Bobbie Jean Huff: On Writing

Bobbie Jean Huff

There are a host of challenges that face every writer, and as a debut novelist I faced some difficult ones with The Ones We Keep, published by Sourcebooks in January 2022.

The book is about a woman, Olivia, who after one of her children has died, decides to walk away from her family. This decision, with its negative consequences for herself and her surviving family members, becomes a lifelong obsession from which she cannot escape. The tragedy is never far from Olivia throughout the novel. Indeed, at various points, and even after her life becomes more ordinary, the tragedy resurfaces in events that lead her back to it, and which she therefore again avoids confronting. However, between times she lives an almost normal, mundane existence.

The challenge for me in writing the book was to portray Olivia with enough empathy that her extraordinary behaviour becomes at least intelligible enough that readers will want to keep reading. One piece of advice for writers of fiction is to “Save the cat.” If your main character makes terrible choices, readers may not empathize with her, and will therefore abandon the book. The solution proposed is to create scenes in which a cat is up a tree, so to speak, and the character rescues it. The reader will then forgive her other sins. At least, that is the theory.

In The Ones We Keep, Olivia doesn’t save treed felines. After thinking about whether she should, I decided that Olivia was Olivia. She came to me more or less fully formed, I never felt as if I were making her up, and it would have felt false to inflict on the poor woman a whole new set of problems in an attempt to explain her bad behaviour to possibly unsympathetic readers. Olivia was left as I found her.

Instead, I decided that the mundane aspects of Olivia’s life would make her easier to understand. We seem to proceed through life, intending one thing at one time, but then later doing something entirely different—or forgetting the first thing entirely. At one point in the novel Olivia, like me trained in classical piano, buys a piano which she then vows never to play. Later—and with no explanation—we find her giving piano lessons. Similarly, in another chapter she vows never again to enter into a romantic relationship, and a later chapter finds her engaged in one. Events like these provide the contrast to offset the tragedy at the center of her behaviour.

My second major challenge occurred when I began to look for an agent. I had unfortunately read an article about ageism in the publishing world, which led me to believe that agents and publishers are not interested in “older” first novelists. The theory behind this is that only second or third novels sell, rarely first ones, and the risk with an older author is that, instead of making public appearances to promote her book, she’ll be dashing off to have suspicious lesions burnt off her face, or performing aqua yoga with other white-haired ladies in a heated pool.

Because of this article, I initially tried to hide my age. And so, a confession: The picture of the young blond woman who at one stage replaced the then seventy-five-year old white-haired lady in my Facebook and Twitter profiles was in fact my niece. Also, during those conversations with agents in which I mentioned being the mother of four sons, there were things I failed to mention: their ages, their four wives, and my five grandchildren.

Happily, I was able to find a wonderful agent who believed in my characters, and who quickly found a publisher who didn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that they were signing someone who had stopped buying green bananas.

During the weeks before my publication date, I obsessively read the reviews on Netgalley and Goodreads, although the advice from experienced authors and from my agent was “Don’t.” The reviews lined up at both ends of the spectrum, but thankfully more on the Love it than Hate it side. Reviewers who didn’t like the novel were mainly focussed on Bad Mother, castigating the book on the grounds that they couldn’t believe in my main character because they themselves would never leave their children. (They obviously didn’t have four sons.) The majority of these early reviewers, though, offered praise for what many said was a sympathetic portrayal of a character whose actions, however incomprehensible to some parents, are nonetheless intriguing.

I believe that it is quite appropriate for fiction to test the extremes. I don’t know why a main character always has to be likable. (Think of Nora in The Dollhouse.) But he or she must certainly be interesting. I hope that’s what I’ve done with Olivia and her family, and also, for that matter, the characters in my next two novels, both completed during the publishing process of The Ones We Keep.

And, of course, the characters in my novels after that. I am, after all, only seventy-six years old.

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Category: On Writing