ABOUT ENOLA AND ME

The idea was nothing if not high concept: give Sherlock Holmes a kid sister who can show him a thing or two. The research was vast but exhilarating. The writing was a challenge but a delight. Why, then, when I finished the initial Enola Holmes manuscript, did I tremble like a first-time author as I sent it in to my agent? I was an old hand at this stuff; I knew how to process criticism and shrug off rejection. So why was I feeling so uncharacteristically vulnerable regarding Enola?

That question went unanswered for a while. My agent and my editor greeted Enola with enthusiasm, so I forgot my vapours and got busy writing the second book in the series. But sometime after publication, when readers started asking about the hows and the whenceforths, I realized, with a shock, that Enola was entirely too much like me, Nancy, age awkward, lonely fourteen.

Of course all fiction writers extrapolate from their own lives. But I had exposed way more of my tender underbelly than I realized when I wrote Enola. The Case of the Missing Marquess, in particular, shows a remarkable number of parallels:

Like Enola, I had two older brothers I hardly knew. Both were off to college before I reached puberty.

Like Enola, I was a scrawny, bony, gawky tree-climbing tomboy with hair that needed to be washed.

Like Enola, I was solitary and bookish.

Like Enola, I was raised by Victorians. Actually, my parents were born in 1906 and 1909, but they might as well have been Victorians.

Like Enola, I was a tardy arrival in my parents’ lives. My mother was forty when she had me. Forty was a lot older back then than it is now.

Like Enola’s mother, mine was an artist. Actually, she made a good living doing pet portraits in oils, but what she loved to paint (like Enola’s mother) was delicate watercolor flowers. And when she had painted, say, a rose in bloom, it breathed sunlight and summer breezes from the paper. Her talent was extraordinary.

Also like Enola’s mother, mine was an individualist. I recently realized that in all my life to date – I am now on Medicare – I have never met anyone else even remotely like my mother. That’s how one-of-a-kind she was.

Finally, my mother, like Enola’s mother, “ran away” when I was fourteen. No, not literally, which was why I did not suspect I was writing about myself when I created Enola. My mother’s body remained in residence, but somehow the better part of her seemed to have gone elsewhere. In retrospect, I realize that in all likelihood Mom was having problems with menopause. But of course, in my strait-laced family, no one said so. And there was something else my parents were not telling me: Mom had cancer. I dare say that her health problems preoccupied her a bit and caused her to lose interest in me.

Unlike Enola’s mother, mine did not die. She beat the cancer. But then I went away to college, and then Dad died and Mom moved to Florida, still “gone elsewhere,” and she never did come back. She had Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia for the last decades of her life.

Whew.

So it’s no wonder that Enola Holmes and I formed an instant bond. It’s no wonder that, the moment I needed her, she sprang out of my unconscious mind complete with a name, a physique and a personality. But it is a wonder that I could write about her for so long without realizing that her loneliness was my own and her heartache an expression of the long-forgotten heartache of my teenage years.

No wonder I felt more than a twinge of apprehension when I sent her off to the big city – not London, but New York. Does anybody else out there think that editors and agents take on somewhat of a parental role to authors? If so, I wasn’t aware of it until just now, thinking about Enola and understanding at last why I felt so apprehensive as I packed her off: I was afraid Mummy might not love her = me.

Isn’t it wonderful that Enola’s story has a happy ending? To all of the many readers who love Enola Holmes, let it be known: she loves you, too.