Guest Post from Debbie Levy: The Footnotes

IMPERFECT SPIRAL is about the aftermath of a tragic accident, in which Humphrey Danker, the five-year-old boy Danielle Snyder is babysitting, runs into traffic to chase down his football.  It’s also, and equally, about the summer Danielle and Humphrey spent together and the deep connection they forged.

Walker Children’s, July 2013.

To me, and I hope to readers, my characters are very real.  But of course, they’re not really real.  IMPERFECT SPIRAL is fiction.  And yet—one of the pleasures of writing fiction is that while you’re creating people and events mostly out of thin air, you can add texture and depth to it all by finding a home for stuff you’ve been carrying around inside.  For personal stuff.

None of the personal stuff is labeled as such.  But what if it were. . . .  (Cue swirly music evoking a dreamy, “what-if” state.)

            When Mrs. Danker came home from radiation, she didn’t usually eat. It wasn’t that radiation made you sick, Mrs. Danker had told me. It wasn’t like chemotherapy. It just made her feel a little whipped. After she rested for an hour or so, she usually ate something small and cold. A yogurt. A little container of cottage cheese. She liked cold red plums. 1

Footnote 1, page 46 of IMPERFECT SPIRAL - This is how I felt while undergoing radiation treatments for breast cancer when I was thirty-nine.  Especially about the cold red plums.  It wasn’t the worst thing ever, not by a long shot.  But it was reality-changing.  And I still love cold red plums.

I pushed my way through two overflowing displays. A third one quivered. Wait. Unless that rack was alive, it had no business quivering. Unless.  I found Humphrey nestled between two velvet leisure suits.  He was holding the purple fabric of the jacket between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, and holding— no, clutching— one of the purple pant legs in his left hand.

            “Humphrey!” I exclaimed.

            He was absolutely in rapture. “These give me tears,” he said. 2

Footnote 2, page 49 – Oh, be still, my heart.  This scene reflects the time in Nordstrom when one of my sons disappeared for a few minutes deep in a rack of truly hideous “Activewear” suits.  We were shopping for a gift for Grandma.  They were plenty ugly, but Ben wasn’t even looking at them; he was stroking the soft, petal-like fabric, the way he used to stroke the satin edge of his blanket.  “These give me tears,” he said, he really did.

(Don’t worry, my other son, Alex, has his own footnote later in that same chapter, which also makes my heart go pitter-patter.  Equal treatment of the offspring.)

After the Torah reading, it was time for my speech, which I’d also been working on for nearly a year. I was proud of the insights I’d come up with about my Torah portion, which is the part in the Bible where Jacob knows he’s dying and he gives this kind of awkward blessing to his son Joseph’s two sons. But the wave was way too strong for me, and it swept me off the stage and down the short hallway that connects to the rabbi’s study, where I tumbled into a chair and  hyperventilated. 3/

Footnote 3, page 73 – This mirrors what happened at my Bat Mitzvah, when, like Danielle in this flashback, I was swept off the podium by a wave of panic and ended up running to the rabbi’s study.  Mortifying.  Talk about reality-changing.

But reality has a way of changing, which is good.  I finally become comfortable speaking in front of people when I took a summer job during college as a tour guide in Washington, D.C., responsible for keeping a busload of eighty-eight hot and sweaty tourists entertained and informed.  A microphone can be empowering!  It was the best job ever, partly because of all I learned about my hometown, partly because the guides and drivers were mostly other fun college students, and partly because I always knew what I was going to wear to work—day in and day out, one of the two orange-and-white wash-n-wear dresses they gave to us girl guides.  I never realized how liberating a uniform could be.

(Cue swirly music bringing us back to the here-and-now.)

Would the creation of annotated editions of novels take away the magic of fiction?  Maybe.  But I think that, as readers, we can’t help but wonder what came from experience and what from imagination.  And as writers, we try to balance privacy considerations, the impulse to spill everything out on the page, and the imperative of keeping things compelling—because, after all, most things that are real aren’t all that compelling.

Finally, this assumption that fiction must reflect, at least in part, the author’s own experience is one of the things that makes novel-writing feel dangerous.  Readers might assume that a particular distressing event or dislikeable character trait comes from the author’s life, when actually it’s pure invention.  Wow, the reader might think, that must come from a dark and weird personal history when really it has nothing to do with the author personally.  But you may never look at the author in the same way again.

Oh, well.  It’s an occupational hazard, and mostly, we don’t tell.  But if you gather people in a virtual room like this blog to blab about your book, I kind of think you ought to divulge at least a few of the hidden footnotes.  And so I have.  As for the others—I’ll leave them hidden.  Except for this:  pretty much all of Humphrey’s excellent traits reflect the adorableness and interesting-ness that characterized my two boys when they were his age.

It’s true!  I know I am the only mother to think this about her children.

Debbie Levy.

Debbie Levy writes books — fiction, nonfiction, and poetry — for people of all different ages, and especially for young people. Before starting her writing career, she was a newspaper editor; before that, she was a lawyer with a Washington, D.C. law firm. She has a bachelor’s degree in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, and a law degree and master’s degree in world politics from the University of Michigan. She lives in Maryland and spends as much time as she can kayaking and otherwise messing around in the Chesapeake Bay region.