Quinn Dalton's Backstory

Bulletproof Girl has eleven backstories, one for each story, or even twelve, if you count the one for how I selected these stories, which were written and published over a ten-year period. All of them began with experiences—or the recounting of others’ experiences—that have left me, at the very least, slack-faced in shock, if not face-down in a pillow, stifling a scream. But the resulting narrators live in realities that are, for the most part, very different from mine. They are divorced single mothers, recovering alcoholics, teenage star bowlers, pregnant runaways, murderous wives, recipients of visions. They aren’t winners, but they haven’t given up. They’re tough but vulnerable: bulletproof girls.

The opening story, "Endurance Tests," came out of memories of one summer when a girlfriend and I devised a battery of tests to prove our strength and readiness for adulthood. One test involved sticking our faces into a stream and seeing how long we could hold our breaths. I didn’t think about this for years and when I remembered it, I had to laugh. Why had it become important to "train" to be grown ups? Then I recalled that her father had just moved out and her mother had stopped cleaning the house, and I had simply gone along with her plan to not be caught off guard by disaster again. But now I am struck by the incongruity of the tests to the task—as if anything we could have done then would have prepared us for the hormonal poisoning of adolescence, the painful politics of sexual relationships, the absurd boredom of most jobs, the sleep deprivation that goes hand-in-hand with parenthood.

The backstory for "Lennie Remembers the Angels" came from a friend of mine who told me about the experience of losing her mother at the age of sixteen. Her family was poor, and after purchasing a pine box, they did not have the money to pay to have the hole dug in the church cemetery to bury her. They proceeded with church services anyway; what else could they do? But then an extraordinary thing happened. Angels appeared at the funeral, visible only to my friend, and handed her a paper bag containing several hundred dollars in cash.

This story amazed me. I’ve never had anything close to a vision, and my friend was not reporting a vision, but what, in her mind, was the real thing: angels delivering the help she’d prayed for. So I wanted to write about that from the perspective of someone who, unlike me, wouldn’t question whether it was possible for such a thing to happen. It took me four years to disentangle the story from the details of my friend’s life and therefore make it work on its own, then a little over a year to find a home for it, and almost two years before it finally appeared. Seven years from the first word to print.

I wrote the closing story of the collection, "How to Clean your Apartment," in three days after a painful breakup. I guess we all succumb to a Breakup Story. But after some revision, I thought it was pretty good and I started sporadically sending it out. Again, nearly seven years passed between Draft One and finding a place in a magazine, but the reward was great. An agent contacted me after reading the story and asked if I might be working on a novel. I was, and he subsequently sold High Strung along with Bulletproof Girl. Not bad return on a nasty little two-month grad school romance.

One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, "It’s all material, hon." Often she would offer it when I came home from elementary school crying because my friends (the idea of "friends" being so interchangeable in those days with that of "back-stabbers") had agreed en masse not to speak to me for the week, or some such low-level, psychological torment that girls especially like to dole out. She was trying to say, even then, "You like to write; maybe you can use this painful stuff someday," although her version came out more like, "When those dumbasses who think they’re so hot shit now are bussing tables, you can look back and laugh."

She was the original bulletproof girl.

Quinn Dalton is the author of a novel, High Strung, and a collection of short stories, Bulletproof Girl, published by Washington Square Press.

Comments

[Barbara W. Klaser]

Just want to say, what great backstories. I'm putting this book on my wishlist now. Thanks.

[Allison Brennan]

I love your mother. It always helps when we have someone solidly in our corner. The stories sound wonderful.

[ro36ck]

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[Robert]

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