What if Donna Can’t Leave the Building?

By Susan Jane Gilman

If there’s any silver lining to the global Coronavirus pandemic, it’s that if I ever attend a cocktail party again, people will no longer say: “Wow, you’re a writer? It must be great, working from home. You know, I’m thinking of taking a couple of months off to write a book myself.”

We writers have been working under quarantine-like conditions for, like, forever. Yet what has changed for us with COVID-19 is that the entire narrative context of contemporary storytelling has become outdated overnight.  So many of the books, dramas, and screenplays we’ve set in the present day have suddenly become period pieces —  tales from a bygone era — simply because our characters go outside.

Before the Coronavirus, a fictional modern couple could dismantle their marriage while commuting between New York and Hollywood. Main characters could lose a child at an amusement park; deal crack on a crowded street corner; or run away from an oppressive community in Williamsburg by hightailing it to Berlin.  They could do countless romantic or depraved things crucial to entire genres of fiction.

But in 2020, how can two “summer sisters” have breezy romances when they can’t lie on the beach? How can serial killers kidnap victims when no one’s mindlessly lingering in parking lots? For that matter, how can private detectives work the streets when they’re supposed to stay home – and why would they anyway, when all their suspects are stuck on their sofas watching Netflix?

Last year, my contemporary novel “Donna Has Left the Building” was published in hardcover.  Its heroine, Donna Koczynski, has a spectacular midlife crisis. One day, she breaks down, blows up her suburban life, and takes off in her Subaru on a blind pilgrimage to reclaim her lost, wild youth.  She careens from a crowded Walmart outside Toledo, to the teaming boardwalk of Rockaway Beach, to Kid Rock’s Annual Fish Fry concert in Nashville. After spiraling down a rabbit hole of modern America—she lands, unexpectedly, on the other side of the globe. On a Greek island embroiled in an epic refugee crisis, she wakes up to a much wider world, a global community, and a new sense of her own responsibility.

Yeah, well.

A year ago, this novel was described as “a story for our times.” Yet now, as the paperback has just come out, it reads like an entirely different book.  In the fresh light of the global pandemic, it is now an escapist romp full of humor and nostalgia: Remember those days when a woman in the throes of a nervous breakdown could simply walk out the door and take off on an impulsive road trip?

If my heroine was to have such a crisis right now in 2020 – as opposed to just a few months earlier — how could I re-imagine such a meltdown in lockdown? “Donna Can’t Leave the Living Room”? “Donna is Selling Her Family on eBay?” “Donna is Saying ‘So What If They Call Me a Granny Killer?’ I Need a Goddamn Haircut”?

Readers will still be swept up by the story – but now because it hints at a way forward in our broken world and transports them away from their anxieties instead of reflecting them. Road trip!

Of course, the irony of the title is not lost me either, seeing as I, too, haven’t been able to leave my building.  What’s more, until the pandemic, staying at home for days-on-end was business-as-usual for me. Now, I find it nearly unbearable – not because I’m going stir-crazy, but because everyone keeps messaging me: “You must love having all this time in quarantine to start a new book! What are you writing?”

Until a few months ago, I’d naively believed that history was, by definition, something that happened in the past. (The fact that we often categorize stories as “historical fiction,” “period films,” and “costume dramas” only reinforces this.)  While September 11^th was the first tip-off to some of us privileged Americans that the world could transform instantly in real-time, the Coronavirus amplifies this to a whole other magnitude.

How do you write contemporary fiction with any enduring wisdom or perspective when the world is currently being shaken up every single day like a snow-globe?

I suppose Irene Nemirovsky’s brilliant novel from the 1940’s, “Suite Francaise” could serve as a model. Nemirovsky wrote exquisitely sensitive and insightful fiction about the German occupation of France during WWII while she herself was a Jew in hiding. But significantly, she was never able to complete her novel because real-time events caught up with her; she was deported to a concentration camp before she could finish.

Perhaps it helps to bear in mind that while the virus is transforming our world in ways we cannot even begin to fathom, it will likely do nothing to destroy the eternal human shortcomings and mind-boggling ineptitudes that always fuel good fiction. We may never again be able to unthinkingly dash into a Walmart dressed in only a t-shirt and flip-flops — but regardless of whether we’re wearing surgical masks, humans will still fall prey to stunning hubris, gut-shredding heartache, searing betrayal, and hilarious miscommunication. We writers will certainly continue to plumb this material, and audiences will likely continue to crave it. Hell, it worked for Shakespeare.

But for me right now, the snowstorm is too blinding. After writing five books and decades of articles, all I feel capable of penning at this moment is an admission: That I’m experiencing the same vulnerabilities that much of humanity has lived with throughout history, but which many of us in 21^st century America have been lucky enough to be immunized against — until now.

So for the next few months, at least, I’m going to be doing what I’ve been doing ever since lockdown began: Watching reruns of “Black-ish” in a stupor and letting myself getting distracted by recipes for toaster-oven donuts on Instagram. But I’ll also continue to do what we writers have always done: sit alone before an empty page, watch a brand-new world unfold, take notes, avoid insipid cocktail parties, and quietly, quietly hope.

—

Susan Jane Gilman is the New York Times bestselling author of five books – the nonfiction “Kiss My Tiara,” the memoirs “Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress,” and “Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven,” plus the novels “The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street” and her latest, “Donna Has Left the Building.” Gilman has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, Salon, The Guardian, Real Simple, and Ms. magazine, among others. She been a commentator for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Her short fiction has been published in a variety of journals and won several literary awards. She has given a TEDx talk on the creative process, “There Is No Lightning Bolt.” Her books have been published in a dozen languages. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

DONNA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress comes a hilarious, timely, and big-hearted novel about rebuilding life in the face of disaster.

As a pink haired teenager, Donna Koczynski once played in a punk rock band and ran wild in Detroit.  Twenty-five years later, she finds herself moldering in the suburbs as a wife, mother, and recovering alcoholic, feeling increasingly obsolete. Until she comes home one day to a terrible surprise.

Blowing up her life, Donna speeds off on a road trip armed with only a guitar and her children’s pharmaceuticals. She careens from Detroit to New York, Memphis to Nashville, searching for old friendships, love, and music. Yet her pilgrimage takes her down a rabbit hole of modern America instead — until ultimately, she lands on the other side of the globe. Plunged into the middle of a refugee crisis on a remote Greek island, she wakes up to a world much wider than her own.  She discovers a whole new second act –and a deeper understanding of love, bravery, and purpose.

BUY THE BOOK HERE: https://www.amazon.com/Donna-Left-Building-Susan-Gilman/dp/1538762420/

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers