Only Mostly Devastated

by Sophie Gonzales

“Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the people we love, right? It might not be ideal, but we may as well do it with a grin.”

Although ONLY MOSTLY DEVASTATED was never written to be a straight retelling of Grease so much as it was an homage to Grease and other classic rom-coms, I spent a lot of time thinking about the controversial message of Grease, and came to the conclusion that I’d like to focus on knowing when to sacrifice for love, and when to enforce boundaries, as an overarching theme in ONLY MOSTLY DEVASTATED. When Ollie’s mom says this line to him, we can see that these are the sort of values he’s been raised with; the encouragement to self-sacrifice. Ollie tends to live his life for others—he helps out with his family, moves states without complaining, and gives up his nights to babysit his cousins. Ollie’s problem is that he has trouble figuring out where to draw the line between a reasonable sacrifice, and becoming a doormat. As the book goes on, we see him getting clearer and clearer about where that line should be drawn—even swinging too far in the opposite direction as he tests the waters, before finally coming to a happy medium where he’s able to communicate his own needs, and also offer help and understanding when appropriate.

A week later, and I was still getting lost more often than the girl in the Labyrinth movie, except I didn’t even have David Bowie in tights as a reward for my efforts.

I, personally, never had a thing for David Bowie in tights (and some shots in the Labyrinth movie made baby-Sophie avert her eyes!). As an author, it’s always interesting to create a character—you inject pieces of yourself, but you also don’t want to make them carbon copies of yourself. One way of doing this is to give your character traits, likes and dislikes you’ve observed in other people. I’ve seen plenty of people rhapsodize about David Bowie in tights, but none so passionately as one of my best friends, Steph, who spent all of high school holding him up as the ideal man. In fact, she’s been saved in my phone as “David Bowie” since 2006, the year we met. So, this particular opinion Ollie holds actually comes from her!

Note to self: carry bass around everywhere and break into impromptu solo whenever anyone tries to force you into conversation. Foolproof.

This line was a reference to not only Grease, but all movie-musicals, where everyone seems to inexplicably break out into song, complete with choreography and instrumentals, at the drop of a hat! Ollie’s particular sense of humour was interesting as his voice came through in the first draft, because I quickly noticed he was the type of character who would describe ridiculous imaginary scenarios to get his point across. Ollie 100% goes through life processing his emotions through little animations he’s creating in his head. He would make a wonderful comic-book artist, had he ever shown a penchant for drawing. Maybe one day he’ll discover he has the knack!

Here walks Ollie Di Fiore. Master of his feelings, expert detacher, only mostly devastated.

My first drafts are often very similar to the final version. This line is one example that has stayed exactly as I initially wrote it. I was about eighty pages into writing the book (word document pages!) when my agent told me we were going to try to sell this novel on proposal (A.K.A, without completing the full manuscript). At that stage it didn’t have a name, so I rapidly scanned through the pages I’d written, and landed on the last part of this line as a working title—I thought it captured the overall mood of the book pretty well! As you can tell, the working title became the official title, and the rest is history.

“Well, like, the kind of girls you’re competing with … they wouldn’t be eating mashed potatoes at lunch, put it that way.”

This scene was so extremely important for me to include, because of how personal it is. I’ve dealt with a million insidious comments like the above, from family to acquaintances to close friends. I’ve had friends hold makeshift interventions about my lunch choices, comments along the lines of “oh, I thought you were trying to lose weight . . .”, and even rules placed on me as a child by (non-parental) caregivers about eating where I could be monitored. In reality, though, every time a comment like this was sent my way, I would wilt, and make myself small, and laugh as though it was a joke we were all in on. By giving Niamh the power and agency to stand up to this comment, making it perfectly clear that it wasn’t okay (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the comments she made in return), I gave myself a level of closure. It was like sending a message to the younger version of me that no, that wasn’t okay, even if the person speaking was a friend who was “only looking out for you”. There was a lot of power in writing this scene, for me. Quite a bit of anger, too, I suppose. But mostly, it was healing.

“You can kiss whoever the fuck you want,” I said finally. “And it’s no one’s business but yours.”

The fact that this scene so closely follows the previous scene made it interesting for me to write. As an author, when you create a character, you have to know them inside and out, and that includes knowing how they would react in a certain situation. I personally reject the idea that a main character’s choices are an indication that the book (or author) is wholly endorsing the action (in fact, by the time you finish ONLY MOSTLY DEVASTATED, one thing you might notice about my writing is I prefer to create conflict situations where no one character is entirely in the right. I believe life is usually more complicated than good vs. evil, and enjoy creating situations where each reader will come away with a different interpretation of who was more in the right according to their own life experiences. But I digress!). Here, Ollie is faced with a choice; comfort Niamh, a character who’s been nothing but kind to him, and who has been shamed by her friend . . . or comfort Lara, an objectively unkind character, who started the argument in which she was hurt, but who has no one who is likely to have noticed why she’s as hurt as she is, except for Ollie. If I had been sitting at that lunch table, I think I would have been inclined to go after Niamh. Ollie, however, is a gay teenager, who’s gone from a largely accepting environment to one where he’s feeling picked on and shamed every day. He’s noticed that someone in his orbit is probably queer, and is possibly feeling some of those very emotions that he’s struggling with. Finally, he’s correctly pegged that he’s the only one at this stage who’s noticed Lara’s feelings for Renee. This, combined with Ollie’s habit of letting people walk all over him, and his penchant for helping others he thinks need his assistance, no matter the cost to him, made his choice clear to me. He would go after Lara. This is one of those odd things about writing fiction; sometimes, for the story to make sense and for a character to feel real, you have to allow them to make a choice you probably wouldn’t make yourself.

It’s funny how you can spend weeks, or months, or sometimes even years preparing yourself for a nightmare that’s more “when” than “if.” Then just when you’re fooling yourself that you’ve accepted the world’s end, and you’ll roll with the impact when it hits … suddenly, it might be hitting, and you’re not rolling. You’re collapsing, sitting where you stood, totally overwhelmed by a loss you were never really ready for.

I, like a lot of people, have unfortunately experienced the death of a loved one multiple times. This particular line I wrote while thinking of my Poppa, who died several years before I wrote this book. I remember visiting him in the hospital one day (which I did often towards the end), and realizing with certainty that he was going to pass away soon. At the time I thought I was grieving and processing in advance, and that I’d resigned myself for what was about to come. When he did die, though, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus—I was completely unprepared for that level of grief after what I’d thought was a period of bracing myself. Writing this reflection, I accessed some of those emotions, and I think I ended up crying while writing it from memory.

“Sometimes I think I don’t like him very much.” Lara shrugged. “Hate away. I’ve hated Renee for over a year now, I think. Doesn’t mean I don’t love her.” “Isn’t that a contradiction?” “Nope. Apathy is incompatible with hate. Love works okay.”

When I signed with my first agent, it was with a manuscript that ultimately didn’t sell. One thing that stood out to me, though, was one day she called me to discuss a new ending scene I’d written, and she said she found it really powerful that the villain’s comeuppance was that the hero turned apathetic towards them, a person they’d once called their close friend. My agent said she believed apathy was a lot more gutting than hate, because hate is passionate, and it takes energy. If you hate someone, you’re invested in them. There’s still power there. You can hate someone and also love them, at different moments, or even simultaneously, but you can’t hate someone while also feeling nonchalance. I really loved that observation, and I included this line as a nod to that original theme, a sort of in-joke between my agent and me. I think there’s a lot of truth in the take.

All this time, I’d been wondering when my needs would start to really matter to him. Maybe I hadn’t spent enough time wondering when my needs would start to really matter to me.

This is a transformative moment for Ollie, during which he realizes he’s been acting like a doormat in many aspects of his life, but most especially in his relationship with Will. It’s important to remember that Ollie is not angry at Will for being closeted throughout the story—he’s angry because Will, in his efforts to stop friends and family from suspecting anything, throws Ollie under the bus several times in a row. While Ollie has been somewhat naively hoping Will might come out at some point so they can have the fairytale ending he’s so set on, he doesn’t resent Will for being closeted—every argument we see the two get into follows an action Will takes without showing consideration for Ollie’s feelings. Allowing his friends to joke about Ollie without intervening, going to the dance with his ex-girlfriend, etc. Essentially, until this point Ollie’s taken the advice given to him by his mom and Aunt Linda—to be patient, and accommodating, with the person he loves—too far, and he’s now having trouble figuring out which parts of their relationship deserves patience, understanding and flexibility (for example, giving Will the space to come out in his own time) and which parts are crossing a line (dirty-dancing with your ex-girlfriend is not acceptable behaviour!). Ollie’s solution to this takes shape from Lara’s advice at the dance—first and foremost, he needs to ascertain the difference between his needs and wants, and ensure that his needs are met. Here is where he realizes it’s actually okay to choose not to make a sacrifice for someone you love if the personal loss is too great.

“Yeah, fine as a man who’s been gently corrected on the internet,”

I love this line from Lara. She’s such a loud personality, and we can definitely see some Rizzo from Grease influence in her. Her signature look is a feminine, flouncy sort of dress paired with a leather jacket, and we see this juxtaposition reflected in her personality. She’s feminist in some ways, but misses the mark in important ways when it comes to supporting her friends without judgement. She’s unnecessarily mean to the people she cares about the most, but also has a warm, sentimental, and even loyal streak. If Lara had a catch-phrase, it’d be “no one’s allowed to pick on my friends but me”.

But they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t have done any of that, because in stories guys fight. They fight for the person they care about, and they don’t give up, ever. In real life, though, sometimes you beg for them to care, and they just don’t. And then they go quiet. And they let you walk away without much of a fight at all.

Ollie starts the story with a very naïve view of love. He has this childlike idea that he will meet the person he’s meant to be with, and he will be pursued, and everything will be extremely easy and romantic. Even though the opening lines of the book are Ollie declaring that he no longer believes in these ideals, we can see that it isn’t so, as he constantly expresses surprise and disappointment that Will has fallen short of the Prince Charming ideal. Throughout the story, Ollie continually allows himself to hope that everything will magically work out—for example, when he daydreams about Will coming out, and them ending up openly together—an idea that Aunt Linda points out is probably not so realistic. This paragraph is both the moment that Ollie truly processes that relationships aren’t like the movies, and it’s also a scene where his unreliable narration becomes particularly obvious. The reader can see that Ollie’s interpretation of Will as uncaring and uninvested is far from accurate, from Will’s body language in this scene, through to his actions during the remainder of the book. In reality, Will’s actions are influenced by the level of fear and panic he’s experiencing—it isn’t that he doesn’t care enough about Ollie to consider his feelings, it’s that he’s become overwhelmed by the very real threat of people realizing he’s not straight, and the possible fallout from that, which can, on the negative end, range from unpleasant through to downright dangerous. As Lara points out, this isn’t an excuse for his actions (certainly, most of the behaviours Ollie takes issue with are things that were never necessary for Will to do in order to remain closeted), but it is an explanation—and it’s an explanation Ollie hasn’t really considered. Ultimately, though, it’s Ollie’s misconception that allows him to grow and discard this childish view of relationships. When he allows himself to view Will as a flawed human, rather than a fairytale figure whose every action will put Ollie’s wants and needs at the forefront, he learns some important lessons in how to set boundaries in a relationship, and also how to contribute to a relationship as something he’s participating in as an equal, rather than something that’s happening to him.

And life was too short to play chicken with something as important as the person you loved.

This was a very personal line, born of my own musings in my diary years ago. There was a person in my life who was very hot and cold, and I became more preoccupied with “winning” some sort of imaginary game against them than I was with either making the non-relationship work or letting it go. I spent all my energy on trying to make sure I wasn’t the person putting the most energy in (a total contradiction, in hindsight, but it made sense at the time). I was engaging in a game of chicken with this person, who was very much, by their own admission, engaging in the game right back at me—and it was a game we both lost because we did, in fact, run out of time in the end. Part of grief, I think, is the way it reframes your life, and what’s important. More time is never guaranteed.

That day, his excuse to hang with me in the music room was an upcoming test. I’d thought the book was a prop, but, to my surprise, he actually sat down and started reading it when I picked up my bass. I wasn’t sure if it was because he really wanted to ace the test, or if he just found it really boring to listen to the same bass line repeated over and over again. I wouldn’t blame him if it was the latter, but then I had to wonder—why did he always come to visit me here at lunch when I spent three-quarters of it ignoring him to practice music?

Earlier in the book, Ollie describes Will as the type of person who catches on when something’s wrong, and tries to fix it. Here, we see an example of this as Will makes one of many excuses to spend time with Ollie in the music room while Ollie is processing his grief. Ollie has never communicated a need for company to Will, but as we see in an earlier scene, Ollie doesn’t want to be alone so much as he wants to be free to feel his emotions as they come, or to sit in silence without putting on fake-cheer. By making different excuses every day, and bringing in activities to keep himself occupied so Ollie doesn’t feel pressured to talk or engage, Will provides Ollie the expectation-free company and support he desperately needs, but hasn’t been able to express to his friends. Here, we get to see a glimpse of the Will Ollie fell in love with over the summer—the version of himself he’s able to be when he isn’t overwhelmed by fear and anxiety. Will’s love language is undoubtedly Acts of Service!

Maybe our Happily Ever After hadn’t worked on the first shot. And maybe Happily Ever Afters weren’t a singular event. Maybe they were something you had to work at, and build, and never give up on, as long as they were something you still wanted.

Finally, Ollie reflects on the lessons he’s learned about life over the past few months – its randomness, its pain, the way things don’t miraculously fall into place without a significant amount of effort and compromise—and reframes his view on love and life. He still believes in Happily Ever Afters, only now his definition of a Happily Ever After has evolved into a more mature, adult perspective—one that involves a healthy mix of optimism and realism.

Acknowledgments

Thank you so much for reading ONLY MOSTLY DEVASTATED! If you enjoyed it, be sure to check out my next release, PERFECT ON PAPER, out in March 2021, which follows a bisexual girl named Darcy, who runs an anonymous dating advice service at her school, and is blackmailed into becoming the personal dating coach of the hot senior who catches her! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49204960-perfect-on-paper