On Heroes and Villains

My husband has been frustrated lately with the rage of highway billboards with a photo of a “hero” of one kind or another on them, and then a tag-line about how to follow this person's wonderful character. The problem for him has been that he knows altogether too much about most of the heroes. As a student of physics, he admires greatly the mind-blowing theories of luminaries like Einstein. But this does not lead him to be blind to Einstein's massive character flaws. And just about every great physicist he has studied.

The more he and I have looked into most heroes, the more we discover the hidden darkness. For instance, the great Hoyt father/son duo which is up on billboards often obscures the reality that the Hoyt parents were divorced over the very issue of these constant races. The mother felt that her husband was constantly endangering their son's life. Which he was and is. Yes, the son has expressed the desire to continue doing this. But how much of the father's desire to keep doing this is because of the personal glory he gets from it? How much of the son's desire to keep doing this is because of the way his father trained him to expect pleasure in dangerous thrills?

The older I get, the more I have come to understand that all of my best features can be looked at upside down and seen as terrible, dark flaws. When I was a teen, I was sure that my focus on achievement was my greatest virtue. I also thought that my ability to do everything at light speed was wonderful. But I realized at some point in my late twenties and early thirties that my need to rack up a list of achievements was likely the result of a severe case of anxiety. The achievements had been compensating and acting as a blind to my real questions of self-worth. As for my light-speed ability to do everything, this was in part a form of OCD, where a hyper-focus on doing the next thing in my list was a way to avoid thinking about deeper, darker worries in life.

Am I a hero, then? Or am I a sick, twisted freak?

For me, the ability to hold simultaneously in my mind the reality that I am both a hero and a villain is what makes me the writer I am today. Not one of my heroes is free from a kind of villainy. Prince George in The Princess and the Hound is driven to goodness because of the terrible moment in his childhood when he sees a man being burned at the stake and does nothing to save him. Does this make him less heroic? I don't think it does. It just makes his heroism come from a dark place. In The Rose Throne, Ailsbet is driven by her father's rejection toward excellence in music. She is sometimes rather detached from the politics going on around her simply because she has invested all of her self-worth in her music. She tends to be abrasive when in contact with others because none of them value music as she does and it is difficult for her to relate to them. Does this make her a hero or a villain? Both at the same time, in equal amounts.

In my own new book, Ironmom, I find myself slightly embarrassed by the publisher's blurb:

From the personal tragedy of a stillbirth to a first Ironman and beyond, ordinary stay-at-home mom of 5 kids, Mette Ivie Harrison learns life lessons about accepting herself, moving on, pushing to become better, and bringing her family along the way.

The publisher lists all my many accomplishments in triathlon, 4 Ironman competitions, 6 ultramarathons, a national ranking of 163, and on and on. But there is a darker reality hidden behind all of this. Yes, I started training more seriously after a stillbirth. Yes, I dealt with my grief by running. But I also used triathlon as a kind of drug. It was an addiction which I have had to wean myself from in the years since.

From the journal I wrote in 2005, right after the stillbirth:

I went out walking today, in the dark. It felt wonderful to breathe fresh air and to feel not myself, not the person that this terrible thing happened to. I could almost pretend that the past year was gone, that I was the woman I had been.

But then there was the need to push myself harder and harder. The hills felt so good, when my breathing came fast and furious and I could feel my heart beating fast and the sweat begin to rise on my head, under my arms, between my legs.

And that is even better than being the person I once was. There is an anonymity in intense exercise. You are a machine, no longer a mind or a heart.

The dawn strikes, and the feeling fades.

I find myself back at home, on the doorstep, and I am myself again. Tired, heavy, and wrong.

I am not supposed to run for six weeks, but I know that it will not be that long before the walking is not enough. I crave the pain, the sharper the better. Because the pain is not mine. It belongs to the machine.

Some other sections read:

Pain is my new coin. I find a new masochist in me and she is hungry.

There’s a part that urges me to keep going even when it hurts. Because hurting feels good. It’s what is right. It makes me clean somehow. It tells the guilt to be satisfied.

If I hurt myself enough, then no one can tell me that I deserve to be hurt even more. It is my fault, it’s all my fault, and I punish myself.

And:

Sometimes it feels as though exercising has become my way of expressing grief. Instead of crying, I sweat. Instead of becoming angry at the world, I work myself out until I can’t feel anything anymore but the physical pain.

It became clear to me as I reread this old journal that there was a lot less triumph in my Ironman training after my daughter's death than there was masochism, guilt, and sickness. I am sure there are many other worse ways I could have dealt with my grief, but I don't feel superior to people who use drugs or who cut themselves off from family and friends. Quite the reverse. I feel like I am just another one of them, a different side perhaps of the same coin.

If you can write characters who are both heroes and villains in your own novels, you are going to find that your books are far richer than they would be otherwise. Your heroes should have secrets, dark pasts that they are trying to run from. And your villains should not only think themselves heroes, but should be heroes if only the story ran a slightly different way. I love the rich texture of real life, of real people. The more we put that into books, the more we will see life reflected in all its facets.