Search Heartache: Carla Malden

December 10, 2019 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Search Heartache, Carla’s novel, is out now. We’re delighted to feature this interview and an excerpt!

What was it that made you want to tell this story? What do you hope your readers will take away from your book?

As a young(ish) widow, I found myself becoming infuriated with couples I knew who were trashing perfectly good marriages… or at least what appeared to be perfectly good marriages. I had no choice in losing my husband. I became angry because I felt that they had the choice to preserve their marriages. I also knew that no one can ever really know what the fabric of someone else’s marriage is like. So I became interested in the chasm between those two things: the appearance of a marriage and the reality of a marriage.

For my protagonist, Maura, that chasm exists for her internally. She falls into that chasm and finds herself unmoored. I hope that readers will think about the value of nurturing a marriage and, secondarily, the insidious nature of that home invader: the computer.

How much did you borrow from your own life in creating this book?

Mostly, I borrowed from other people’s lives – or, more accurately, used them as springboards. However, I know what it is like to become obsessed with something. I know what it’s like to pull a thread and end up somewhere you had not anticipated, but that turns out to be inescapable. I know what it’s like to have things loop in your brain that you can’t tamp down.

Do you think Maura changed her opinion about what her husband was doing, or simply learned to accept it?

That is the one of the questions we are left with. But by the end of the book, they have both engaged in what many may see as marriage deal-breakers. This episode in their marriage will always be lying there between them, but they can make the choice to use it as fuel for contention or as the cautionary tale that saved them. We can’t really know how many times either of them is going to bring up the other’s behavior when they’re in the middle of a fight… and which of those times will unravel them again. It’s a possibility. At the end of the book, they are contentedly lying in bed, having weathered this storm, but they are very much at the back of the bus like Benjamin and Elaine in The Graduate.

Is this a subject that you want to write more about in the future?

Yes, I look forward to writing more about relationships. Marriage, in particular, fascinates me because it is the one relationship where the one person is up close and personal with the best and worst of another person on a daily basis. I am currently writing a novel about second marriages.

What do you think is unique about your story?

This is a story about a marriage that is tested in both traditional ways and ways that didn’t exist ten years ago. I gave a lot of thought to developing Maura as a complicated and complex, clearly flawed, character. I love that she can’t get out of her own way. I love that she ends up fighting for what she realizes is all she really cares about.

I also think the Los Angeles/movie industry backdrop helps give it a fun sense of place that not only contributes to the texture of the story, but actually acts as a sort of character in the story.

When you were writing this book, how did you feel about Adam’s behavior? Is it, or should it be, more accepted as part of nature?

I think that Adam’s behavior is not okay. I think he crosses the line. I can understand the impulse to revisit the past, especially since he is at a point in his life that is shot through with a disappointment. He’s at that inevitable is-that-all-there-is moment. However, he actually takes up emotional residence in his past, and that is not okay. Even if emotional cheating is part of human nature — which I don’t believe it is – commitment to another person demands that you ignore that impulse rather than act on it. Like Maura, I believe that his email exchanges with the other woman constitute a betrayal of his marriage. The question is whether it warrants savaging the marriage?

Where did the idea stem from?

The idea stemmed from being a sideline observer of other people’s marriages crumbling. And from an inherent distrust of technology. And a deep interest in exploring how our upbringing seeps into our daily lives as adults, for good and not so good. I was also fascinated by the blurred line between virtual infidelity and actual infidelity. For someone like Maura who lives so much in her head, the line is basically nonexistent; that is her undoing.

Do you think, in the end, this was something that strengthened their relationship or weakened it?

The hope is that this episode strengthened their marriage. The fear is that it weakened it. In reality, it probably did both. It made them aware of a fault line that ran through their marriage that they were heedlessly tromping on all the time. Not until this earthquake happened did they know it was there. Now they will be more careful. They’ll tiptoe when they get close to it and hold each other’s hands when they have to cross it. Or so we hope.

Do you think it’s important for couples to share the truth of these experiences with their children?

Clearly, Maura and Adam want to protect their daughter from the raging conflict in their marriage. They fail miserably. In theory, I think parents should strive to insulate their children from marital strife. In reality, that is probably easier said than done. In any event, I think intimate details between parents should not be foisted on the children. It is always a parent’s job to protect the children.

You portray Maura as a somewhat flawed character; she refuses to get help for her vertigo, she has almost a “me against the world” mentality, etc. It feels very true-to-life. How much of you is in Maura?

There is a lot of me in Maura – the perfectionism, the high expectations, the steadfast belief in right and wrong. The flip side of those qualities can be an uncompromising rigidity that can be unproductive. Maura has a lot of the me I try to tone down, the parts of me that are likely the most difficult to live with – both for myself and the people who actually live with me: stubbornness, the need to be right. She also has some of my more admirable traits, I hope – devotion to family, loyalty, strong moral core.

Did you think it was important to make her imperfect?

I thought it was very important to make her imperfect. The plot is driven by a few huge mistakes that she makes. It is her effort to reclaim her life, despite her imperfections, that makes her struggle poignant and the story meaningful.

What drew you to telling a story about infidelity?

I don’t think infidelity is the deepest crux of the story. However, I was interested in comparing virtual and real-world infidelity. And infidelity lent itself to the story I wanted to tell about this particular woman because it provided a crucible for all of her issues – many swirling around in her since childhood — to boil over. The deeper crux of the story centers around how easily we get in our own way — how expectation and disappointment can trap us.

What is your writing practice?

My writing practice varies depending on what stage of a project I am in. I spend a lot of time percolating. I don’t enjoy writing an outline, but I force myself to make one. There is no guarantee that I will stick to it once I start writing, but it provides a safety net. I also keep a file with all kinds of snippets: lines of dialogue, snatches of description, character insights, any little thing that comes to me that may – or may not – pertain to the project. In terms of ass-in-seat time, a four-hour writing day is a good day… keeping in mind that I’m frequently thinking about my project when I’m driving, grocery shopping, etc., even when I don’t know that I am. When I’m really absorbed, I spend more hours than that. I often have two to three good hours in me in the evening, too.

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Raised in Los Angeles, Carla Malden began her career working in motion picture production and development before becoming a screenwriter. Along with her father, Academy Award–winning actor Karl Malden, she coauthored his critically acclaimed memoir, When Do I Start?. More recently, Malden published AfterImage: A Brokenhearted Memoir of A Charmed Life, a fiercely personal account of battling the before and surviving the after of losing her first husband to cancer. Carla’s feature writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, highlighting the marvels and foibles of Southern California and Hollywood. Search Heartache is her first novel. Carla Malden lives in Brentwood with her husband and ten minutes (depending on traffic) from her daughter.

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SEARCH HEARTACHE: Excerpt

“I’m going to have to start wearing my glasses on one of those chains,” I said. I was sitting on the bed, propped against four pillows, filing the rough spot on a fingernail I had been fidgeting with all day. I stretched my arm out straight, willing my fingers six inches farther away. “You know,” I said to Adam, “those chains you wear around your neck?”

“Like an old lady?”

He was slouched on the foot of the bed in his underwear, remote control in hand, adding the latest channels to the box. Netflix, Prime, Hulu, HBO. Behind these icons, neatly arranged on the screen, was a new generation of media tycoons, flush with cash and buying shows like drunken sailors. My husband was an agent in the motion picture/television department of a major talent agency—his father’s. It was part of his job to make sure the agency was selling what the “entertainment providers” were buying, though entertainment value often seemed the least of the transaction.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. Old lady?

“Nothing,” he said as he added the CarChase Channel to the lineup.

But I knew perfectly well what he had said. Old lady. Old. Lady.

Old.

I thought about filing the rest of my nails to match the newly shortened one, but that seemed several fingers too many to cope with right now. Especially since I couldn’t see.

“Would you turn down the air?” I asked. It was barely early spring, but the temperatures had been late-summer-high the last several days—calm and still, what people in LA sometimes call earthquake weather. I had turned on the AC for the first time since last summer.

Adam didn’t answer. He was watching a promo for the new Ken Burns documentary. This time out: the Dust Bowl. They were hyping it as the worst manmade ecological disaster in history. “I wonder if that’s true,” Adam said.

“What?”
“About the Dust Bowl.”
“People thought it meant the end of the world,” I said, uninterested.

“Maura, people always think everything means the end of theworld.”

“It’s blowing right on me,” I said. “Would you turn off the air?” Adam got up from the edge of the bed and studied the thermostat. The AC shut off with a troublesome click. “That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

“No,” I agreed.

Adam resumed his channel reprogramming. I picked up my book. I had decided that twice a year I was going to read one of the classics that had slipped through the cracks of my education. I was currently slogging through The Great Gatsby, not really enjoying it, but determined to finish.

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,” I read silently. I read the line again, hoping to commit it to memory, along with the Faulkner, Joyce, and Proust I had stored in the hope chest in my brain that I doubted would ever be opened.

“You better call the air conditioning people,” Adam said as he climbed into bed.

I nodded. Done.

Adam rolled onto his side, his back to me, and let out a sigh that said how good it felt to finally be in bed…or, more likely: another day, another dollar. I read to the end of the chapter, then turned out the light.

When I was a small child, I had a recurring nightmare of being chased by a witch. I ran but could not escape, opened my mouth but could not scream. I looked over my shoulder and there she was: the witch, behind me, closer and closer. Until she was close enough to reach out and run a long, pointy fingernail down my back. I would wake up, the last tingle of sharp nail bursting at the base of my spine.

That witch hadn’t made an appearance in forty years. But this particular night, she paid me a call. And when I awoke at 2:00 a.m., nightmare heart thumping, Adam’s side of the bed was empty. I didn’t hear him in the bathroom. I waited a few more minutes, assuming he would appear with a glass of water and, most likely, smelling of Oreos or something else chocolate. I had picked up a pint of Ben and Jerry’s latest concoction, Fifty Shades of Chocolate. If the middle-of-the-night munchies hit, Adam wouldn’t be able to resist.

I knew there would be no falling back to sleep after my nightmare, so I headed down to the kitchen to join Adam, hoping there would be a shade or two left for me. As I passed Adam’s study, the light from his computer caught my eye, its eerie glow a sort of technological Cheshire cat grin suspended in the darkness.

On screen were two bodies. A man and a woman. Naked. Legs entangled. Arms entangled. Flashes of thigh. Flashes of breast. Flashes of who-knows-what, who-knows-where. A man and a woman having sex. As if in a horror movie, from out of nowhere, Adam’s chair rolled slowly up to the desk. I knew the witch would be sitting in it.

I was still trapped in my nightmare. Don’t scream. Don’t wake Adam and Stephanie.

But it wasn’t the witch after all. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was Adam sitting in the chair, his back to the door, his sandy hair matted where a half-hour earlier it had been wedged into his pillow. Something about Adam’s demeanor stopped me from going in, from uttering a word. He sat there, quite still, right elbow on the desk, chin in hand, left hand hovering over the mouse.

I held my breath and took a silent step backward. This was a different kind of nightmare. My husband was watching porn.

On screen, nothing extraordinary seemed to be going on between the sheets. Nothing acrobatic or gymnastic. Barely aerobic. There were no stilettos, no leather, no handcuffs or silken restraints. Just two people in a slightly grainy video. What there did seem to be was a surprising tenderness between these two players, an intimacy that made me look away for a moment, that made me feel like a voyeur. This didn’t feel like a spectator sport. This felt like intruding.

The woman was young, barely more than a girl really. The camera was not stationed at the foot of the bed, but rather off to the side, trained more on her than him. The girl turned her head, opened her eyes, and looked straight into the lens. The man’s shoulder pressed against her cheek, but when he propped himself up, lifting the bulk of his weight off of her, I could make out the girl’s face—deep-set almond eyes, broad forehead, a hollow sculpted by her cheekbones that no amount of cosmetic contouring could create. Her lips were wide and full. They curved gracefully into an upturned smile as she gazed into the camera. I had no idea that porn stars came with such finishing school features. I was about to say something to Adam, something cutting that would make him wither. But just then, on screen, the rhythmic intakes of air and their throaty replies—a sort of guttural call-and-response—were interrupted.

“Oh my God,” said the man’s voice. An involuntary utterance. “Oh my God! Minou…”

Why was Adam talking to the screen? And then the voice spoke again. “Minou.”

Yes, it was definitely Adam’s voice. But it was not coming from him. Not from the Adam sitting there at the desk. But from the man on screen.

Yes. It was Adam on the screen.
Yes. It was Adam on top of the beautiful girl.
Yes. It was Adam making love to another woman.

SEARCH HEARTACHE

When I got home, I did what I had stopped myself from doing earlier. I Googled the name: Aimee Laroche. I wondered what I would have done if I had found myself embroiled in this scenario fifteen, even ten years ago. Would I have hired a private detective to track this woman down? Would I have passed sleepless nights waiting for him to hand over a manila envelope containing long lens black-and-whites of a femme fatale smoking Gauloises at a sidewalk café? Probably not. But Googling was irresistible. Like everything on screen, it required no effort. It was so easy.

Maura Fielder looks like she has the perfect life: every expectation fulfilled. But under the illusory surface of perfection, Maura finds herself blindsided by what she discovers on her husband’s computer. She has no emotional cubby hole into which she can shove this ghost from her husband’s past, so instead, Maura upends her life―thrashing her marriage, alienating her daughter, and eroding her own moral center. On the verge of sacrificing everything she holds dear to her own obsession, how does Maura manage to regain her equilibrium and reclaim her life?

In this post-privacy new world, any woman can find heartache if she searches hard enough.

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