Backstory

Katie Arnoldi's Backstory

For years, I’ve been walking around wondering how in the world people get so damn messed up.  What traumatic incident leads them into the dark sexual fetish worlds of pony play, cannibal fantasy, or Balloonism?  Why do people covet root vegetables?  At what point was the natural instinct to survive replaced by an overwhelming desire to starve oneself?  Does the obsession with one's own reflection start at birth?  And what is the source of rampant materialism?

             In my opinion, it all starts in the home.  You want to figure out how someone got the way they are, check out the parents, review the childhood.  Natural birth or c-section? Breast or bottle fed?  Was the infant’s diaper changed regularly or was there a problem with diaper rash?  Kind siblings or torturous enemies?   Let the baby cry or bring them into the warm and vaguely incestuous family bed?  Every action has an impact.  In the early years, the parent is god. And, as we all know, mistakes tend to be passed down through the generations.

             The Wentworths are a wealthy, multi-generational family living on the Westside of Los Angeles.  It is a territory I know well as I grew up there and was surrounded by Wentworths. This is a world of country clubs and gated estates.  There is a sense of superiority that has nothing to do with Hollywood.  These people consider themselves old world aristocracy in a city with no history.  They exist on a plane far above you and me and wield their wealth and power like a weapon against all those beneath them.  There are no checks and balances in the world of the Wentworths.  They are impervious.

      I have to say right here and now that this book is not some thinly veiled  autobiography.  I’m not working out my childhood issues in the pages of my novel.  My family in no way resembles the Wentworths except for the fact that they are a family.  I swear.  But you probably won’t believe me.  In my last novel, I explored the ins and outs of sexual perversion and everyone assumed I was sharing the secrets of my married life.  I tried to explain that it was a novel and in no way was it representative of my life, certainly not my sex life.  Of course my protests just made the situation worse.  So, I swear this book is not about MY life but I don’t expect to you to believe me.

              There are other families surrounding the Wentworths, every character has one.  There’s Rosa the maid who was forced to leave her five children behind in Guatemala in order to support them.  There’s Honey the runaway from the Polygamist colony of Colorado City, Angela the gold digger, hoping to forge a better life for herself by bearing an illegitimate Wentworth child.  And Jack the drifter who’s spent his life running away from the family he left behind and now finds himself longing for a family he could create.

             The Wentworths is about the destructive and redemptive nature of the family structure.  It is a twisted, dark story that is ultimately hopeful—at least I think it is.

To learn more about Katie Arnoldi, please visit her website.

Hillary Jordan's Backstory

I grew up on stories about my grandparents’ farm.

      “We got our water from a pump in the front yard. In the wintertime the pump would freeze, and Daddy would thaw it by wrapping it in rags soaked in kerosene and lighting them on fire…”

      “The farm had a river running through it, and whenever it flooded we’d be stranded. That’s how it got the name of Mudbound…”

      My mother, aunt and grandmother spoke of the farm often, laughing and shaking their heads by turns, depending on whether the story in question was funny or horrifying. Often they were both, as Southern stories tend to be.

      “One spring our sow birthed her litter too early, and I found the poor piglets lying frozen in a ditch. I put them on a baking sheet and popped them into a warm oven. And do you know, four of those six piglets survived? At least, until they were old enough to be turned into bacon…”

      I loved these stories. They were a peephole into a strange and marvelous world full of contradictions, of terrible beauty. They revealed things about my family, especially about my grandmother, who was the heroine of most of them for the simple reason that whenever calamity struck, my grandfather was invariably elsewhere.

      My grandmother was not a country girl. She was forced to become one in 1946, when my grandfather abruptly decided to move the family from Dallas to a farm in Podunk, Arkansas. Like Henry in Mudbound, he wanted to be near his recently widowed sister. And too, my grandfather revered the land and yearned to farm it.

      My grandmother had never seen the property, and I can only imagine how she felt when she discovered she would be living and rearing her two small children in an isolated, unpainted shotgun shack with no electricity, telephone or running water. But Nana was a woman of her time, obedient to her husband’s wishes, and so she made the best of it. My grandfather’s brother came to live with them, followed by her cantankerous father-in-law, and she cooked and cleaned uncomplainingly for all of them. Like Laura in the novel, Nana was a singer, and the songs she sang were indicative of her mood. “Rock of Ages” was a frequent refrain on the farm, and—when things got really bad—“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.”

      To my mother and aunt, their year on the farm was a grand adventure, and indeed, that was how all their stories portrayed it. It was not until I was in my thirties that I realized what an ordeal that year must have been for her, and that, in fact, these were stories of survival.

      I began the book (without knowing I was doing any such thing) in graduate school. I had an assignment to write three pages in the voice of a family member, and I decided to write about the farm from Nana’s point of view. But what came out was not a merry adventure story, but something darker and more complex. What came out was, “When I think of the farm, I think of mud,” which was not my grandmother’s voice at all. That realization liberated me to write fiction, rather than fact.

      As the story grew, I began to want other perspectives. My grandparents had black sharecroppers on the farm, and a black housekeeper. They were usually in the background of the stories, where African-Americans in the Jim Crow South were thought to belong. My grandparents were both products of that time and place; their racism was deeply ingrained. And yet, they were good people, kind, big-hearted, devoutly Christian. That contradiction—the entrenched bigotry of otherwise good people—is a key underpinning of Mudbound.

     I decided to move the black characters to the foreground, to let them answer the ugliness of Jim Crow in their own voices. I was, frankly, a little afraid. I knew I would be excoriated if I got it wrong. A number of well-meaning colleagues said things to me like, “You know, even Faulkner didn’t write about black people in the first person.” But ultimately, I decided that letting my African-American characters speak was the only way to give them a small meaure of justice.

      My grandparents are long dead, as are the sharecroppers who worked for them. I often wonder what they all would have thought of the story I made from their stories. Certainly Nana would been horrified by the idea of committing adultery with her brother-in-law; Pappy, who by all acounts was a bigoted jerk, would not have appreciated being killed off for it; and my black characters would undoubtedly have wanted to set me straight about a few things. But my hope is that all of them would be proud that I was so captivated by their stories I had to retell them, and pleased that I’ve painted a lasting, if fictional, picture of their world.

Please visit Hillary Jordan's website at: www.hillaryjordan.com

Kelly Simmons' Backstory

Like so many things, it started with Tom Wolfe and a bottle of Xanax.

       I was at Penn Station, NY, after a terrible meeting with my former agent, who didn’t like the book I’d just labored over. And just as I was contemplating whether I’d ever come up with an idea that would make my agent happy, let alone be published, Tom Wolfe sat down next to me in his pristine white suit and spats. (Did I mention it was January?)

      I didn’t speak to him, because well, I’m me and he’s him. But I took it as a sign: he left a journalism career to write novels mid life, and dammit, so could I! I willed myself to come up with a new idea for a novel before I got off the train. I asked myself a classic question: What story can only I tell? I reached in my purse for a pen (there wasn’t one) and saw my bottle of Xanax. Hmmmm. Could I write about a woman who’s so afraid of things she has panic attacks? That’s a start, but not very special, I thought. (Plus everyone would think it was a memoir.) Then I thought: what if that fear-filled woman did one singularly brave thing? Within five minutes I had the core of the story: about a panicky woman who offers to take her daughter’s place as she’s being kidnapped.

      It was a perfect way to blend my obsession with the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case with a lead character, Claire, who shared many of my own quirks and personal characteristics. Like Claire, I had first-hand knowledge of anxiety and panic disorder, and because of that, I was able to give the fiction an authentic feel. I added other details from my life: a husband who travels, three small daughters, a home under renovation. I did this not because they were familiar, but because they served the story perfectly.

      The manuscript for Standing Still helped me nab a new agent, and she sold it in two weeks. I spent nearly three years revising it with two different editors at Atria, but the core of the story is still the one I sketched out on the train that winter day in a few minutes’ time. Some times the best ideas come in an instant---some times they percolate for years—and sometimes they come to you from an angel wearing white.

      I like to think there was some divine intervention that day—but the truth is, rejection and criticism were part of the equation, too. My agent’s lack of enthusiasm angered me just enough to spur me forward in an “I’ll show them! I’ll show all of them!” kind of way.

       Still, what I remember most about that day was how depressed I was when I got to the station – and how elated I was when I reached my destination. It’s almost enough to make me start wearing white myself. Almost.

      Learn more about Standing Still at my website: www.bykellysimmons.com