#MISS MY MOM #MISS MY DAD

THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART (Abrams, 2018) took me more than a decade to write. My previous novel SIGN OF THE QIN was a fantasy with shapeshifting demons , heroic outlaws, a Starlord, an evil Emperor, and a trickster monkey king with god-like powers who needs to learn to love a child in his care to earn his immortality and his entry into heaven.

Set in China in an imagined and long ago era when myth and legend mixed boldly and visibly with everyday life, that novel took me on a journey to China and Outer Mongolia where I adventured outside my comfort zone, witnessed mirages in the Gobi desert, slept in a yurt under an unfamiliar sky, rode on a camel and came back with thousands of photos and a journal packed with story fragments and notes.

THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART required a more internal journey. It also took me outside my comfort zone but the landmarks I discovered along the way were those buried in personal history.

The book is set in Inwood and Washington Heights on the far Upper West Side of Manhattan where I grew up. It’s a family story, with characters based on my own family.

I’ve spoken about my father in earlier posts. He was the Rock of the family, a storyteller and the easiest character to write. In my book, he is Grandpa Ben. Lil, the mother in my book, was harder. Grief-stricken by the sudden death of her husband, she turns agoraphobic, forcing my 13 year old heroine Briana out of childhood too soon.

I realized somewhere deep into the process of writing THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART, that the agoraphobia I attributed in my story to sudden loss was a condition that haunted my mother for reasons I never understood. I became aware that as a young girl I was constantly, like Briana, in search of my mother-- the beautiful joyful parent who I remembered had played with me as a baby and small child. Where had she gone? Her sadness during my middle school years made me angry. I felt it was my fault.

In my book, Briana misses her dad. But she also misses her mother--the mother she had before her father died and before her little brother was born. “Find her,” says the extra heart Briana imagines lives in her belly--the one that speaks to her in her Dad’s voice. The command along with the command to “Be Your Own!” is urgent. It drives the story. It took me a long time to realize that I too, in writing THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART, was trying to “Find her.”

I remember as a teen constructing an explanation for my mother’s agoraphobia. It was rooted, I guessed, in the trauma of temporarily losing my father during his military service:

When World War II took my dad into the army, my mother had been afraid he would be shot down or blown up by a German mine. The more afraid she became, the more she wept. She wept every day. And somehow, while weeping and thinking about all the terrible things that could happen to my father, she had begun to be afraid of leaving the house.

When my father finally came home from the army, he took a steady job in the garment district. Every morning, after eating his bagel and drinking his coffee, he dashed into the subway, leaving my mother at home. My father could be counted on to be back every evening by six o’clock for dinner. Eventually, my mother stopped weeping every day, but she was still on the look out for disaster. Trouble, she said, always struck out of a clear blue sky.

By the time I started high school, my mother rarely went out of the house without my father. When faced with my questions about her agoraphobia, my father told me about a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onada who was sent to an island so remote that he never heard the war was over. For years, the soldier lived alone, almost starving, sometimes sick, and madly stuck in the past.

Finally, a young adventurer found and befriended him, convincing him that Japan had surrendered twenty-nine years earlier. But by then, Onada was like Rip Van Winkle; he had fallen asleep in the jungle and his fears had eaten up his future.

Eventually, my mother never went out at all but one day she wandered out of her apartment and fell down while crossing the street. She broke large and small bones in both arms and in both hands as well. She had no memory of the fall or of the operation.

When I went to see her in the hospital, she did not remember my name. My father was the only one she recognized and she said his name over and over again.

The other day, one of my students and I were talking about revision. She asked me to name one thing I had cut out of THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART. “Onada,” I replied and explained: I had cut the actual reference to Onada, but remembering him and his story in the process of writing THE GIRL WITH MORE THAN ONE HEART was one of those moments of insight and revelation that makes the day to day of being a writer so enlivening. Onada added a layer to the character of Briana’s mother in the book even though he didn’t actually appear by name in the final manuscript. Remembering his story as narrated to me by my father, a story that hadn’t meant too much to me as a child, allowed me as an adult to see my mother in a new light. It helped me create the character of Briana’s mother with more warmth and understanding. I had, in a sense, long after my mother’s death, found her.

To help teens tell their stories, I’ve developed a “Be Your Own!” workshop with prompts from my book. One of those prompts is MISS MY MOM/ MISS MY DAD which encourages students to write a short story or a flash that includes one of those phrases.

For more writing prompts from my Be Your Own! workshop write to me here at CONTACT LAURA.