Caitlin Hicks: On Inspiration

Caitlin Hicks on the inspiration for A Theory of Expanded Love and Kennedy Girl

It could have been the war. Maybe that’s where the story starts. My father pulling on his trousers when the siren sounded, ‘All hands on deck’ but managing to get them up in time to see the Japanese markings on the planes and the Arizona blow up and the battleships California and Virginia, fiery and sinking. My grandmother, turning grey overnight when there was no news of her son, no name in the paper, just the terror of tandem uniforms at the door. 

It could have been Carl Robert’s untimely death in January of 1945 in Alsace Lorraine, a member of the 45th Infantry, mere months before the war was declared over.  

Or it could have been my mother, needing those few moments in church after Sunday Mass, to be alone with prayers for the soul of her young childhood sweetheart, even as her belly swelled with another of my father’s children.

For sure, it was my mother, so talented and sweet and so in love with my father, neither of them ever being able to resist the other.

And then, it could have been the children, all the children that came out of my mother’s body. It could have been each and every one of us who took up space in that family, each child, demanding to be the center of attention. My sister Madcap, for instance, the black sheep of the family. It could have been the night the time she ran off with a Jew.

Or it could have been that Mother died, and we were all left without her.

Of course there’s the fact that I married a good man but the wrong man for the wrong reasons, because Daddy found out we were living together, ‘in sin’. 

Or, the supremely pivotal event in my life of meeting and falling in love unexpectedly with another man, an artist. Everything about this man; the fact that he was an artist, that he was the right reason to leave the wrong man, that he too, came from a big family and that I got pregnant ‘out of wedlock’, but refused to give our baby up for adoption. 

When I moved to Canada and left them all behind. Maybe that’s where it began.

Or perhaps it was Six Palm Trees, the play about life in a huge family; Gord and I writing it together as a comedy routine, with a white statue of the Blessed Mother appearing to me, and all sorts of hilarious things happening, most of them at the lighthearted expense of the Catholic Church and the Little Kids in both our families. 

Perhaps, unbelievably, it was my yearning to be with them all, my desire to perform it for them, especially for them. To hear them laugh, to make them cry. I think about them every day and have held them in my heart every single day of my life.

—

Caitlin Hicks is the author of the 2015 novel A Theory of Expanded Love, which won many awards, including IndieFAB Bronze (now Foreword Indies) and iTunes for “Best New Fiction.” In 2022, the novel won listing on BookRiot’s list of 100 must-read books about Women and Religion alongside celebrated writers Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood, Ann Patchett, Alice Hoffman and more.

The audiobook of A Theory of Expanded Love won NYC BIG BOOK AWARD as a Distinguished Favorite in 2022.Hicks is also an international playwright and acclaimed performer. Her theatrical writing has been performed in Best Women’s Stage Monologues (New York), SheSpeaks (Playwrights Canada Press), and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national radio.

A screen adaptation of Hicks’s internationally toured play Singing the Bones debuted as a feature film at Montreal World Film Festival (2001) and screened around the world. Hicks’s writing has been published in Vancouver Sun, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Fiddlehead, and other publications. Her podcast SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us, captures women’s voices at small and profound moments in their lives.

Kennedy Girl, the follow up of A Theory of Expanded Love is out now.

Learn more at CaitlinHicks.com

KENNEDY GIRL

An uncontrollable series of events transform the lives of two teenagers the night of RFK’s assassination. The unforgettable heroine of A Theory of Expanded Love returns in this coming-of-age adventure about love, justice and the memorable year of 1968.

Seventeen-year-old Annie Shea is feeling good about her life. Performing a solo in a glee club production of HAIR, she has a crush on the show’s star, Lucas Jones, a talented black singer/dancer from Watts. Annie sneaks away from home to volunteer for Robert Kennedy, and proudly rides alongside his car as part of his campaign entourage.

On a hot June night inside the crowded ballroom of The Ambassador Hotel, Annie and Lucas witness the triumph of RFK’s presidential campaign. Seconds later, RFK is shot, and the two follow his ambulance through the streets of LA—a tragic and chaotic ride that upends their young lives forever.

Soon after, Annie ditches her first day of university to drive Lucas and her brother to Canada to evade the law. Throughout the suspense of their hasty road trip up the coast of California, Annie unearths her brother’s unbearable secrets. She connects with Lucas’s generous heart while sorting out justice and privilege, racism, sexuality, love, and the dark forces of war.

In the sequel to the award-winning A Theory of Expanded Love, Annie is determined to find her voice. Thrust into making excruciating decisions, Annie begins to understand the new roles she must navigate as a woman in a fast-changing society, amidst the chaos, danger and social change of the late Sixties.

BUY HERE

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing