Be Safe I Love You: A Novel
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7. Why does Lauren have such conflicted feelings for Shane? Why did she stop communicating with him while she was in Iraq and yet seek him out as soon as she arrived home? Discuss the divergent paths they took and their motivations for doing so—Lauren joining the military and Shane attending college. How does each one view the other’s decision?
8. Lauren found comfort inside the church building while she took vocal training with Troy. How has she viewed the stations of the cross (reverential depictions of the final hours of Jesus) differently since returning from Iraq? Share your thoughts on her religious views, including why she believes “battlefield baptism” was among the worst things she saw while in Iraq.
9. Most of the townspeople’s perception of Troy differs from reality. In what ways is he a role model to Lauren and the parental figure she didn’t have? After her return, why does Lauren refuse when Troy or others ask her to sing?
10. When Danny was a child, Lauren read him Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Why is Danny so fascinated by this fairy tale? How do the events in The Snow Queen parallel what takes place in his and Lauren’s own lives?
11. Despite the fact that Jack is adequately caring for Danny, why does Lauren proceed with her plan to take her brother away from Watertown? Is she doing it more for Danny, as she claims, or for herself?
12. Why does Lauren believe she was “kept in a woman’s prison” while serving in the military? How does she equate it with the years she spent keeping house and caring for her father and Danny? Why is Lauren upset when Danny tells her that their father’s crippling depression was alleviated in a matter of weeks with medication?
13. How does the author build and sustain suspense throughout the story? Were you surprised when the truth was revealed about Daryl? Why or why not? Looking back, what clues do you see along the way?
14. Be Safe I Love You illuminates the personal cost of war to each individual soldier and to their families. In addition, how does the novel illustrate the broader issues associated with war, including politics and corporate interests?
15. Do you agree with the author that there is a cultural tendency to romanticize war? Why or why not? When Lauren confides in Troy that she did terrible things, he says to her, “Of course you did. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Why does he offer her this advice?
A Conversation with Cara Hoffman
Q: What prompted you to write a war-themed novel? Was it something you were considering for some time, or was there a particular moment when you realized it was a topic you wanted to explore?
A: We live with war. The United States has permanent military bases throughout the world. The foundation of our culture is exploitation and conquest. There are many books written about battles, but there are few written about how deeply enmeshed our personal lives—our livelihoods, pleasures, and entertainments—are with war. And very few novels deal with what life is really like for families of returning soldiers.
Q: Why did you opt to have the central character be a female soldier? What particular challenges do female soldiers face?
A: The main challenge that women in the military now face is constant risk of sexual assault by the people they are serving with. It’s something I didn’t write about in Be Safe I Love You, but it would be wrong not to mention here. Rape in the military is at epidemic proportions. Apart from that, women have additional issues when they return home. Particularly if they are parents and expected to be nurturing and to be caregivers for an entire family, women face humiliating kinds of gender-based discrimination at home in addition to those they faced at war.
Q: There are so many vivid details in the story about a soldier’s life in and out of uniform—from Lauren’s thoughts on battlefield religion to the emotions she experiences after she returns home. What research did you do for Be Safe I Love You?
A: I interviewed veterans. And my brother was a combat veteran who did two tours of duty and worked as a military contractor. I’ve spent a good amount of time around military people since I was a child and have a good idea of what that culture is like. The character of PJ was inspired by a close family friend who was a Vietnam vet and civil rights activist.
Q: Authors are often asked if they share similarities with their novel’s protagonist. How do you feel about this common trend that links authors’ personal lives with their work?
A: I think there’s been a serious cultural shift in the way people read and receive fiction. The shift was influenced first by the rise of the memoir as a genre, and second by forms of visual media and social media, which normalized self-exposure. I write fiction, not memoir. So I am more interested in talking about language and craft and ideas than I am about my personal life. The characters in my novels, like the characters in all novels, are the result of research, imagination, and experience.
Any personal similarities I have with the characters are pretty generic. I come from upstate, from an Irish Catholic family. I have an older brother who is a soldier and a younger brother who is a brainy sort of guy. But my experience of loving them, of caring for them is universal. Readers might link my experiences with the Danny character, but that would be a mistake. In many ways, we’re all Danny. Living in a military culture and coping one way or another with the fallout of things soldiers have done, the burdens they’ve taken on under the guise of protecting us, the way they shape us and the world we live in. I guess my answer to this question is Be Safe I Love You is fiction. And I’d like to keep my personal life private. But I will say that anyone looking for clues about where my life and upbringing intersect with the novel need look no farther than Troy, the Patricks, or the postindustrial towns of upstate New York.
Q: But what about Lauren? In the novel Lauren trains as a classical singer. Is this a talent you share with her?
A: Yes. I trained as a vocalist and sang and performed classical music when I was young, often with my stepbrother, who was a classical concert pianist and accompanist. I went to juried competitions and performed pieces from operas. I still sing sacred music with a choir and enjoy the music my son composes. Had I stayed in school I’d likely have become a musician like him instead of a novelist.
Q: What made Watertown, New York, the ideal setting for Be Safe I Love You?
A: There is a military base in Watertown; it has one of the highest suicide rates in New York State, and it’s close to Canada. In many ways it’s the quintessential upstate town.
Q: You note that Be Safe I Love You is a homage to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and his work, in particular his autobiographical novel Journey to the End of the Night. What other books and authors have influenced or made a lasting impression on you?
A: That would be a long list! And most of the people on it would be French. Céline changed the way people read. He changed our whole conception of narrative. The work is visceral and immediate in a way that I think is unsurpassed. I have read passages from Death on the Installment Plan that made me laugh so hard I was crying, and at the same time made me feel like throwing up. He’s a genius. I also love Jean Genet, Gustave Flaubert, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginie Despentes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. I love George Orwell—as folks who’ve read So Much Pretty know. And then the Americans: Paul Bowles, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor. It may sound strange but I’ve read with total pleasure everything by Philip K. Dick—including the first 500 pages of the Exegesis which is just a lunatic work. I love PKD. Because his books are about Gnostic philosophy and identity and fighting against a false authoritarian world—but the stories are about people living on Mars or spying on themselves from inside disguises. I’ve been deeply affected by David Wojnarowicz’s work, particularly The Waterfront Journals and also Close to the Knives, which resonates with me the same way that Céline’s Journey does—in my view it’s a perfect book. I come back to it over and over again. It’s a source of strength and inspiration, raw and real and filled with beauty and rage. When I read it I feel awed and excited, and very sad that he didn’t sur
vive the plague.
Q: You’ve mentioned in interviews that there is a tendency toward “romanticizing war as a thing that gives life meaning, war as inevitability.” Do you see that view changing with novels about the Iraq war that have been published recently? Why was it important to you not to take that direction with Be Safe I Love You?
A: I have no patience for the narcissism of war narratives. People think murder adds gravitas and mystery to their work. But nothing is more superficial, more underdeveloped or unenlightened, than violence and killing. There are ways to write intelligently about war and violence, ways that demystify the mundane causes and get somewhere more interesting and significant, but that kind of work is rarely undertaken. Fetishizing violence and killing, studying battles and weapons, getting a vicarious rush from reading about or seeing brutality is literally the definition of a perversion. It’s an ignorant practice. The fact that any of it carries weight in our culture is laughable. War is state-sanctioned murder. There’s nothing lower than that. It is the conscious misdirection and exploitation of men’s bodies and of hypermasculinity, in order to steal and profit from others’ misery. I don’t see that books such as The Yellow Birds take a different direction; the language is utterly lovely but the story is still one of men suffering because of the suffering they’ve inflicted. And it still reinforces the dominant paradigm. It’s time to do something wholly new. Helen Benedict’s The Sand Queen was an inspiration and a good start toward capturing the big picture. David Finkel’s nonfiction The Good Soldier is brilliant. But the longer we continue to tell epic tales of cowboys and Indians, the longer we’ll remain in a kind of cultural infancy. It’s thumb sucking, plain and simple.
The short answer to your question is that I couldn’t take the direction of romanticizing war because I don’t write propaganda for the government. Poverty and propaganda are what make kids strap on suicide vests, join the Taliban or the IRA or the RUC, help destroy their neighbors with machetes, or leave their jobs at the Dairy Queen and travel thousands of miles to dump white phosphorus on an entire town. I won’t have any part of that propaganda. I won’t pretend for a minute that there’s any meaning at all in that kind of brutality. This is the main way in which the book is a homage to Céline, who understood these things as a soldier and as an anarchist.
Q: “Home is not always the safest place for a returning warrior,” you write in Be Safe I Love You. What strides have been made in recent decades to support soldiers when they return from war? What still needs to be done?
A: People can make donations to the Service Women’s Action Network, which works to end sex discrimination and reform veterans’ services.
The “strides” that have been made to support soldiers clearly have to do with transport and medical support in the field. The prosthetics and physical rehabilitation that people can get today are amazing. More soldiers are surviving combat than before because of it. But the suicide rate for returning soldiers is high. The fact is, these folks often end up dead or homeless or abusing or killing people close to them after returning from combat. Talking about what should be done once people return is really talking around the problem. Obviously creating a society where military intervention is not the norm is the goal. But gender exploitation of men to commit violence is not going to change any time soon. So it’s a good question. What do you do once you’ve trained a person to murder and then sent him out to experience extreme trauma? What do you do to help those people? I don’t know.
Q: What would you most like readers to take away from Be Safe I Love You?
A: An understanding of how important fraternity is, actual brotherhood, siblinghood, mutual aid, and solidarity—not false brotherhood created by the trauma of war. The book is about how relationships based on hierarchies are detrimental. And how the creative force is lifesaving. It’s about how history and the worship of patriarchal narratives threaten our future. It’s about the power of autonomy and equality, and the terrible things you have to face about the world in order to get that power. It’s about love.
Q: Be Safe I Love You is your second novel, after So Much Pretty, the story of a reporter who investigates the death of a young woman in a small town. What is your next novel about? Does it share any themes or other similarities with your first two books?
A: My third novel is about a homeless teenage girl living in Athens, Greece, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, who gets involved in some illegal activities. Just as in So Much Pretty and Be Safe, it’s an examination of institutional violence—and how we cope with and transcend it. There’s a Camus quote that I think sums it up nicely. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Enhance Your Book Club
Pair your reading of Be Safe I Love You with Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, a book that had a profound influence on Cara Hoffman.
Suicide is now the leading cause of death for US service members and veterans, far outstripping combat-related deaths. Please consider making a donation to the Service Women’s Action Network to help end sex discrimination, reform veterans’ services, and ensure high-quality health care and benefits for women veterans and their families.
Go to servicewomen.org, or write to: Service Women’s Action Network, 220 E. 23rd Street, Suite 509, New York, NY 10010.
Arvo Pärt is Lauren’s favorite composer. Listen to his music while reading Be Safe I Love You.
Lauren’s favorite poem is “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. Incorporate a reading of the verse into your discussion of Be Safe I Love You.
Visit CaraHoffman.com to learn more about the author and her books.
About the Author
Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed novel So Much Pretty.
Hoffman grew up in upstate New York, part of northern Appalachia, where she studied classical voice. She dropped out of high school and spent her late adolescence travelling and working as an agricultural laborer and runner in Greece and the Middle East.
In the 1990s she returned to the United States, had a baby, and found a job delivering newspapers, which eventually led to full-time work as a staff reporter.
She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s University, Goddard College, Columbia University, and Oxford University, where she lectured on violence and masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. She lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College.
ALSO BY CARA HOFFMAN
So Much Pretty
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Cara Hoffman
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2014
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Text design by Paul Dippolito
Jacket design by Matthew Lenning
Jacket photograph by Marc Lepson and Sam Li
Author photo by Constance Faulk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffman, Cara.
Be safe I love you / Cara Hoffman.—First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Veteran reintegration—Fiction. 2. Depressed persons—Family relationships—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.O4775B4 2014
813'.6—dc23 2013011118
ISBN 978-1-4516-4131-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-4133-2 (ebook)
Contents
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Epigraph
Part One
Prologue
Chapter Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four