Reunion
Page 31
He scrolled down to the photos. She was so young then—younger than Jill and Jess, who weren’t either of them mature enough to handle motherhood. In his opinion, at least. What would his parents have done if one of them had gotten pregnant?
And… there was the baby picture.
He opened his baby book.
Even as he turned the pages to the one announcing First Photo, he knew what he would find. It was going to take some time, though, to decide what he would do.
Acknowledgments
This, my second novel, was so much a labor of love: Love for writing and for telling a story that engaged my imagination so thoroughly; love for my profession and all the excellent people who publish my work; love for the readers whose responses to my first novel, Souvenir, have humbled me beyond words … To Souvenir’s readers I send my most heartfelt thanks, and to those beginning with Reunion, my warmest welcome.
Second novels are, they say, the hardest to write. The quandary is in deciding how similar the second book should be to the first. I decided to approach the matter much the way a singer might when selecting which songs to record for a new CD. Listeners don’t want the same song on every track—yet they do need to recognize the sound as uniquely that artist’s. Consider this book my track #2, a contemporary, slightly up-tempo offering that I hope is as captivating as readers and reviewers say the first track is.
Novelists work on faith. We sit at our keyboards day after day hoping that what we have to say will be things our readers want to hear. It is my good fortune to have the guidance of a publishing team that can and does steer me so capably as I make my way through to each story’s end, and beyond. I’m grateful to Linda Marrow, Libby McGuire, and Gina Centrello, whose faith in me is invaluable. Wendy Sherman, who has championed me from the beginning, is tops. I appreciate so much the efforts of the crew at Ballantine: Brian McLendon, Sarina Evan, Kim Hovey, Katie O’Callaghan, Christine Cabello, Junessa Viloria, Kate Collins, Dana Isaacson—and Charlotte Herscher. No less valued are Jenny Meyer and Michelle Brower. It takes a village …
I treasure the camaraderie and support of my writing pals, who know better than anyone else the struggles that take place at the keyboard and behind the scenes.
Most of all, I treasure and thank my enthusiastic family (and not only for the unpaid publicity efforts!). My husband, Andrew, and our four boys get both the pleasures and the pain of living with a “creative type,” and seem to love me just the same.
A Conversation with Therese Fowler
Random House Reader’s Circle: What was your inspiration for writing Reunion?
Therese Fowler: This will sound crazy, but the first seed of inspiration was my reaction to the ending of the movie Something’s Gotta Give. I wanted to write a younger-man-older-woman story that turned out the way I thought the movie should have.
That gave me a basic plot frame, but the substance of the story really grew from my longtime interest in celebrity, and from my own childhood experiences of growing up yearning for a better life than the one I was living.
RHRC: This is your second novel; did you find it easier to write Reunion?
TF: Not really. In fact, second novels are widely considered to be harder to write, and I have to agree. There is the difficulty of figuring out how to craft a new story that’s both similar to and different from the first. There is the distraction of the first book’s publication and the activities that go along with it. With the second book you do a lot of second-guessing. Sometimes you have the pressure of a looming deadline. And you can only hope that you can figure out what you did right the first time and do it again.
I’m starting on my fourth book now, and as far as I can tell, the next book is never easier than the one before it. I just worry about different things with each one. Even so, I love writing novels, and feel so fortunate that this is my job. I’m living out a dream that took forty years to come true.
RHRC: There’s a great line in Reunion about how some people are spotlights and some are reflectors. What did you mean by that? Which of the characters are spotlights and which are reflectors?
TF: Some people live outwardly; they shine with their own power, drawing attention to and illuminating whatever they come into contact with. Others live more inwardly. They’re quiet about their passions, blending into the scenery and only shining when light is turned their way. As for which characters are which, I’ll turn that question back to you and the readers.
RHRC: I loved all the bird imagery in Reunion. Are you a bird watcher? Did you have to research the different types of birds you wrote about?
TF: My husband was a casual bird watcher when I met him, and as I got to know him, I grew more and more interested in both him and birds. Where the birds were concerned, I became fascinated by the amazing variety of colors and markings, the differences in sizes and habits, the fact that some birds are carnivorous predators while others are passive seed-eaters. (My husband, incidentally, is an omnivore.) We love traveling and spending time outdoors; searching out birds we haven’t seen before gives every trip an extra bit of purpose and pleasure.
I did have to do a fair bit of research in order to know which kinds of birds can be seen in which locations—which is how I discovered that macaws and parakeets live in the Keys not by nature but because they escape or people release them there. Key West is a haven for all kinds of orphans and runaways.
RHRC: Key West is so wonderfully portrayed and described in Reunion—you really made it come alive. Did you make a special trip to Key West for this book? Have you ever visited the Hemingway Home?
TF: Thank you! Key West has always intrigued me, so it was a treat to do the research for the book—and yes, I did visit as part of that research, including an extensive Hemingway Home and Museum tour. The fact that Hemingway’s writing studio is painted the same soothing, pale shade of blue as my home office makes me wonder if there’s something about that shade that’s conducive to writing.
Blue’s fascination with the house during Mitch’s tour for TBRS is really my own. It isn’t so much that I revere Hemingway—his work is for the most part darker than I like—but there’s no discounting his place in literary history.
Key West, with its multiple personalities, its varied history and unique location, is such a rich setting to work with. It’s also a lovely place to spend time. Whether or not I set a future story there, I can’t wait to return.
RHRC: Daniel is such a fantastic and charming character and I love his split personality. Why did you choose Ken Mattingly as his alter ego?
TF: Really, this happened of its own accord, odd as that sounds.
So much in my storycrafting process and the choices I make is subconscious, and occurs literally the moment I’m typing the words. Of course, the information that inspires such choices has to be rattling around somewhere in my brain, right? I’m sure I learned about Mattingly, and all the Apollo astronauts, in elementary school—and I was struck by his role in the events of Apollo 13, which Gary Sinise portrayed beautifully in the movie Apollo 13.
Now, why he came to mind in conjunction with Daniel and the stroke is beyond me, but I can tell you that when that happened, I loved it instantly.
RHRC: Marcy waited years for Blue to reveal what brought upon her teenage rebellion and angst. Do you think that you could be as patient a friend as Marcy?
TF: Marcy assumed all along that it was a case of love gone wrong—but even at the time she and Blue first ran into each other at the convenience store, she didn’t probe for information. I think Marcy lives in “now,” and so is never burdened by or especially concerned with what’s past. Patience, then, is easy for her.
As for me, I’m pretty laid back, definitely more patient than not, so unless I felt there was something important to accomplish by probing for information, I probably could let the matter lie indefinitely. Like Marcy, I’m primarily concerned with what’s going on in my friends’ lives now, along with how things are shaping up for their futures.
TF: No, but I do think that those who are willing to do so stand a better chance of success. And I think the business certainly can be soul-sucking even to those who didn’t intend to give in to the pressures. It’s heartening to know that there are many who’ve resisted and still managed to become hugely successful, even iconic: Paul Newman comes to mind, and Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Barbara Walters. Nice guys don’t always finish last.
RHRC: I’m really intrigued by the opening quote for Part Four. “Make the most of your regrets … To regret deeply is to live afresh”—Henry David Thoreau. Why did you choose this quote?
TF: I chose this not only for the way it frames the part of the story that’s ahead, but because it’s a message everyone needs to hear. Regret is often seen as a waste of time and energy, something to be avoided lest it weigh us down and prevent us from moving forward. Thoreau knew, though, that if a person truly embraces the emotion, he or she will be compelled to make important changes, to understand, learn from, and amend mistakes, and to live a fuller, better life from that point forward.
RHRC: What are you working on now?
TF: I’m doing a lot of planning for the release of my third novel, Exposure, which my publisher is calling “a deftly crafted, provocative, and timely novel that serves as a haunting reminder of the consequences of love in the modern age.” It’s based on real events my family endured in 2009. It will be in stores on May 3, 2011; I hope readers will look for it, as well as my debut novel, Souvenir, with my thanks.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Blue had a flighty mother who frequently left her to take care of herself, while Julian grew up torn between a mentally unstable mother and a distant father. How much can we blame our parents for our troubles later on? Do you feel Blue and/or Julian blame theirs?
Do you think Blue would have kept the baby if she’d sought out and received her mother and sister’s support?
Should Mitch have fought harder against Renee’s bullying and threats? What was at stake for each of them?
Was it selfish of Blue to try to locate her son?
Blue’s sighting of Daniel is a catalyst for the nostalgia she experiences while walking through Old Town and while at the house there, which is then brought to a fine point when she sees Mitch later at dinner. Is nostalgia always behind the rekindling of an old romance? How might it be dangerous? How might it be beneficial?
Do you think the best photographers are connected to their subjects, or disconnected from them? In what ways might both be true about Julian?
What did the shop owner mean when she told Blue “you brought it all with you”? Do you believe strangers can be so attuned to people they’ve just met, or was this more likely coincidence combined with Blue’s guilty conscience?
Julian and Brenda both thought that Mitch would be a sell-out if he sold Literary Lions to a cable show. Do you agree? Why is PBS seen as more respectable than a cable network?
Why did Renee wait so many years to tell Julian the truth about what happened between her and Mitch? Why do you think she chose that moment to reveal all the facts?
When Blue asks how her mother knows that Calvin is “The One,” Nancy tells her that she and Calvin like the same things, and want the same things—but that such a simple-sounding truth is really not so simple. What does she mean?
Might Blue have forgiven herself for her choices and moved forward sooner if not for the way events unfolded? Conversely, was the crisis exactly what she needed to get her moving forward?
The author has said that the ending was not intended as a cliff-hanger. Since that’s the case, what do you think she intended by it? What, if anything, should happen next between Blue and her son?
Read on for a preview of
Therese Fowler’s captivating new novel
EXPOSURE
AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER FROM
BALLANTINE BOOKS
1
Nine hours before the police arrived, Anthony Winter stood, barefooted and wild, on the narrow front porch of the house he shared with his mother. The painted wooden planks were damp and cool beneath his feet, but he hardly noticed. In his right hand he held a fallen maple leaf up to a sun that was just breaking the horizon. In his left he held his phone. He squinted at the leaf, marveling at its deep blood-orange color, amazed and happy that nature could make such a thing from what had, only a few weeks earlier, been emerald green, and before that, deep lime, and before that, a tight, tiny bundle of a bud on a spindly limb, waving in a North Carolina spring breeze. He’d always been an observant person; he hadn’t always been so romantic. Amelia brought it out in him. She brought it out in everybody.
When she answered his call, Amelia’s voice was lazy with sleep. It was a Monday, her day to sleep a little later than she could the rest of the week. Tuesday through Friday, she rose at five thirty to get homework done before her three-mile run, which came before the 8:50 start of their Ravenswood Academy school day. At three o’clock was dance—ballet, modern, jazz—then voice lessons twice a week at five; often there was some play’s rehearsal after that, and then, if her eyelids weren’t drooping like the dingy shades in her voice teacher’s living room, she might start on her homework. But more often she would sneak out of her astonishing house to spend a stolen hour with him. With Anthony. The man (she loved to call him that, now that he’d turned eighteen) with whom she intended to spend all of her future life, and then, if God was good to them, eternity to follow.
Seeing Amelia and Anthony together, you would never have guessed they were destined for anything other than a charmed future, and possibly greatness. Perhaps Amelia had, as her father was fond of saying, emerged from the womb coated in stardust. And maybe it was also true what Anthony’s mother claimed: that her son had been first prize in the cosmic lottery, and she’d won. They were, separately, well-tended and adored. Together, they were a small but powerful force of nature. Love makes that of people, sometimes.
That morning, nine hours and perhaps five minutes before his arrest, Anthony stood on the narrow front porch with a leaf and a phone in his chilly hands. Amelia was saying, “I dreamt of us,” in a suggestive voice that stirred him, inside and out. He heard his mother coming downstairs, so he pulled the front door closed. Unlike the rest of his school’s faculty, she knew about Amelia and him; in her way, she approved. Still, he preferred to keep his conversations private. There were certain things even an approving mother wouldn’t want to hear. Certain things he absolutely did not want her to know.
2
At 8:35 that morning, Amelia parked her car in the student lot and sat with the engine running, keeping warm until Anthony arrived as well. She was still smiling with her recollection of his words, spoken softly as she’d swum up out of sleep and into the day. He’d quoted her Shakespeare:
No sooner met, but they looked;
No sooner looked but they loved;
No sooner loved but they sighed;
No sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason;
No sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy.
She knew the lines by heart. She had been Rosalind, he Orlando, in last year’s school production of As You Like It. And while the lines were Rosalind’s, about her cousin’s love for Orlando’s brother, this was, after all, their story, in verse.
No sooner looked but they loved.
Love at first sight. Amelia, sixteen when it struck, a focused high school junior whose romantic experience with boys was tenuous and limited, hadn’t believed it could happen to someone like her. But as with anything that a person dismisses and then experiences in full force—a hurricane, the Lord, a visit from a ghost—she was converted instantaneously. With her heart pierced as surely as Shakespeare’s lovers’ had been, she became Immediate Love’s happy evangelist—quietly, though. Selectively, so that her
father would not find out and ruin everything.
Whenever her most trusted girlfriends heard her talk about seeing Anthony across the stage at auditions, of falling for him before he’d even spoken a single word, the girls gravitated toward her like she was fire and they were chilled travelers of a hopeless, barren snowscape. Oh, to be loved. To have love, true love, not the pistol-in-my-pocket variety they were offered all too often. Or worse: the lurid, online-porn-fed ambitions of the most heinous of their rich-boy classmates, whose ideal woman was an oversexed Lady Gaga in fishnet and pasties. No. To be Amelia, who had Anthony, that was the dream these girls nurtured. Anthony was passionate. A nonconformist. Perhaps best of all, Anthony was a secret.
They were sure Amelia’s father, Harlan Wilkes, would kill her, or maybe Anthony, or maybe both of them, if he found out Amelia was not just dating someone he disapproved of but was, in planning a future with Anthony Winter, deceiving her father in every possible way. The girls talked about Amelia’s risky love with dewy, faraway expressions, with smiles and sighs. They trailed Anthony like ladies of the court, always respectful of Amelia’s claim on him but, at the same time, always angling to be the one he might turn to should anything ever go wrong.
Sitting there in the parking lot, Amelia watched car after car—many of them luxury models bought from her father’s franchises—pull in to the lot and park while the heater’s air warmed her skirt-bared legs. Save for the pleasure of seeing Anthony, she didn’t want to spend yet another day at Ravenswood. She’d been attending school there on the forested, esteemed campus since she was four years old. The buildings and grounds, the sports fields, the stadium, the teachers and staff, the classrooms, the gym—nothing seemed to have changed in all that time. There were new students every year, yes, but they were, for the most part, replicas of all the students who had come before them, and models for the ones who would come after. Amelia knew the word for her feelings: ennui. She knew the remedy, too: escape.