On (Re)Writing Real-Life Tragedy

On (re)writing real-life tragedy

Every author who comes out with a new book gets asked, “What was your inspiration for writing this story?” For Three Days Missing, it was two things that happened all at once.

The first was an idea that woke me up in the middle of the night. A child goes missing during an overnight school trip under strange and mysterious circumstances. That child became Ethan, a brilliant but awkward kid, a social outcast who’s bullied for his brains by another kid in the class, one who looks a lot like Ethan.

I don’t think you have to be a parent to put yourself in his mother’s shoes. Anyone can imagine how it would feel to have a police officer show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night with news of a loved one, the terror and the confusion and the pressure of a constantly ticking clock where every second counts. This part of the story is—thankfully–100% fiction.

The second part of my inspiration, however, hits a lot closer to home. In Three Days Missing, Ethan’s mother Kat is in the midst of a very ugly, very public divorce from an abusive husband when Ethan disappears. Of course the first person she suspects is her soon-to-be ex, this man who’s not allowed within a hundred feet of her, the one she’s fighting for custody. Kat’s story was one part fiction, two parts true.

It’s a seed that was planted a few years ago, when one of my dearest girlfriends called me up out of the blue to say her husband had beaten her. The kind of beating that results in two black eyes, a cheek swollen to twice its size, a sprained wrist, a finger mangled and broken in multiple spots, and bruises over a good part of her body. We’ve all seen those awful images. For me it was always in magazines or on TV—never in real life, and never with someone I knew. Someone I essentially consider family. By the time we hung up the phone, I hated her husband, but I hated myself more.

The thing is, I didn’t know. Until she called me that day, I had no idea of the abuse that was going on in her home. Even though we were the type of friends to talk daily, sometimes multiple times. Even though our husbands were friends and our boys were friends and I spent as much time in their house as she and her family did in mine. We’d been on girl’s weekends and family vacations, skiing and to New York City and Miami and once, a whole week on a boat together in the Caribbean — if that’s not close quarters, I don’t know what is. And all that time, I didn’t have the slightest clue.

She told me the attack was the first time he’d actually hit her hard enough to break her bones, but there was also that time he’d twisted her arm until she screamed, and another time he’d pinned her to the bathroom floor.

What she knew then and I have learned since, is that violence never goes backwards. It only gets worse. Rougher, more aggressive, more hurtful and cruel. For my friend and her twenty-plus-year marriage, that attack was the last straw. She changed the locks, got a restraining order, had her husband arrested, and then she found a lawyer and filed for divorce.

She’s one of the strongest people I know, and it’s this strength that I gave to my character Kat. Partly because I still carry a lot of guilt for not being there for her before the attack, though she’d tell you I’ve more than made up for it since. She’d also say I didn’t know because she engineered it that way, playing her role of suburban wife and happy soccer mom to a T. Abuse is often like that — a couple’s dirty little secret. She’d become a master at keeping theirs.

So here was a story that presented itself to me on the proverbial silver platter. By then my friend was divorced, and I’d had a front-row seat to all the drama. I also had her blessing to use everything I’d seen and heard in one of my books. She’s fully aware that by escaping her abuser and taking back her power, she was one of the lucky ones. If her story — Kat’s story — motivated even one reader to do the same, she wanted me to tell it.

But I write fiction, so it wasn’t just a matter of transcribing what happened to my friend onto the page. I also wanted to protect her privacy so I gave her a disguise, a head-to-toe makeover with a new name, new hair, a new way of talking and thinking and walking. I changed details in her past, gave her a different job, added skills and hobbies she doesn’t really have. By the time I was done with her, she was virtually unrecognizable.

Now, six years post divorce, my friend is fine, and so is our friendship. The scars she carries are mostly emotional, and I got to rewrite her story. I got to turn her into the heroine and her ex into the evil, mustache-twirling villain. Even if nobody but she and I knows it’s him, it still feels a little bit like revenge — the good kind. The noble kind.

And in my own, small way, I got to give my girlfriend the ending she deserved.

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Kimberly Belle is the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of four novels: The Last Breath, The Ones We Trust, The Marriage Lie, and Three Days Missing. Her third novel, The Marriage Lie, was a semifinalist in the 2017 Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Mystery & Thriller and has been translated into a dozen languages. A graduate of Agnes Scott College, Kimberly worked in marketing and nonprofit fundraising before turning to writing fiction. She divides her time between Atlanta and Amsterdam.

Keep up with Kimberly on Facebook (www.facebook.com/KimberlyBelleBooks), Twitter (@KimberlySBelle), Instagram (@KimberlySBelle) or via her website at www.kimberlybellebooks.com.

 

THREE DAYS MISSING, Kimberly Belle

Kimberly Belle delivers the goods—a rocket-paced story with a heart that will keep you riveted through every hairpin twist and turn. Breathless suspense!” —Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of The Red Hunter

When a child goes missing, two mothers’ lives collide in a shocking way in this suspenseful novel from the bestselling author of The Marriage Lie.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: the call that comes in the middle of the night. When Kat Jenkins awakens to the police on her doorstep, her greatest fear is realized. Her nine-year-old son, Ethan, is missing—vanished from the cabin where he’d been on an overnight class trip. Shocked and distraught, Kat rushes to the campground, but she’s too late; the authorities have returned from their search empty-handed after losing Ethan’s trail in the mountain forest.

Another mother from the school, Stef Huntington, seems like she has it all: money, prominence in the community, a popular son and a loving husband. She hardly knows Kat, except for the vicious gossip that swirls around Kat’s traumatic past. But as the police investigation unfolds, Ethan’s disappearance has earth-shattering consequences for Stef, as her path crosses with Kat. As the two mothers race against the clock, their desperate search for answers reveals how the greatest dangers lie behind the everyday smiles of those they trust the most.

“No. Nails. Left…”  Barbara Bos, Managing Editor Women Writers, Women’s Books

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing