How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #9)

by Louise Penny

She’d spent hours sewing it. Time she could have, should have, spent wrapping Christmas gifts for her husband and daughters. Time she could have, should have, spent baking shortbread stars and angels and jolly snowmen, with candy buttons and gumdrop eyes. Instead, each night when she got home Audrey Villeneuve went straight to the basement, to her sewing machine. Hunched over the emerald green fabric, she’d stitched into that party dress all her hopes.

In this scene I needed to do several things. A certain mis-direction (’nuff said), create a contrast between the Christmas treats and her obsession, and of course, the mystery. Why was this dress so important to her that she was willing to give up so much for it? We find out later, why. And what sort of person Audrey really was. (’nuff said).

But this was the snow of her childhood. Joyful, playful, bright and clean. The more the merrier. It was a toy. It covered the fieldstone homes and clapboard homes and rose brick homes that ringed the village green. It covered the bistro and the bookstore, the boulangerie and the general store. It seemed to Constance that an alchemist was at work, and Three Pines was the result. Conjured from thin air and deposited in this valley. Or perhaps, like the snow, the tiny village had fallen from the sky, to provide a soft landing for those who’d also fallen.

How well I remember the snow of my youth, in the Laurentiens of Quebec. Exactly as Constance has described. They’re becoming rarer now, so I wanted to capture not just the event, but the feeling. Such peace. Everything white, and clean, all sounds muffled. People sometimes ask why I live in a climate that can be so harsh. Besides the obvious answer that it is home, I also love four distinct seasons. And very few seasons are as distinct as winter. As beautiful. And, as brutal.

She’d arrived a self-sufficient city woman, and now she was covered in snow, sitting on a bench beside a crazy person, and she had a duck on her lap. Who was nuts now? But Constance Pineault knew, far from being crazy, she’d finally come to her senses.

Ha. Again, the ongoing themes of perception and perspective. Who’s to say what is crazy? Who is mad? Is bonding to another living creature the act of a lunatic, even if that creature is a duck. Or Ruth? And again, the theme of home. Of that miraculous, magical moment when we look around and realize, this is where I belong.

It was the mad old poet, but it was also the Virgin Mary. The mother of God. Forgotten, resentful. Left behind. Glaring at a world that no longer remembered what she’d given it.

Ruth. The description of Clara’s painting of Ruth as Mary first appears in A TRICK OF THE LIGHT. I wish I could say it was planned, but it wasn’t. I simply wrote it. It seemed right and appropriate. When I talk to emerging writers about the process I try to stress that we all do it the way that works for us. There’s no right or wrong way to write a book. But for me, I have to plan each book just enough so that there is a momentum forward. Themes I want to explore. Like belonging. Like madness. But I’ve learned I need to hold onto those themes, onto the characters, lightly. So that there’s room for inspiration. For those grace notes. I consider first writing about Clara’s painting of Ruth just such a moment. When despair meets hope.

But Isabelle Lacoste had been in the Sûreté long enough to know how much easier it was to shoot than to talk. How much easier it was to shout than to be reasonable. How much easier it was to humiliate and demean and misuse authority than to be dignified and courteous, even to those who were themselves none of those things.

I think you might know that I belong to a 12 step programme, and what Isabelle describes was one of the first things my sponsor taught me. (Though it took a while to sink in!) Just because someone pushes, doesn’t mean I need to respond. No one else gets to dictate my reaction. Only I do. It gets worse...if I want to consider myself a decent person, I need to act with decency. Huh? Easy enough to do when people are being nice. A whole other thing when the effluent is flying, in my direction. Rage might be justified, but it’s rarely necessary or constructive. Isabelle knows this, but it’s one thing for the characters to know, a whole other thing to act that way.