Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

ALL OUR LITTLE SECRETS “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” —George Orwell, 1984

You’re already having a hard day when the train home stalls on the tracks. A mysterious young woman in the next seat strikes up a conversation with a surprising confession. Maybe it’s the dark of the idling train, maybe it’s the drink you shouldn’t have had but, whatever the reason, you reveal to this stranger a secret, something you’ve never told anyone else. As the train rumbles to life and the lights come up, you’re embarrassed. Why would you say those things? You go your separate ways, hoping that you never see the woman from the train — ever again. Sometimes a stranger is the safest person in your life. Sometimes she’s the most dangerous.

Everyone was on broadcast these days, thrusting out versions of themselves, cropped and filtered for public consumption. Everyone putting on the “show of me.” It was when people were alone, unobserved, that the mask came off.

It often feels like people have stopped living and interacting authentically, so concerned about what they’re posting, how things look, what they want people to see about their lives. But, we all know that real life is what happens between the social media posts.

“Society doesn’t always know what’s right. Our families tell us stories about ourselves that often aren’t true. Sometimes we have to follow our hearts.”

I just finished listening to Elizabeth Gilbert talking about Martha Beck’s idea of the integrity cleanse. Beck believes that the body, the gut, never lies and that we have to reach past and beyond ingrained messages from culture, family, and trauma to know what’s right for us. We all know that gut feeling. We don’t always follow it. How many times have you talked yourself out of a gut feeling and then later thought: I knew it!?

She liked the shadows. That’s where you got to see all the things that other people missed.

This character is an observer. She’s watching when other people are not. She’s watching when others don’t know they are being observed. She’s driven by a deep curiosity to see people as they are, not as they pretend to be.

But mainly, people were so wrapped up in their own inner hurricane that they never saw anything outside the storm of themselves.

This is another Buddhist idea, that we can be so lost in our thinking mind — planning, wanting, regretting, hoping, fearing, holding grudges — that we don’t see what’s right in front of us, that we’re essentially sleepwalking. How many hours, days, have you spent on autopilot, going though the motions of your life but not really being present for it?

Arrested development. When a person stops maturing at a point of trauma, grief, or at a place in her life when she felt the profound and total loss of love from a primary caregiver.

Arrested development is a common reaction to childhood trauma. The psyche retreats to the place where it last felt safe and loved, and essentially refuses to mature beyond that point.

When the same thing happens again and again, we have to look at that. We have to unpack it and figure out why we cause ourselves and others pain.

Sometimes we get so entrenched in our habits, in our learned behaviors, that we do the same hurtful or self-destructive things over and over. When we notice this, we have to stop and observe, try to understand why, and then make a different choice. Otherwise, our lives never change.

Story is story, Stella said. It’s a portal you walk through into another world. And this world—which usually sucks—just disappears.

All readers know that this is true! Stories are a doorway that we disappear through and enter another world entirely, something informed by but utterly separate from our own life. Real life is a mosaic — good days and bad, sorrows and joys, the mundane and the extraordinary. But a fictional world is distilled and idealized — a vivid and continuous dream to quote John Gardner.

You can’t con an honest man.

A couple of years ago I was backstage at BookExpo America in New York City getting ready for a panel with Megan Abbott and Ruth Ware, among others, and the conversation turned to confidence games. Maybe I tossed the topic out there because it had been on my mind. I’d been puzzling over something I’d heard about the nature of the con — and the conned. It was the idea that “you can’t con an honest man.” Megan Abbott said, and I’m paraphrasing because this was a while ago, “Oh, I don’t know about that. That sounds like victim-blaming to me.” Was that true? I wondered. So that conversation turned around in my mind for a while, and I started researching the various elements of the con, as well as the psychology of the con artist, and why very smart people who should know better fall for all sorts of scams. This is usually how things go for me, a spark, a lot of research, and then a character voice. In the case of CONFESSIONS ON THE 7:45, the first voice I heard was Pearl, a troubled girl who grows into a dangerous woman with a taste for chaos. That said, the book is not exactly about con artists. It’s about chance encounters, and layers of identity, about the little lies we tell each other and ourselves, and how easy it is, with the tug of a single thread, to unravel our carefully constructed lives.

People didn’t fall in love with other people. They fell in love with how other people made them feel about themselves. And so, it was easy to get someone to love you—if you knew how they wanted to feel.

Like so many observations that this character makes, it’s true and not true. It is possible to authentically love someone for who they are, of course. But a big part of adult relationships has to do with how the other person makes us feel about ourselves. If you’re with someone who makes you feel badly about yourself, that’s not love. If you’re with someone who hurts and abuses you, it’s impossible to truly love that person. Of course, many people who emerge from trauma and abuse in childhood confuse pain with love. And one might choose someone who offers that to them. But healthy love is characterized, at its foundation, by self-love.

he knew that you couldn’t win an argument. Anything you fight against gets stronger.

This is the ultimate Buddhist sentiment, speaking to the acceptance of what is and the now. The more we fight against something, the more power we give that thing. Once we go still and accept the moment, we can see the way out or through more clearly.

Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.

I taught a poetry class to girls who had been removed from their homes due to abuse. This was one of the things we talked about most often. How you can write your own story, how there is power in owning and taking control of the narrative. We all have that power, and in harnessing it on the page, we can often change the course of our lives.