This Body

by Laurel Doud

  Perhaps, but she realizes she can't cut herself off completely from them any more than she was able to cut herself off completely from her own family. Yes, she is going to have to live her own life, just as Ben should — but not as selfishly as Thisby did, and truer to one's self than Katharine did.

  She had given Goodfellow the gray tones; perhaps now she's found them herself. The yin-yang was a nice concept, but it was only a concept. Nothing is so definite, so separate, so defined in life. And Katharine was beginning to think there was a certain strength in that.

  “Come on in, Quince. I'm wide awake.”

  Act 5, Scene 5

  As you grow older, you'll find that the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.

  — ZACHARY SCOTT, Mildred Pierce (1945)

  “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.

  “That depends on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

  “I don't much care where,” said Alice.

  “Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

  She's taking the feline's advice; she's hitting the road and it doesn't matter which way she goes.

  The Chinaman was right. A plethora of paths. A phantasm of forks. A congestion of crossroads.

  Katharine realized she had tried to parent Thisby herself, but it hadn't worked. She was going to have to let go of Thisby as a parent. As any parent would. Growing up, letting go, and moving on. Wasn't that the way it was with everyone? Why had she forgotten that?

  She could stay, the Bennets would have her, Quince would have her, but this is the price she will have to pay — for sanity, for a life forged for Katharine and Thisby, in all their strengths and their weaknesses.

  Letting go to survive. But surviving didn't mean reinventing herself, it didn't mean rediscovering herself. It meant opening herself up enough to be able to embrace Thisby. It meant integration and then, ultimately, invention, for wasn't she creating something — somebody — entirely new? For neither extreme — Thisby/Katharine, black/white, yin/yang — was healthy or honest. It's somewhere in between. It's in searching for the balance.

  She traded in the Porsche and bought a Jeep Renegade with a detachable hardtop. Yes, she'll admit it. She half bought it because of its name. Assume a virtue …

  Don't fuck with me, bubba, I've got a dog, two gas tanks, a tattoo, and a fifth gear that will turn you into roadkill.

  She adopted a dog from Quince's veterinary clinic, an attack-trained German shepherd she named Moriarty. He takes his role as the bodyguard very seriously. She is now loved enough to die for.

  She had the tattoo of the two-faced woman permanently inked above her heart. The artist explained to her that it was in actuality a Janus symbol, one face looking back at the past, the other looking forward into the future. Janus is also the god of beginnings, of gates, doorways, and entrances, so her tattoo is now the portal into her new heart.

  She has money. She sold off most of Thisby's possessions to the pawnbroker. If she's frugal, she can go a long way before she gets down to the seeds and stems. Seeds and stems. Drug lingo. From the Woodstock generation. Maybe they'll go north toward Ashland. She hears there are communes in Oregon. The same ones that were started during the sixties. Maybe she'll drop in.

  But she hopes they have grown up too, because the Woodstock generation didn't have it right either. “If it feels good, do it.” “Love the one you're with.” All of that disregarded the connections you have, must have, with the people around you. If you can defy those connections, then that only erects the wall that separates you from everyone else, including yourself.

  She may not know which way she's going to go exactly, but another thing she's discovered on this excellent adventure of hers is that you cannot do everything you want to just because you put your mind to it. You can't have everything you want just because you want it. You do not always get what you deserve.

  Katharine wanted to go back to her family, but she found out there are just some things she couldn't change and had to let go of the idea that she could. You learn what you're supposed to learn, but you don't get to go back — not always. No matter how much you wish it.

  But she also realized that she couldn't give up, let the winds of life batter her back and forth. She began to understand that people are reactive creatures, but if they're not careful, they'll live in reaction, as characters in a play within a play, never taking over and commanding a starring role in their own lives.

  My starring role now, so to speak, is to live — and to connect.

  Quince will be going to the Ashland summer seminar for high school students in a few weeks. Katharine will drop by and say hello, and then she'll go on to Wyoming. Ben's got a summer job there, mucking out horse stables and mending fence posts. Just what he asked for. Marion is planning on visiting him too.

  She'll see the both of them.

  Harrison Ford is his neighbor, and maybe she'll meet him, him and his second wife and their couple of kids. By his first wife, he has two grown sons — Ben and Willard.

  Yes, like the horror movie rat, Ben, and his twitchy human master, Willard. Ford didn't name his kids after characters from a movie any more than I did. But it makes for a good story, doesn't it?

  Hidden stories. Hidden lives. Hidden pictures. The MacGuffin. Kitchen appliances drawn into the scene of a forest. The knot in the tree trunk is also the lid of a pot. Things are hardly ever what they seem.

  And that's okay because I'm making this up as I go.

  Epilogue

  Please you to see the epilogue …?

  — NICK BOTTOM, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.360

  They called her Katharine that did talk of her, but she lied, in faith, for they also called her plain Kate and bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst, and now they will call her KT. No, not Katie. KT. Katharine/Thisby. An amalgamation. A comingling. A grafting.

  Sometimes she still can't help but wonder whether this other existence is but a three-second dream before she really dies in that bed of hers next to Philip, her heart exploding in her chest. It's just seconds long as she mounts a short but steep flight of stairs, almost a ladder, entwined with clusters of bright blue flowers, imagining a lifetime, only to feel the hands of Death once more.

  You may ask, will she try her word again? It's always there in the frontal lobe of her brain. She doesn't know. Two bodies may be enough. Two lives may be enough.

  She doesn't know.

  Maybe I should know better, but I don't.

  Say the magic word, KT.

  Wait …

  FADE OUT

  A Reading Group Guide

  * * *

  Laurel Doud on writing

  This Body

  The first question many people ask me is “What is your book about?”

  When I tell them it's about Katharine, a working wife and mother of two teenagers who dies suddenly and wakes up a year later in the body of Thisby, a twenty-two-year-old drug addict who has just overdosed on her Los Angeles bathroom floor, and in that year Katharine's husband has remarried and her children have seemingly moved on without her, invariably the second question people ask is “Good heavens, how did you think of that?”

  My stock answer is the honest one: it had been a really bad week.

  My children were fifteen and thirteen at the time — difficult ages in anyone's book — and I woke up one morning feeling poor, unattractive, and unappreciated. I thought that I would just like to die and start all over again. But then I realized that I didn't want to be reincarnated with a clean slate for a mind and a baby for a body. I also realized I didn't want to do junior high or high school again. (Shudder.) So I decided I would like to die and come back in the body of a twenty-two-year-old (and, therefore, perfectly legal; I'm much more Katharine, I have to admit — sometimes more than I'd like to admit — than Thisby) with all my memories intact, and I would be thin, rich, and desired by all kinds of new and interesting men.

&
nbsp; That's my romantic side.

  My pragmatic side said, “Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it. You want to be thin? Okay, we'll make you so thin you look anorexic. You want to be rich? Well, then we'll make your money come from drug dealing. You want to be desired by all kinds of new and interesting men? We'll make sure they're really interesting.”

  And suddenly I had the idea for a story — an idea that could perhaps sustain me through the length of a novel.

  In the beginning, my audience consisted of two: my daughter and my son. I thought that if this fantasy/nightmare were really to happen and my children were left motherless, I'd want them to have something in writing about how I felt about raising teenagers, growing older and hanging on to youth, about love and lust, longings and addictions, and about knowing “best” yet letting people make their own mistakes and learn their own truths.

  My publisher calls This Body “a novel of reincarnation,” but it really isn't. It's a novel of transmigration, which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the passage of the soul at death into another body.” (I am a research librarian by profession!)

  It's a minor point, and it really doesn't matter whether it's technically reincarnation or transmigration. For me it was a plot device to explore issues I find much more interesting. If you had a second chance at youth — with all your knowledge, experience, and “wisdom” intact — would it make a difference? By putting Katharine's brain and soul into Thisby's body, I could play with all kinds of questions: Where is our love? Our lust? Are they in the mind or the body? What controls our addictions? If our mind isn't addicted, can it overpower its drug-dependent host, or are there demands of the body that ultimately cannot be ignored? Does the body hold memory? Are our experiences imprinted into our very synapses? Can we tap into them? Would Thisby's memory cells start to break down the barriers to Katharine's mind? Would the two separate entities start to merge, or would they fight — each demanding exclusive control of the body?

  I had the first and last words of the novel in my head that morning. I knew generally how it was going to end; I just didn't know exactly how I was going to get there. I started writing, and the story started to tell itself.

  One aspect of the story that just seemed to happen was the incorporation of Shakespeare, and notably his play A Midsummer Night's Dream, into the plot. This came about after searching for an appropriate name for my young body and finding it in Thisby, a character in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm not a Shakespeare scholar, but annually I visit the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, and I have acquired a love for his work. Rereading A Midsummer Night's Dream, I realized there were similarities between the play and the story that I wanted to present: being forced to wear an ass's head and not knowing it, fighting authority with naïveté and bravado, lovers being mismatched, and, most of all, going into the forest and coming out changed.

  This Body was my first attempt at writing a novel. After spending a month completing the first draft at a writer's retreat, I decided I would see how far I could take the publishing process. It took me five years to get the manuscript into good enough shape to send out to a literary agent. I didn't know anyone in the publishing or creative writing field, and I found my agent the good old-fashioned way, using Literary Market Place to send out sixty cold-query letters over a six-month period. My manuscript was the first one my agent had ever accepted out of her agency's slush pile of unsolicited material, and she sold it to Little, Brown in two weeks. The system does work, and I am proof of it.

  This Body has been optioned by the film studio Fox 2000 (A Thin Red Line, One Fine Day). The director is George Armitage (Grosse Pointe Blank, Miami Blues), and the producer is David Friendly (Courage Under Fire, My Girl). It's a long and hazardous process, but perhaps This Body will be showing at a local theater near you someday.

  Thanks for reading This Body. I hope you find truth and honesty here.

  * * *

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. Katharine's situation might strike some readers as a dream come true: the chance to start one's life anew. Put yourself in Katharine's shoes for a moment. If you were to find yourself awakening as someone else tomorrow morning, what kind of person would you want to be?

  2. At first Katharine has a hard time seeing her predicament as an opportunity. How does she eventually manage to use this “reincarnation” to her advantage? Do you think that, in the end, this mind/body switch was an enriching experience for Katharine?

  3. At the heart of This Body is a constant struggle between the responsibilities of parenthood and the recklessness of youth. Did the novel instill in you a new appreciation for either youth or middle age?

  4. Katharine was allowed to peek into the future — to see her husband with his new family. Would you want the opportunity to see how your family survived without you? Why?

  5. We hear so much today about the importance of the mind-body connection. Does it seem even remotely possible that one person's mind could thrive within another person's body? Take Thisby's addiction as an example; Katharine initially dismisses it, but then falls prey to the physical cravings herself. What does this suggest about the mind-body connection? Have Katharine's mind and Thisby's body made peace with each other by the end of the novel?

  6. There are times when Katharine seems to enjoy being in Thisby's young, thin, attractive body — most notably during her sexual encounters. What do these encounters suggest about the mindbody connection?

  7. Quince seems to accept the “new” Thisby with surprising ease. She is apparently so starved for a sister, any sister, that she doesn't even ask questions about the “new” Thisby's attitude and approach to life. What is the significance of this relationship? What do Katharine and Quince learn from each other?

  8. In the course of the novel, Katharine makes choices about what is right for herself, for her family, for Thisby, and for the Bennet family. Do you agree with Katharine's choices? Do you think she should have been more honest with the Bennets? Do you think Thisby's parents had the right to know that their daughter was dead?

  9. The Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream figures prominently in the life of the Bennet family. How does Katharine use her knowledge of Shakespeare's play to better understand both the Bennet family and herself as a member of it?

  This Reading Group Guide to Laurel Doud's This Body is available also at www.twbookmark.com

  WHAT IF YOU HAD LIFE

  TO LIVE OVER AGAIN?

  _______________________________________

  WHAT IF YOU WERE RICH? WHAT IF YOU WERE

  SKINNY? WHAT IF YOU HAD A SECOND

  CHANCE TO FIND TRUE LOVE?

  Katharine Ashley, in the prime of her life, is a dutiful mother of two whose heart suddenly stops beating. Thisby Bennet is a rich and skinny young woman whose dangerous taste for drugs and men leads to her equally untimely death. When Katharine's departing soul finds its way into Thisby's lifeless body, the story of This Body begins....

  “A frisky, riveting debut... .With Doud's brightly visceral prose and deft sense of tragicomedy, This Body proves equally engrossing for the senses, soul, and mind.”

  -MEGAN HARLAN, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “Lots of fun.... Every woman has had the fantasy of waking up in a younger, skinnier body. But what if you had to die first? And what if the body you came to one year after your death belonged to a freshly OD'd junkie?”

  -CINDY BAGWELL, DALLAS MORNING NEWS

  “Engaging...strangely moving....So weird, it works.”

  -SARA NELSON, GLAMOUR

  “A compassionate first novel.... This Body approaches the uncertainties of life from an angle skewed just enough to give us a glimpse into something we hadn't seen before.”

  -BERNADETTE MURPHY, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  LAUREL DOUD lives with her family in San Jose. California. This Body is her first novel.

  Laurel Doud, This Body