soon the National Book Awards will be revealed. Among the finalists?
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyne Ward, a poignant story of an odyssey across Mississippi that wrestles with ghosts, drug addiction, and the horrific legacy of history.
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, a sweeping saga of New York City during the Great Depression and the Second World War, with the story centered on a remarkable female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard.
And, of course, Kazuo Ishiguro today won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What I find extraordinary about his work is the way that he finds such courage and beauty in wistfulness. He has a deep affection for his characters and their frailties -- the way they live with missed opportunities. He understands the importance of memory -- how we crave it and need it like air -- and how even beautiful memories are tinged with sadness because the moment they conjure is unrecoverable.
Other new books I can highly recommend?
Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo, a beautiful, gripping debut about a marriage being torn apart by infertility and tradition.
The Baker’s Secret by Stephen Kiernan, a magnificent re-imagining of life in a small village in Normandy in the years before D-Day.
Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips, a terrific novel about one mother’s desperate attempts to protect her son from shooters who have come to the zoo.
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, another debut that awed me. It’s the story of a 14-year-old girl, her knife, her Sig Sauer, and her sadistic, survivalist father.
Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta, a timely and moving exploration of suburban America, centered on a middle-aged mother’s sexual re-awakening and her son’s discovery of his sexism.
Testimony by Scott Turow, a taut legal thriller set against the possibly genocidal slaughter of gypsies in the 1990s.
My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul, the only non-fiction book I’ve put on this list. It’s one voracious reader’s memoir of her “book of books,” and the way that different novels, memoirs, and histories have bookmarked key moments in her life.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, a wistful tale of two Middle Eastern refugees working their way west through magic doors.
Another book to consider adding to your nightstand? The paperback of my novel, The Sleepwalker, arrived this week. It’s a beautiful new edition.
I have appearances throughout the autumn, which you can find on the Events page of my website. You can pick up a copy of the paperback wherever you buy books or download the ebook or audio…now.
And if you’re in a book group, now’s the time to sign up for me to join you. I have slots in November and December if you want to dive into (and debate!) the mysteries of sleep and one sleepwalker’s devastating disappearance. Again, just visit my website and fill out the form.
Finally, brace for impact: I have a new novel arriving this spring – wheels down on March 13, 2018 – about some of the most remarkable people in the world: flight attendants. I fly a lot and I can tell you they are among the hardest-working, nicest, and most dedicated professionals around. Their stories are amazing. And so this novel is called, fittingly I hope, The Flight Attendant.
It’s the tale of Cassie Bowden , one of my favorite women in any of my books, a flight attendant who wakes up in bed in a hotel in Dubai beside. . .a dead man. Someone has slit his throat rather expertly. An alcoholic mess who fears she is capable of almost anything in a blackout, Cassie puts the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and leaves. Afraid to call the police – she's a single woman alone in a hotel far from home – she begins to lie. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it's too late to come clean – or face the possible truth about what really happened back in Dubai.
The Flight Attendant unveils a story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol – and the devastating consequences of addiction.
You can read all about The Sleepwalker and The Flight Attendant here on Goodreads or at:
www.chrisbohjalian.com
Yes, these are indeed interesting times. We can’t escape them because this is our world. But books? They do make it better.
See you on the road or the social networks. Follow me on my website or right here on Goodreads to see what I’m reading, watching, or writing!
Sincerely,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Also? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, List
May 19, 2017
The novel, "Midwives," 20 years later: What was your writing process like for Midwives? Is it similar to your writing process now?
Greetings!
Throughout this month I've been answering questions from the Reading Group Center to celebrate the new, twentieth anniversary edition of my novel, "Midwives." Here is their third question.
As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.
All best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
++++++++
QUESTION: What was your writing process like for Midwives? Is it similar to your writing process now?
ANSWER: The essentials of my writing process remain unchanged. I am at my desk in my library before six in the morning, and I really don't leave my library until lunchtime. The goal is to write 1000 words. I don't always write that many, but as my friend Jodi Picoult once said, "You can edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."
But some things have changed. Instead of coffee, I now start the day with an 8.4 ounce can of sugarfree Redbull. I still skim the dictionary for interesting words -- noctivigant, luminescent, phantasmagoric -- but now I also watch movie trailers. Those impeccably produced two minute previews of movies instantly catapult me into the appropriate emotion for whatever scene I'm hoping to write that morning.
I print out every fifty or so pages I write at the computer and edit those pages by hand with a fountain pen. I use a fountain pen because they can be messy and using one forces me to write more slowly and thus think more carefully. It compels me to find the right synonym for red: crimson, burgundy, plum.
And I still know that when I have writer's block, it means that I haven't done my homework: I need to roll up my sleeves and do some research to really understand what's going on. Then I can return to my desk and my characters.
Throughout this month I've been answering questions from the Reading Group Center to celebrate the new, twentieth anniversary edition of my novel, "Midwives." Here is their third question.
As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.
All best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
++++++++
QUESTION: What was your writing process like for Midwives? Is it similar to your writing process now?
ANSWER: The essentials of my writing process remain unchanged. I am at my desk in my library before six in the morning, and I really don't leave my library until lunchtime. The goal is to write 1000 words. I don't always write that many, but as my friend Jodi Picoult once said, "You can edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."
But some things have changed. Instead of coffee, I now start the day with an 8.4 ounce can of sugarfree Redbull. I still skim the dictionary for interesting words -- noctivigant, luminescent, phantasmagoric -- but now I also watch movie trailers. Those impeccably produced two minute previews of movies instantly catapult me into the appropriate emotion for whatever scene I'm hoping to write that morning.
I print out every fifty or so pages I write at the computer and edit those pages by hand with a fountain pen. I use a fountain pen because they can be messy and using one forces me to write more slowly and thus think more carefully. It compels me to find the right synonym for red: crimson, burgundy, plum.
And I still know that when I have writer's block, it means that I haven't done my homework: I need to roll up my sleeves and do some research to really understand what's going on. Then I can return to my desk and my characters.
May 18, 2017
Win a Vermont gift basket -- and a signed copy of Midwives
That's right. Free stuff and a free book.
Because my novel "Midwives" turns twenty this year, the Reading Group Center and Vintage Books are giving away a basket of Vermont swag -- and a signed copy of the special 20th anniversary edition.
That's right: it was twenty years ago that the novel was first published, and nineteen when Oprah Winfrey picked it for her Book Club.
To enter the contest, click here:
sweeps.penguinrandomhouse.com/enter/m...
Thank you, as always, for your faith in my work. Color me deeply grateful.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
“Astonishing … will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.”
— Washington Post Book World
Because my novel "Midwives" turns twenty this year, the Reading Group Center and Vintage Books are giving away a basket of Vermont swag -- and a signed copy of the special 20th anniversary edition.
That's right: it was twenty years ago that the novel was first published, and nineteen when Oprah Winfrey picked it for her Book Club.
To enter the contest, click here:
sweeps.penguinrandomhouse.com/enter/m...
Thank you, as always, for your faith in my work. Color me deeply grateful.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
“Astonishing … will keep readers up late at night until the last page is turned.”
— Washington Post Book World
May 11, 2017
The novel, "Midwives," 20 years later: What was early reaction to Midwives like? Has it changed over time?
It was twenty years ago that "Midwives" was published: 1997. Seinfeld was still on the air. The Spice Girls had two of the year's biggest hits. The Dow Jones closed for the first time at. . .7,000.
Throughout this month I will be answering questions from the Reading Group Center to celebrate the new, twentieth anniversary edition of the novel. Here is their second one.
As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.
All best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
++++++++
What was early reaction to Midwives like? Has it changed over time?
Let's start with the midwives, those remarkable individuals who work with moms (and dads) and catch babies.
When the novel was first published, there were a lot of midwives who thought I was the antichrist. The Hollywood flyover of the novel was this: a midwife performs a cesarean section in a homebirth that goes tragically wrong, and the mother dies. The midwife is tried for manslaughter. And, oh by the way, the daughter becomes an OB/GYN.
I remember at one of my events in downtown Boston, there were midwives protesting the book. There were midwifery conferences in which midwifery activists discouraged midwives from buying the book, checking the book out of the library, or even talking about the book. They just wanted it to disappear.
But the wonderful thing about midwives is this: when a midwife is concerned about something, she asks questions. When she is very concerned, she asks a lot of questions. I had so many wonderful exchanges with midwives when the book was originally published, even with those midwives who were very troubled by it.
Eventually, as more and more midwives read the novel, they begin to like it very, very much. They understood that I had never meant to write a book about an incompetent midwife; my intention all along was to write a novel about an immensely competent midwife who is beleaguered by a medical and judicial system beyond her ken.
How supportive of the book did they become in the end? A year and a half after the novel was published, when Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club, the Midwives Alliance of North America actually linked their site to the novel's page at Amazon.
I also was thrilled by the way general readers gravitated quickly to the story, and how many readers were sharing with me their "amazing" birth stories from the very beginning. I felt like a talk show host at many of the events on the hardcover and paperback book tours, because woman after woman would stand up during the Q and A and volunteer some powerful or poignant or outrageously funny moment from when she was in labor.
And Midwives was my first national bestseller. And then, months after it had fallen off the bestseller lists, a year and a half after it was published, Oprah Winfrey would select it for her book club and return it to the bestseller lists -- where it would remain for a long time.
Throughout this month I will be answering questions from the Reading Group Center to celebrate the new, twentieth anniversary edition of the novel. Here is their second one.
As always, thank you so much for your faith in my work.
All best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Litsy, Twitter
++++++++
What was early reaction to Midwives like? Has it changed over time?
Let's start with the midwives, those remarkable individuals who work with moms (and dads) and catch babies.
When the novel was first published, there were a lot of midwives who thought I was the antichrist. The Hollywood flyover of the novel was this: a midwife performs a cesarean section in a homebirth that goes tragically wrong, and the mother dies. The midwife is tried for manslaughter. And, oh by the way, the daughter becomes an OB/GYN.
I remember at one of my events in downtown Boston, there were midwives protesting the book. There were midwifery conferences in which midwifery activists discouraged midwives from buying the book, checking the book out of the library, or even talking about the book. They just wanted it to disappear.
But the wonderful thing about midwives is this: when a midwife is concerned about something, she asks questions. When she is very concerned, she asks a lot of questions. I had so many wonderful exchanges with midwives when the book was originally published, even with those midwives who were very troubled by it.
Eventually, as more and more midwives read the novel, they begin to like it very, very much. They understood that I had never meant to write a book about an incompetent midwife; my intention all along was to write a novel about an immensely competent midwife who is beleaguered by a medical and judicial system beyond her ken.
How supportive of the book did they become in the end? A year and a half after the novel was published, when Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club, the Midwives Alliance of North America actually linked their site to the novel's page at Amazon.
I also was thrilled by the way general readers gravitated quickly to the story, and how many readers were sharing with me their "amazing" birth stories from the very beginning. I felt like a talk show host at many of the events on the hardcover and paperback book tours, because woman after woman would stand up during the Q and A and volunteer some powerful or poignant or outrageously funny moment from when she was in labor.
And Midwives was my first national bestseller. And then, months after it had fallen off the bestseller lists, a year and a half after it was published, Oprah Winfrey would select it for her book club and return it to the bestseller lists -- where it would remain for a long time.
