The Story Beneath the Story

burial vault set-up display http://www.chesapeakevault.com/

I’m writing a novel. I’m in a yearlong novel writing class, in fact. And it is not a happy story. In fact, the story is quite depressing. And so I’ve been going around the past two weeks especially asking myself why on earth I feel compelled to tell this story.

The novel did not start in depressing territory– well, no more depressing than anything else. It started with a man with an occupation, a middle-aged man living near Grand Forks, North Dakota, who delivers burial vaults. Most people don’t even know there are burial vaults involved in burials, concrete vaults into which the casket is placed and that secure the casket against the elements. Nor do they know that the burial vault delivery guy is the one who provides “graveside services,” setting up the canopy, the chairs, the green Astroturf surround. They probably think all this comes from the funeral home.

This particular burial vault delivery guy as a large, rural territory. And as he goes out and does burials, he brings his 82-year-old father with him.

But as I explored my character’s life, I found he had three daughters. And to one was born a child who wasn’t thriving. Diagnosed with “failure to thrive,” she is removed from the home. This story comes from the life of my former sister-in-law, and the moment when my first marriage fell apart, right at the moment that I might have taken custody of this child who was not thriving. And over the past decade, with no contact with that family, I have puzzled what happened to this child, before and after the diagnosis, and what happened to my sister-in-law. So when this child and mother appeared in my novel, though they are not at all my sister-in-law or her child, but fictional characters, it became my way to explore the story.

And no matter how you look at it, this is a depressing story. It is a story about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), which is much more prevalent than we think (about 1 in 1,000 children), and which is still not diagnosed, still labeled “failure to thrive,” a label that throws all the blame on the mother in a way that she can probably never climb out, because without a diagnosis, there can be no real therapeutic response. And though of course FASD also places blame squarely on the mother, it is a diagnosis of past behavior with a hope of, if nothing else, attention and therapies and support for the present and future of both mother and child.

And this morning, I realized why this story is so urgent to me. Why it is the story I tell, united to the other stories I tell and have told. My interest is in the story beneath the story, the story hidden and disguised and denied and suppressed. I want to bring those stories to light an make us look at them and face them. Even when the diagnosis is bleak. Because I do believe that it is only in seeing that story beneath the story (and I won’t call either “truth,” although that is what I would have said about the earlier stories-beneath-the-story, because I am not sure here in my maturity I believe in truth, though I do believe in honesty and I believe in a way forward that is based on a narrative that not only most closely reflects objective reality but also that has hope built into it).

One thing that is true of the process of writing these stories is that they are a work of incessant revision. I have to learn to tell “the real story” myself, and my characters, particularly the mother of this child, but also everyone around her, want to lie and tell other stories. So I have to keep interrogating them and figuring out what is really going on so that in the end we can all face it to move forward.

The question is, will I be able to keep the audience reading? Will they be willing to go with me and trust me that even though all will not in the end be “fine,” there will be hope and a way forward?

When I came to Minnesota in 2005-06 as a resident scholar at a Benedictine Abbey with a group of religious scholars at the Collegeville Institute, one of my projects was to explore what it means to be a Catholic author. Like all Catholics who write, I suppose I’ve always wanted to be Flannery O’Connor. I do not have her inventiveness or command of figurative language. My worlds are so much more “realistic.” But I do have her theology of grace and of redemption that comes by way of crucifixion. I am only just beginning to understand what that means.