For Sale: Character trauma. Endlessly processed.

@nicholas_flannery

That hairography though #thewifethatdiesatthebeginningofthemovie #johnwick #afterlife

Lately I’ve been reading novels from the first few decades of the previous century. I’ve especially been enjoying the novels of Ursula Parrott, whose 1929 novel The Ex-Wife sold more copies at its release than The Great Gatsby—times five. 

Parrott’s novels are intimate first-person stories of women navigating the changed and changing roles for white women in U.S. society in that decade. She subjects her characters to all manner of harrowing trauma, sometimes off but mostly on the page—loss of a child, infidelity, sexual assault, divorce, poverty, loss of lover and spouse, severe illness. These events are presented unflinchingly, sparingly, and unsentimentally—but let us not confuse lack of sentimentality with lack of emotion. 

There are no tortured flashbacks or lengthy self-psychoanalytical paragraphs. Instead, the facts interject themselves plainly into the scenes, reminders of each characters’ burdens without Vaseline-smeared lenses or pornographic spotlights.

In The Ex-Wife, the main character suffered the death of her infant son prior to the present of the novel—in which, having been left by her husband, she’s seeking an abortion. At the office of the doctor:

“There was a pause. I caught myself on the verge of telling him, as a fact of extreme significance, that the baby Patrick...dead more than a year now...had the longest eyelashes I ever saw.”

Look at the control there. It is the point-of view-character who is inserting this impulse—and the terse, distinct detail leaves room for the reader to fill in the rest: the empty arms, the child’s scent, and the weight of this loss riding on the character’s shoulders at all times, puncturing her reserve only in the most heightened moments. On screen (as in the TikTok above), incorporating reference to prior trauma tempts filmmakers to pin the idea of loss to fully realized moments, fractured visual (and idealized) memories. This is yet another superpower of fiction on the page. As a fact of extreme significance. You can feel the sorrowful desire, the undeniability of grief. This is the power of Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word story referenced in the title of this essay. For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

Nearly fifteen years ago, I read a review of a novel (a novel that, I should point out, I haven’t read), and some source material quoted by the reviewer has stuck with me ever since. The gist is this: the author wrote a novel loosely based on an ancestor’s diary, and then published parts of that diary in conjunction with the novel, which inevitably invited the reviewer to compare the historical document with the book. The reviewer described how the ancestor’s brief, “unsentimental anecdotes” gave life to the incidents therein. “Recalling the death of her younger sister in just two sentences, she still manages to communicate the confusion one feels when stricken by grief: ‘Shortly before I was 11 years old, our little Bertha died, and for a number of years I looked, or seemed to be looking for her. She never came back.’” 

The thing about trauma—on the page, in life—is that it has an urgency, an immediacy that refuses denial. This is why it’s such a beast, why it causes panic attacks, dissociations, outbursts. The body and mind are reacting to the ghost of an occurrence as though it is right here, right now. This immediacy is present in the Ursula Parrott passage above. It’s a brutal, factual insertion of the long-gone into the moment. That immediacy is one of the ways that characters can convince readers that what they feel is real, rather than merely a plot point required by the writer’s outline. And that immediacy, that potent, urgent intrusion, just might be more powerful when it’s left to rest on a single, sharp point—those eyelashes, those unworn baby shoes, the child scanning the horizon for her dead sister—than when it’s embellished into gauzy scenes of bittersweet nostalgia. 

(This is the other thing about flashbacks: while I think writers intend for them to have the impact of inserting the immediacy of that bygone experience, instead they take the reader out of the present of the story and plunge them into the past. It defeats the intrusiveness of trauma to render it this way, and it flattens the interplay between past feeling and present moment.)

As a writer, you can offer ideas to your reader. You may choose to pin them to a particular object or image or gesture or sound, or you may communicate them through what your characters notice, e.g., where is the nearest exit, which is the chair with its back only to a wall. You don’t have to pre-digest every possible meaning or expression of a character’s traumatic backstory in order for it to live on the page in such a way that it influences action. You don’t have to transmit the exact replica of what you’re holding in your mind into the mind of your reader. I hereby give you permission to evoke without carving in stone.  

This is a collaboration. Leave room for your partner.

Reflection: Imagine the Hemingway short story rendered as a Netflix series. Could it ever have the same punch? If so, what would be required? How could embellishment add depth rather than flattening an experience?

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