The Alchemy of Fiction

The alchemy of writing fiction. 

By Victoria Costello

Joan Didion said we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I wonder if we also change our stories in order to heal.  

It was my go-to trauma. Seven-year-old me finding my father passed out drunk on the floor of our flooding basement, with an empty booze bottle floating at his feet. I feared he might be dead, but I was more afraid of my mother’s wrath should I run upstairs and tell her. So I laid my cheek on his chest and waited. By the time my mother found us, I’d fallen asleep. My memory ends with her shriek, lifting my head off his chest, finding my pajamas soaking wet. 

It wasn’t until the college boy I loved madly broke my heart that this old memory rose again like a flashing billboard. I scribbled its fragments in a journal where they stayed until I turned forty, unhappily married with two small children. My married lover had dared me to share a piece of deeply personal writing. We made a picnic out of trading our private pages. I remember nothing about his, but I vividly remember sitting on the grass trembling as he read mine. He called my writing gorgeous, and I decided he was my soulmate. As it turned out, the affair—which ended soon after, as did my marriage—had a larger purpose. It helped me come out as a writer. It also put me on another path—one I didn’t know existed at the time—of using writing to heal trauma. 

Twelve years later, those same pages appeared intact in my published memoir, A Lethal Inheritance. Although that book contained dozens of equally raw incidents from three generations of mental illness and addiction, I felt particularly vulnerable having this one exposed. At the same time, it disappointed me that I got no emotional catharsis from having put it out there. Maybe because I wasn’t ready to confront the unresolved grief for which it had become a talisman. 

I hadn’t yet changed the story I’d been telling myself.

Fast forward another decade and virtually the same scene shows up in my debut novel, Orchid Child, told in the voice of Kate, a brilliant neuroscientist with a sex addiction problem. As the novel opens, she’s lost her job in the wake of an affair with her married lab director. Kate tells her drunken dad story to Ryan, a psychiatry colleague and her soon to be love interest, who responds empathetically. Indeed, Ryan’s availability for relationship tests Kate’s predilection for doomed affairs. Like all unrecovered sex and love addicts with Daddy issues, Kate—like me for much of my adult life—resists a healthy relationship with an available man.

 Take this scene where Kate screws up her field work and, instead of owning up to it, she finds relief in a one-night stand—worse, she spends the night with a grad student from the university hosting her new study. 

Archie’s flat is a lower-rent version of her place, with some twenty-something male touches. Unpacked boxes for furniture, an enormous TV on the floor, an overflowing trash bin, food containers and empty bottles on the counters. Smells combining all of the above. Kate keeps her breath shallow as she crosses the living room. Archie goes into a bedroom and emerges with a pipe. It’s been years, but hell, why not? Splayed on a beanbag chair, Kate inhales deeply, proud of herself for not coughing. After three tokes she’s more stoned than God knows when. The walls are tipping and swaying. Archie’s smiling face elongates first vertically then horizontally. Oh dear. This isn’t the same pot she used to smoke. Her eyes focus long enough to make out the fact that Archie’s face is connected to the arm extended to help her out of the chair. On her feet, their hands get to work stripping each other of clothing. Shirts, pants, belt, bra, underwear, and shoes are tossed as they stumble to his bed. Flesh on flesh, groans replace words, until Kate arrives at the destination she’s been seeking all day.

Several early readers of Orchid Child have contacted me to share some version of “I’m really feeling Kate’s pain.” That’s when it struck me. I no longer felt it. Not in that visceral screwdriver in the stomach way I’d known since childhood. Certainly, I credit the psychotherapy I’ve done off and on for decades. Also my newly acquired crone wisdom—the point where a woman looks back at her life and says, what the f#$k was I thinking? Then chucks her old bad habits like spoilt milk. 

Still, I suspect the final death knell of this old wound came only after I alchemized it in fiction. Writing Orchid Child gave me an opportunity to expeditiously bring Kate’s issues to a messy head and allow her growth through a series of events which, if I shared them here, would constitute spoilers. Suffice to say, Kate ultimately faces a fundamental choice: she can either cling to her unhealthy enmeshment with a dead father, or she can let go of him and allow real love in our life.  

In this scene she’s still resisting that choice and the vestiges of her abandoned faith are only muddling her emotional battleground.

Leaving her body behind, Kate slips into an in-between state, not fully awake or asleep, and enters a chapel. Like her, the chapel is suspended in space. She discovered her ability to go there as a child when she missed her father more than she could bear. In this private purgatory, she transformed the act of waiting for him into a devotional ritual. … Her favorite teacher, Sister Evangeline, appears at the end of the pew and reminds her that dying in that awful way was what Jesus had been born to do, the act itself a prophecy fulfilled. His reward, Sister explains, was to leave earth and reunite with his father, who happened to be God. In that way, Jesus became whole again. 

Kate feels her old desire to leave this world and reunite with her father, no matter where or how. Fragments of the dream linger long enough for her to see the girl’s face is contorted, her cheeks wet and blotchy. She knows the cause of her distress. Just as she understood Sister Evangeline’s silence. But that doesn’t mean she’s ready to let go of the old desire. Her dream to go and be with him. She wouldn’t be Kate without it. She and the girl are still of one mind on this. 

In the field of narrative medicine, researchers have demonstrated improved health outcomes for patients who change the plotline of their illnesses from a simple desire to return to the status quo, into a quest for something better. Or, when they alter their narrative point of view from singular to plural; that is, from “I” to “we.” Perhaps the same thing is true for the author of autobiographical fiction who changes the plotline to make her broken protagonist whole again. That is, to do in novel form what she couldn’t honestly represent in memoir. 

Proof of my own healing comes when I read scenes like these, either silently or aloud at bookstore and library talks. Instead of the embarrassment that used to wash over me as the creator and alter ego of such a pathetic character, I now have only compassion for Kate. A bittersweet knowing, one in which I’m able to forgive and soothe the younger part of me that created all that chaos from the pain I was feeling. 

It’s perhaps only fair that after the hard work of writing a novel, there should be such a lovely payoff for an author. The other priceless reward for me comes when readers see themselves mirrored in Kate and use her pain to process their own.

—

ORCHID CHILD

Kate is a neuroscientist who covets logic and order, unless she’s sleeping with her married lab director, and then logic goes out the window. So does her orderly life in Manhattan when she’s fired over the affair and Kate’s mother presses her to accept responsibility for her fifteen-year-old nephew, Teague, an orchid child who hears voices and talks to trees but rarely people.

To salvage her career, Kate agrees to conduct a study in West Ireland where hostile townsfolk rebuff her study of their historically high rate of schizophrenia and a local chief Druid identifies Teague’s odd perceptions as the gift of second sight, thrusting a bewildered Kate on a trail of madness, magic, and armed rebellion that leads to her own grandparents, who were banished as traitors from the same town.

When a confrontation with the chief Druid endangers Teague’s life, Kate lands at the intersection of ancient Celtic mysticism and 21st century neurodiversity, where the act of witnessing old wounds can heal suffering in both past and present – even hers, if she can accept the limits of science and the power of ancestral ties.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers