INSTEAD OF

When I first started scribbling for real, when I was in my early twenties, I wanted to write a novel about how wretchedly I had been tormented in the New Jersey public schools. I had never spoken more than two sentences about this misery before being dismissively interrupted, whether by parents, siblings, or college friends. This was long before anyone took bullying seriousIy; they said it was just life. I quite desperately wanted to tell my story and be heard.

So I scribbled. (Back then, it was for-real scribbling, with a Bic pen in a spiral-bound notebook.) But I hadn’t written more than a few pages before I realized how profoundly depressing, boring, and whiney was my plaint, all mimsy like a borogove (“Jabberwocky” jargon). Nobody would ever want to read what the mome rath outgrabe. Not even me.

So instead of that, I wrote –

No, actually, it wasn’t that simple. An unconscious, daydreaming process intervened for several months, maybe even a year. But eventually I wrote a fantasy novel about an evil king and his cruel minions and how two princes became blood brothers, endured tortures, rallied followers, and defeated the bad guys. Both of my heroes were me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The golden one was my public, steady self and the dark, scarred one was my hidden, moody, messed-up self. It was about time we got acquainted, if only on paper.

The next novel was the same, except different. Indeed, I wrote fantasy novels of paired heroes for a decade before I put myself together as one person able to be, get this, female. But all that time I had written about being bullied and I was read and heard. I had done it. So I wrote fantasy instead of strict fact; so what?
And then I went on to write many more different sorts of novels. . . .

Caveat: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes – actually, most of the time after that first spate of fantasies – sometimes my novels are just novels, period. But occasionally they’re more. At least four of my YA novels were written in order to exorcise from my heart the horror of murder – various different real-life murders. And one of my children’s books was written in a three-week rage after I’d heard a racist comment from a neighbor. And then there were my problems with my mother, never resolved because she became dotty in her final decades, so they ended up in several novels, including the Enola Holmes mystery series.

But perhaps the freakiest book I’ve ever written “instead of” strict fact was FAIR PERIL, magical realism that many readers find hilarious. I began writing it when my husband fell in love with another woman, although he so earnestly denied having an affair that I believed him – consciously. But the smarter part of me prepared for divorce by creating a wacked-out narrative that starts like this:

“Once upon a time there was a middle-aged woman,” storyteller Buffy Murphy declaimed to the trees, “whose bung hole of a husband dumped her the month after their twentieth wedding anniversary. After she skipped having a life to raise three kids with him, he gives her the old heave-ho and off he goes with his bimbo.”

There’s much more, of course, concerning Buffy’s adventures with a talking frog in the Mall Tifarious, but what’s freaky is this: FAIR PERIL was written so far ahead of time that it was actually published the same month my marriage hit the fan, and my first copy arrived shortly before the splat. My then-husband picked up my brand-new book and carried it into the bathroom with him. When he came out a few minutes later, his face had gone frog-belly white. He said, “I can’t read this.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer me at that time, but before that October was over he finally told me the truth and moved out. “I hadn’t intended to leave you until spring,” he said. (!?!**#!)

I suppose I ought to thank myself for writing FAIR PERIL. It ends with my protagonist talking to the trees again, but making a new story. In writing my dress rehearsal for divorce, although I had thoroughly disguised the material with a wicked queen and a magical librarian, I had included my own healing process.

Whoa.

Instances like that make me look back and shake my head. I write books for a living; I write them one after another because otherwise I don’t know what to do with myself; but sometimes a book is more than just a book. It’s instead of. It’s a way to turn suffering into the write stuff. Luckily for me.