I’d like to thank all the writer-friends who helped midwife the birth of this book; I am forever in your debt. Thank you Elisabeth Sowecke, Sherri Pauli, Catlyn Keenan, Ellen Orleans, and April Joseph; your close readings, line edits, long discussions, and love for Fig truly inspired me to keep going. I am just as grateful to all those who ever workshopped an excerpt of this book, whether at JKS or elsewhere, thank you. And thank you, Julie Kazimer, for providing priceless advice about the world of agents and publication and for supporting me when I most needed it; please know I appreciated every single word.
Several excerpts from the book (as well as the original short story) either won awards or were shortlisted by the following competitions, and I’d like to tip my hat to each one: Winner of the Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction hosted by Third Coast (2011), Finalist for the Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction hosted by New Letters (2011), Finalist for the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize hosted by Hunger Mountain (2011 and 2012), Finalist for the Fiction Contest hosted by Cream City Review (2011 and 2012), Honorable Mention for the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest (2011 and 2012), Honorable Mention for the New Millennium Prize for Fiction (2012), Semifinalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction hosted by Nimrod (2012), Honorable Mention in the WOW! Summer 2012 Flash Fiction Contest, Honorable Mention for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award (2012), Honorable Mention for the Reynolds Price Fiction Award hosted by Salem College (2012), Winner of the Fourth Annual Flash Fiction Contest hosted by Monkey Puzzle Press (2012), Honorable Mention for the Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing hosted by Hunger Mountain (2012), Finalist for the National Writing Contest in Fiction hosted by Alligator Juniper (2012 and 2013), Finalist for the H. E. Francis Short Story Competition (2013), and Winner of the Saturday’s Child Press Fiction Contest (2013). I’d also like to thank Jeff Pfaller and Robert James Russell at Midwestern Gothic for publishing three excerpts, interviewing me, and for generally making me feel like a rock star.
When Hunger Mountain published “The Breaking Wheel” in 2012, editor Miciah Bay Gault, who’d been following the progress of this novel, wrote to say she hoped to get me the attention of a literary agent. I thought Miciah was sweet, but I didn’t actually think anything would come of it. I definitely never expected the amazing Heather Schroder to call me up and ask to represent my first book. Miciah, I will never be able to thank you enough; you truly are the fairy godmother of my particular fairy tale.
Obviously, I am eternally grateful to Heather Schroder and her extraordinary assistant, Julia Johnson; you both worked hard, and because you did, I got to beat my personal best. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I’d also like to thank my editor, Rūta Rimas, and the McElderry team at Simon & Schuster. Without Rūta’s Excel spreadsheets and everyone’s keen eye, Fig would not be the book it is today. I will never be able to thank you all enough.
Last, but not least, I’d like to thank my friends and family: Rozie Vajda, I honestly don’t know where I’d be without you—you are a best friend, a sister, and a soul mate. Thank you, Lesley Evans; you always read my work, and you always have my back. Thank you, Raven Tekwe, for truly believing in me and my work, and for the two celebratory sushi dinners you bought for me. And thanks to Leona Sweat and all the letters we’ve exchanged; you were there for me during some of my darkest hours of self-doubt, and like Raven, you always had faith the book would make it into the world. Now, I’d like to thank my cousins, Claire and Karin; you either promoted me or came to my readings or gave me financial advice. I’d also like to thank my aunt Sallie for being there. And most of all, I’d like to thank my husband, Fish, and our two daughters, Kaya and Story: You three are my everything. I know it’s not easy to share your wife-stepmother-mother with all the characters in my head, but please know this: Without your love, devotion and support, this book would not exist. It’s not just my blood, sweat, and tears on these precious pages, but yours as well.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For me, being a writer is like being a medium. I channel the stories as they come to me. A character forms for me when she or he begins to whisper in my ear. I write what these characters tell me to write. I write their stories.
Fig showed up after I moved into an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado. As long as I don’t look toward the west, I can’t see the mountains, and I might as well be living in Kansas. This house summoned her story. I knew Fig was lonely, intelligent, and devoted to her mother, and I also knew her mother was mentally ill, but I wasn’t sure about the specifics. I began to do some research, and through my findings, I realized Mama was schizophrenic. However, Mama is far more than her disease (just as anyone is with this diagnosis); Mama is an artist, a feminist, an activist, a mother, a wife, an orphan, and a good person.
At the time I first began to flesh out the story, my daughter was still a little girl, and many of my friends were busy having babies. As someone who is still considering becoming a certified doula, I believe women are entitled to certain rights when they give birth. First and foremost, I believe a woman should be able to give birth wherever she is most comfortable doing so, whether that’s at home, a hospital, or a birthing center. While birth is not a medical emergency, I also understand that sometimes birth doesn’t go the way we’d like it to go; “Meconium happens” (old midwife joke).
I was fortunate to have had an ecstatic homebirth with my daughter Story. I gave birth to her in a shotgun shack with no running water on top of a mountain in Tennessee in the winter with the assistance of my midwife; my husband; my bonus daughter, Kaya; two close friends; a cat named Snowball, and the dog, No Name. While my labor lasted a very long twenty-one hours, there were no complications, and from the experience, I learned I was a superhero. The experience was empowering, and afterward, I found I was capable of anything. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes medical emergencies do arise and women must be transported from home to hospital or from delivery room to the operating table. Sometimes women don’t have the option to give birth at home, and sometimes doctors don’t respect a woman’s birth plan. Sometimes women don’t even know they have the right to write a birth plan in the first place, and so they don’t. Sometimes women are forced to give birth in traumatic situations, and instead of feeling empowered, they are belittled. Sometimes C-sections are absolutely necessary, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes C-sections are performed for insurance purposes only, or because a doctor wants to go home, or because there was too much intervention in the early stages of labor.
In Greek mythology, Zeus is the male god who gives birth through his forehead to his daughter, Athena, and the act represents a shift from a matriarchal society into a patriarchal one as Zeus literally steals pregnancy and birth from the female. Sometimes women feel their doctors are stealing their pregnancies and birth when their babies are cut out of them. I knew that Mama’s mental illness was complex, conditioned by both nature and nurture, and I also knew I was rewriting the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Therefore, the emergency C-section echoes the woodsmen and his axe.
Personally, I have never known anyone with schizophrenia, and I wanted to make sure that I got the disease right. I relied heavily on the following texts for my research: Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients, and Providers, fifth edition, by E. Fuller Torrey, MD, and Schizophrenia for Dummies by Jerome Levine, MD and Irene S. Levine, PhD. (The particular copy I own of the latter was ordered used from the Internet and bears the mark of a lighter; I like to imagine someone like Mama trying to set it on fire.) In order to get a more personal understanding of the disease, and specifically, what it would be like to grow up around it, I read the following memoirs: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók, and finally, but perhaps most helpful of all, My Mother’s Keeper: A Daughter’s Memoir of Growing Up in the Shadow of Schizophrenia by Tara Elgin Holley with Joe Holley. I also talked to friends who know schizophrenia firsthand
and I took a writing workshop on “madness” from the author Brian Evenson.
As for creating Fig, I read the book Forever Marked: A Dermatillomania Diary by Angela Hartlin, and I perused the website skinpick.com, reading the articles posted as well as the forums. Obsessive-compulsive disorder manifests in so many different ways, and dermatillomania (also known as compulsive skin picking) is just one of them. As I was developing the character of Fig, I learned the term for something I did as a child, and continue to do: magical thinking. Magical thinking is considered a disorder after the age of seven, and when and if it presents in an adult, it can be considered a possible symptom of schizophrenia (with the exception of religious experiences).
I truly believe there is a fine line between sanity and insanity. What I often joke about as being traits of my own OCD are not really OCD, because rather than causing me harm, the habits serve me. However, while the rituals of a habit can be supportive (like meditating for fifteen minutes every day), they can get out of hand and become destructive (perhaps the meditation practice morphs into agoraphobia and you never leave your house). What I refer to as my magical thinking is really the practice of visualization: I see myself succeed at whatever I am trying to accomplish. I also know when I’m being superstitious; for example, I know that knocking on wood won’t really keep something bad from happening, but it doesn’t hurt to do it as long as I know there are some things in life I cannot control.
I suppose I planted the seed for Mama’s death when I had her reading stacks of books by Virginia Woolf toward the beginning of the story. I like themes to come full circle whenever possible, and to return to Woolf, I had Mama weave lines from Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband, Leonard, into her own speech when she talks to Fig on page 310. While Woolf’s letter is widely available online, I specifically used the copy as provided by The Virginia Woolf Blog. While I used the following lines from her note: “You have given me the greatest possible happiness” and “You have been in every way all that anyone could ever be,” I created a variation of: “You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good” for Mama to say. I believe Mama would have identified with both Woolf, and her last letter, and like Mama I wanted to honor this important literary figure. By quoting Virginia Woolf, Mama’s words take on an agenda, becoming her official farewell.
Fig’s OCD manifests in both healthy and unhealthy ways, and part of her journey is learning how to tell the difference. Fig’s skin picking gets out of control and is a form of self-harm, yet her obsession with looking words up in the dictionary helps her to better understand the world. The dictionary Fig uses in this book was created by me, but to inform the definitions I wrote for Fig, I referenced actual dictionaries and dictionary/etymology websites such as American Heritage Dictionary, third ed.; dictionary.com; etymonline.com; and merriam-webster.com. As for the flower meanings, I employed the following websites: victorianbazaar.com/meanings.html and send-great-flowers.com/meaning-of-flowers.html. And then I had to go and read the exquisite novel The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.
One of my old writing teachers, Junior Burke, talks about the emotional truths that come up in our writing, the little bits of yourself that end up in works of even the purest fiction, and in the end, I think both Fig and Mama are woven from numerous strands of my own DNA. At the same time, they are also one hundred percent who they are and who they were born to be when I first birthed them from my mind. When a writer gets a character right, it’s because that character holds up to the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious, and I hope you, dear reader, find Fig, Mama, Daddy, Gran, Uncle Billy, Sissy Baxter, the Flower Lady, and even Candace Sherman to be as real as both you and me.
SARAH ELIZABETH SCHANTZ literally grew up in a bookstore, aptly named The Rue Morgue—one of the fist mystery bookstores in the U.S. She is an accomplished short-story writer with many awards under her belt. Schantz holds an MFA in writing and poetics from Naropa University. She currently lives with her family in an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, where they are surrounded by open sky, century-old cottonwoods, coyote, and screech owls. This is her fist novel.
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Simon & Schuster, New York
Watch videos, get extras, and read exclusives at
TEEN.SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Sarah-Elizabeth-Schantz
* * *
Thank you for reading this eBook.
Find out about free book giveaways, exclusive content, and amazing sweepstakes! Plus get updates on your favorite books, authors, and more when you join the Simon & Schuster Teen mailing list.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com/teen
* * *
MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
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 © 2015 by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Jacket photograph copyright © 2015 by Kevin Best
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
MARGARET K. MCELDERRY BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
The text for this book is set in Incognito.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schantz, Sarah Elizabeth.
Fig / Sarah Elizabeth Schantz.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1994, Fig looks back on her life and relates her experiences, from age six to nineteen, as she desperately tries to save her mother from schizophrenia while her own mental health and relationships deteriorate.
ISBN 978-1-4814-2358-8 (hardcover)
SBN 978-1-4814-2360-1 (eBook)
[1. Schizophrenia—Fiction. 2. Mental illness—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Self-destructive behavior—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Family life—Kansas—Fiction. 7. Farm life—Kansas—Fiction. 8. Kansas—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.S336Fig 2015
[Fic]—dc23 2014025394
Fig Page 31