It's been a while since I've been able to host a giveaway, so when author Elisabeth Elo offered to write a guest blog post to promote her new book, North of Boston, and then give away a copy, I jumped at the chance! You will find her guest blog below, and once you are done reading you can enter for your chance to win a copy of her fantastic book! The contest is open to US addresses only - please be aware if you win and you are not at a US address I will have to draw a different winner!!
Thanks and enjoy!
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“How
Much of Your Novel is Autobiographical?”
by Elisabeth Elo, author of North of Boston
I’ve never solved a crime or swum in freezing water
(although the ocean around here is pretty cold even in summer). My family isn’t from Russia, I didn’t go to
boarding school, I never stood to inherit a business, and I haven’t been to
Baffin Island. There’s a lot in North of Boston that has nothing to do
with my life. I remember telling friends,
“It’s a really crazy story,” as if I was bewildered by it. Which I was.
But when the novel was finished and people started asking me
questions about it – one of the most common ones being “How much of the story
is autobiographical?” – I began to realize that there’s actually a lot of me in
the book. They’re just not the parts of
me I would have put in a book had I been making conscious decisions about
content. In some cases, they’re events that
I didn’t consider particularly important while they were happening, or ones
that I didn’t remember at all, even while I was creating some version of them
in the novel. But they showed up in the
pages anyway, with some pretty deep feelings attached to them.
I didn't remember until after I finished the book, for
example, something that happened in high school when I was working at an
aquarium: Some of us used to swim after hours with two dolphins named Salty and
Spray who had been together in captivity for over a decade. At the end of the summer Salty died of a skin
infection, and Spray went to the bottom of the tank, rarely surfaced, and
refused to do the shows that she had enjoyed for years. She died in a few months time. Whatever the medical reason, it was clear to
the people who cared about her that she’d died of a broken heart. What I learned about marine mammals from that
experience obviously never left me.
I didn’t remember until after I’d finished the novel a
lobsterman friend of ours who had died suddenly. There was nothing nefarious in his death, but
it was still a very sad event as he left twin daughters behind. Years rolled by in which I didn’t think about
him very much. It was only when I was writing
the Q & A for my website that he came back to me full-force and I realized
he was the model for Ned.
There are numerous other examples of that phenomenon in the
book – submerged events and situations in my life that floated up unbidden and
found life in the pages.
The specifics of plot and character are obviously important
aspects of the book, but they are also relatively superficial. If Pirio wasn’t a perfumer, she could have been
a chef. If she didn’t meet Martin when
she was in Labrador, she could have met someone else. You can always trade one thing for
another.
It’s the thematic material that brings depth and meaning to
the story, and this stuff generally comes straight from the author’s
heart. We can’t fake it or disguise it;
sometimes we ourselves don’t understand it.
Loss, wonder, friendship, work, responsibility to others, relationship
to the environment – the way these issues and others like them are treated in a
novel reflects the author’s own experience and expresses her deepest preoccupations.
Why do I have my character spend so much time taking care of
an alcoholic friend, worrying about her child and wondering what her role
should be? You guessed it. There’s no easy answer here. Why is she incapable of dealing with her
mother’s death and avoids signs of her father’s illness? Right again.
Both my parents died before I was twenty-five. How does she manage to go from the drawing
rooms of Beacon Hill to the bar rooms on the waterfront? Well, I grew up near the trolley track that
separated Dorchester and Milton, city and suburb. In one direction, everyone got richer; in the
other they got poorer – all within the space of a few blocks. I went to an ivy league college on
scholarship and made friends in the monied class, but at home I frequented the
kinds of places where my classmates weren’t likely to show up. For years I studied subjects like post-structuralist
literary theory during the day and counseled drug addicts at night.
It may be true that writing fiction is a form of therapy, if
by that we mean that writers take things that are emotionally rich or troubling
to them (they don’t get to choose) and put them on the page. But that doesn’t mean writers are neurotic,
it just means we’re like everyone else -- trying to play the best hand with
whatever cards we’ve got.
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