So, anyway, what does all this have to do with the subject of past lives? It has everything to do with it because, you see, I’m thirty-nine years old; I’m about to hit the big four-oh, and I’m trying to figure out some things about my life. Sometimes I think I’m as curious as my readers as to how I became a writer. What does make us what we are today?
All in all, the most interesting thing to analyze is people. Why does the lady down the street dress with military precision? Why does someone have a fear of knives or fire or high places? What about those people who are too afraid to leave their houses?
There is, of course, the theory that every fear in your adult life was caused by something awful that happened in your childhood, preferably something you don’t remember so that a therapist can see you hundreds of times and charge you thousands of dollars to help you remember this dreadful thing. So after therapy you’re poorer and have some more rotten memories as well.
During a bad time in my life (what can cause a woman a “bad time” except a man?) I went to a therapist. She told me that I had stories going through my head because I wanted to go to bed with my father. When I recovered my power of speech, I said in great indignation, “I did not want to go to bed with my father!” “Oh,” she said calmly, “then you suppressed it.”
Seeing that I couldn’t win—and winning has always been important to me—I didn’t return after that visit.
But I have tried to figure out why I write and why I write what I do. You see, all writers want one thing. They want immortality. That’s why we’re so vain that we think someone else will want to read what we put down on paper. We writers hear of Mark Twain dying in poverty and feel no sympathy because ol’ Mark attained the goal. He will live forever. Our families would no doubt choose for us to be writers who make lots of money, but we writers would take eternal recognition over wealth every time.
But that’s the problem. No one comes to you, sitting on a pink cloud, a clipboard in hand, and says, “We’re giving you the gift of writing. Do you want the kind that everyone sneers at or the kind that people remember after you’re dead?” Talent is not like a used car. You can’t take it back if you don’t like it. You can’t say, “I’d like to trade in my talent for an Edith Wharton model.”
My talent happens to be in writing romantic novels, and they get laughed at and ridiculed. In any movie, if the director wants to show that a female character is stupid, he puts a romance novel into her hands.
Early on, I decided that I was grateful for any talent at all. Those who can, do, and those who can’t, review. As Anthony Trollope said, “Only a blockhead writes for anything except money.” Or thereabouts. Anyway, it’s true. You can’t very well sit down at your computer and say, “I’m now going to write my way into history.” It doesn’t work that way. You don’t decide what lives on after you, other people do.
So, anyway, I still wonder how I came to write romantic novels and I look back at my life to see if I can figure out what made me such a writer. In fact, I’d like to know what made me like I am in every aspect.
Until I was seven years old, I was the happiest child on the planet. My parents and sister and I lived next door to two houses filled with cousins and aunts and uncles and a couple of sets of grandparents. It was heaven. I was the ringleader of the bunch, ordering everyone about, telling them what to do and how to do it. My creativity was truly appreciated.
Well, maybe not appreciated by everyone. There was the time I saw my grandmother twist the head off a chicken, so I told my cousin we ought to help Nana and twist the heads off all the chickens. There we were, no more than five years old, chickens tucked between our scraped knees and twisting and twisting and twisting. My grandmother came out of the house with a load of wash and there were all her chickens, their heads cocked to one side, listing drunkenly about the yard. Looking back on it and thinking of the ferocious temper of my grandmother, I don’t know how my cousin and I escaped alive.
But those wonderful years ended soon enough when my mother decided she’d had enough of her mother-in-law’s renowned temper. My mother (who could defeat any temper with her rock-hard stubbornness) on one fateful day informed my father that she had bought a piece of land and he was going to build her a house on it. In my parents’ household we all liked to pretend that my father was the one who made the rules. I think the rule he made was, Give Mama what she wants or she’ll make life hell for all of us. Whatever his thoughts, he wasn’t fool enough to say no to my mother when she had that look in her eye.
Whatever the philosophy behind it, the result was the same: We moved. In that one day I lost all those cousins and grandparents; I lost the chickens and the cows and the possum that lived in a barrel in the barn. I lost blackberry bushes that gave me chiggers and I lost apple trees
to climb. In one day I went from being the champion of all, a person of prime importance, to being the child-who-must-be-kept-down.
In a matter of hours I went from having the most exciting life in the world to having a life of supreme dullness. My mother and sister were cut out of the same cloth. They were good. Good, good, good.
What is more boring than good? My mother was always saying, “Don’t eat too much chocolate. It’ll make you sick” or “I can’t look at that right now. I have too much work to do” or “Hayden, you cannot read that book now. You haven’t finished cleaning the bathroom.” On and on she went. There was a right time and a wrong time for everything. But as far as I could tell the right time for exuberance never came.
Didn’t people ever want to do something that wasn’t on the schedule? Was I the only one in the world who actually wanted to eat as much chocolate as I could hold and damn the consequences?
Looking back, I think that some people are afraid to break out of the rules. Maybe they’re afraid that if they break the rules, they’ll lose all self-control and become something horrible—in my mother’s case that would be a woman with a dirty bathroom floor.
Whatever was behind it all, again the result was the same: I was put in a bubble of isolation and left there alone. I had to try to remember to sit up straight, walk sedately, and never, never be rambunctious. I tried, but it’s difficult to control yourself when you’re a child. I guess an awful lot of me slipped out because I heard the phrase “You know how you are” a few million times. Sometimes I got the feeling that my parents thought that if they didn’t keep me under rigid control every minute of every day that I’d lose it altogether. Maybe I’d start eating chocolate and laughing and just plain never stop. Maybe they feared not being able to reel me back in if they just let me go ahead and be myself.
Now that I’m an adult and know all about adult things (uh-huh, sure) I know that my parents were not creative and I was. If they bought something that needed assembly, they read the box and put it together in the way the manufacturer wanted them to. If I bought something, I felt that reading the instructions was cheating. And if I couldn’t put it together easily, it was quite ordinary for me to jump up and down on the box and say all the dirty words I knew—which, thankfully, weren’t many.
My punishment for box jumping or any infraction of the peace rules was to be talked to “for my own good.” Never in my life have I understood that phrase. When someone says this is “for your own good” it always, always, always means that someone is trying to make you openly acknowledge his or her superior power.
So, anyway, how did I survive these spirit killers? How did I survive being dragged to the preacher so he could talk to me because I was “different”? How did I survive hearing my mother ask my relatives if they had any idea what she could “do” with me?
I did the best I could by escaping into a land of stories.
I read incessantly. When my mother made me vacuum the bedroom I shared with my sister, she was more concerned with the length of time I spent vacuuming than with how clean the floor was after I was finished. All she ever checked was to see that the light bulbs were spotless, so I learned to clean the bulbs, then I’d get in the closet with a book, a flashlight, and the vacuum and sit down for a forty-five-minute read. Since my mother had the ears of a bat, I had to make sure the suction was going on and off, so I sat there putting various parts of my face to the hose, sucking and reading, sucking and reading. I did learn that one must make sure the hose end is clean or one’s face gets awfully dirty, then one’s mother makes one actually clean the room. Gag!
So, anyway, I learned to get round the work, work, work, clean, clean, clean ethic of my mother’s house and make time for the books I loved so much. I read nonfiction even then. I read about heroes, about men and women who had done things and accomplished things in their lives.
There was Daniel Boone and Jackie Cochran and, oh sigh, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. There was the most magnificent queen who ever lived, Elizabeth I, and there were girls who dressed as boys and became spies. Oh, but the list was endless.
I didn’t realize it then but what I was doing was researching. Yes, that’s right, researching. Now I receive reader letters saying in awe, How do you ever do all the research necessary to write historical novels? Okay, let’s have a reality check here. This woman has written me that she has a full-time job and three children under the age of five and she wants to know how I research a romantic novel. I want to ask her how she survives each day.
I guess I’m explaining so much about my life to make you, my readers, think I’m a normal, sane person because something happened to me that isn’t normal and maybe not even sane.
You see, I fell in love with one of my fictional characters.