Where Reverie Came From (for the TLR book club)

I feel super honored this month that Reverie was chosen as The Lesbian Review’s book club September book. I joined this Facebook group because I was invited to join in order to discuss Reverie, but now that I’m there, I might stick around for discussions of other books.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to talk a little bit about Reverie — where it came from, what I was trying to do with it, and other “behind the scenes” info that I thought readers might be interested in.

*** AWOOGA, AWOOGA!!!! SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK! ***

I mean it!

No more scrolling!

You’ve been warned!

An unreliable narrator

Authors start stories in different places. Sometimes we start with a character, sometimes with a single plot event, sometimes with a setting idea, or a “What if…?” question we are interested in exploring.

For me, Reverie started with the idea of an unreliable narrator, which was a type of story I had always wanted to write.

An example of an unreliable narrator would be Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club. I’ve never read the novel, but in the movie you don’t realize that Norton’s character and Brad Pitt’s character are actually the same person until almost the very end. A similar movie example would be Keyser Soze (Kevin Spacey) in The Usual Suspects. In the case of Fight Club, the narrator deceives the audience because he is deceiving himself about the two sides of his personality that he cannot reconcile; in the case of The Usual Suspects, Soze tricks the detectives with brilliant lies for the purpose of self-preservation.

Other examples (and types) of unreliable narrators include Memento, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and Catcher in the Rye.

Whatever different reasons make them unreliable in the first place, the common thread of all unreliable narrators is that they take the audience on a ride that the audience doesn’t suspect until the end or close to the end.

Why the unreliable narrator(s) for Reverie?

I used an unreliable narrator (well, two of them, really, since Ardie isn’t that reliable in the end, either), because I wanted to explore the line between what is “supernatural” and what is simply mental illness.

To me, this is a fascinating question, because it has always seemed to me that the line between spirituality and madness is a thin, fuzzy boundary.

I am not convinced I believe in spirits. Neither am I convinced that I don’t believe in them. I am not convinced that I believe in religious visions; neither am I convinced that I don’t. I wanted to write a novel in which the reader could make a good case for either the side of the supernatural or the side of mental illness.

Which brings me to William James, obvs.

I didn’t read all of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience in college, but I read enough that some of it has stuck with me. In Varieties, the founder of American psychology asks if we should be so quick discount the spiritual or religious experiences of someone just because we deem to be “unreliable”. “Unreliable” might mean that they are hallucinating due to a drug, a fever, or a brain injury.

We write off what these “unreliable narrators” tell us about what they see of the universe because they are “mentally ill” (or otherwise temporarily compromised). Yet who are we to say, James asks, to discount their experiences? Why do we assume that our own experience of reality is the correct one? The measuring stick we should be using to judge an experience as “valid” or “not valid” should rest in the ultimate effect it has on the individual, and not the physical state they were in when they had it.

That’s a point which has always stuck with me, and it’s made me wonder, “What if those we deem as ‘crazy,’ like schizophrenics, actually have insight into layers of reality the rest of us do not? What if we are missing something important by writing off their experiences?”

A parallel point would be to ask why we assume certain spiritual figures to have valid experiences of other realities just because their vision/hallucination occurred during prayer or meditation. Why does a schizophrenic have a reputation for spouting nonsense and a certain yogi have a reputation for wisdom, when their words are often very similar?

How do we know what kinds of extraordinary experiences are worth valuing and which are not? And who gets to decide?

And trauma, of course.

Several of my novels also deal with some variation of the question, “What are the long-lasting effects of trauma on the human psyche?” and Reverie is one of the clearest examples of me grappling with this question.

I am endlessly fascinated and inspired by the resiliency of human beings, and the ability of people to go through something horrific (like Lucinda and Ardie, along with Alex and Graham) and still manage to function semi-normally afterwards.

But in Reverie in particular, I wanted to explore how horrific events never truly end in our lives… in one way or another, they keep happening to us, over and over again, for a lifetime.

Which brings me to Carl Jung, as long as we’re talking about psychologists:

The serious problems in life…are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.

– Carl Jung

To finish: The South.

So I have wandered a little in this post as I have attempted to shine a light on my thinking process when it came to crafting Reverie. To sum up, I started with these elements:

• I wanted a story told by an unreliable narrator;
• I wanted to explore the thin line between what is spiritual or supernatural, and what is simply madness (if madness can ever be said to be “simple”);
• I wanted to couch those explorations inside the context of trauma;
• and finally, I wanted to write a love letter to the American South.

I have a love-hate relationship with the South. When it’s convenient for me, or when I want to disown the place that made me, I say I’m not truly a Southerner, since I was born and spent my childhood in the Midwest. Other times, when I feel defensive of her — like a lover with whom I broke up but whose reputation I nevertheless feel a need to protect — I claim the Deep South as my ancestral homeland.

To me, there is no better place to set a tale of unreliability, madness, and the supernatural than the Deep South.

The sound of crickets, the scent of pine, the way the air clings to your skin on those soup-thick summer nights… the way her history casts shadows that are long and and black and chilling… the way she says “bless your heart” in one moment and, with a smile on her face, stabs you in the back the next… the way outsiders assume they understand her, yet never scratch the surface of her complexity…

…well, there is no better place to set a ghost story than inside the claustrophobic sweetness of the small-town South.

Oh, a random fact.

When I was living in Washington, DC, one of my roommates was a librarian at the Library of Congress. She gave me a “behind the scenes” tour of the Library one day, and we walked past a cubicle whose name label read “Ardith [ I’m not telling the last name ].”

“Ardith?” I said to my friend. “That’s an interesting name.”

“Yeah, everyone calls her Ardie. Apparently it’s a family name,” my roommate said. “She’s brilliant.”