Agenda

If you are a long-time reader of this blog--I mean going back nearly three years . . . then you know once in a while I reference being slammed on a board associated with my publisher. The person who slammed me didn't denigrate my writing--just my "agenda." She felt my book The Roofer should have come with a "warning label." Like most things on the Internet, it kind of digressed, on the thread, into a free-for-all, at times nasty, about censorship, but at the heart of it, this woman didn't agree with writing about child abuse, didn't believe the statistics on child abuse . . . and felt writers like me had an agenda.

She didn't mean it as a compliment.

At the time, I disagreed. Vehemently. I was so outraged that someone felt I deserved a warning label, not for language but content. I was insulted. Hurt. Took it personally. We're all adults, I reasoned. And if you read the back cover or page one, you knew what you were getting. Not every plot twist, no. But murder. Now, I'd be a lot more likely to walk away.

And to agree. Oh, not with the warning label. But what she called an agenda, I call my themes.

I think a writer can make a BIG mistake in trying to be all things to all people. My characters are very imperfect and will remain so. No halos on their heads.

My "agenda" is that good people can make horrid decisions when backed into a corner. And "bad" people--even murderers and thieves--sometimes love their family with a ferocity that looks very much like how much I love my own kids. My agenda is that child abuse happens even in white-picket homes. That men in suits can be rapists. And that the alcoholic itinerant handyman could very well be a hero waiting to emerge. My agenda is that the world would be a better place if people stopped judging . . . particularly when they haul the Bible into it. The Bible is a beautiful piece of writing--and may well be how I choose to live my life--not that it's anyone's business and THAT is precisely the point. My agenda is that some things are unforgivable, but if you choose--CHOOSE--to forgive, and not just mouth the words, it can be freeing. But that's not the ONLY path to freedom--just one. My "agenda" is that, in the end, I believe God doesn't care WHO you love so much . . . as THAT you love. Michael and George in Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven are a BEAUTIFUL love story. My agenda is just because you contributed a sperm to a baby doesn't make you a father. Same goes with egg and mother. The words MEAN something.

I realize now that . . . all along I have had an agenda. It's there, in all my books. I don't think I am trying to "convert" people to my way of thinking. But I suppose if someone wrote me and said they thought of gay people differently because of Michael and George, that would be all right by me. In fact . . . I got several such emails after the book was released and each of them made me feel as if there was a tiny bit less hatred in the world because of something I wrote. Maybe THAT is my agenda.

So . .. do you have an agenda?

Why Fiction Matters

This is a true story.

When I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, I had not yet gotten my diagnosis of Crohn's disease. In one awful night, while I was unaware I was pregnant, I was rushed to the hospital for a host of x-rays on my stomach, truly in horrific pain, heart rate up near 180, blood pressure through the roof in pain. Long story short, between those x-rays and the medications prescribed . . . again, I had no idea I was pregnant (thus I am a lesson for high school-age girls everywhere who believe in their birth control), when I DID find out I was pregnant, the doctor urged me to have an abortion. In fact, she refused to keep me as a patient unless I at least considered it, and was pretty rough on me.

But that was NOTHING compared to what was in store for me. You see, at the time, I went to . . . hmm, a church of Christian faith. I won't name it, except that I guess I kind of have to as priests are involved so that singles it out somewhat. And so, in a crisis of faith, I called my priest. And in between sobbing, and pain, and pouring out what had happened, and how sick I was . . . he told me that I would, basically, go to hell for even CONSIDERING such a thing. In fact, I wasn't considering it, not because of religion but because of . . . wanting a baby. But . . . nonetheless he was nasty to me. And on Sunday, two days later, when I showed up for church, he looked at me in the third row as he delivered the most scathing and condemining sermon I had ever heard on "murderers." Women who considered or had abortions. And he used the word. Murderer. Over and over. And I remember looking around and thinking I couldn't be the only woman who had health issues related to pregnancy.

But that's not all. As I went on to decide to have my baby despite all the risks to my health, I left the church. In fact, I refused to have anything to do with religion for five years or more. I didn't pray. I didn' t have much faith in anything. But . . . interestingly, within two weeks of delivering that sermon, that priest took a leave of absence. Within a month, he was dead.

Of AIDS complicated by alcoholism.

None of this is meant to condemn a church, a religion, a person, a closeted gay man, a political position, a moral position. Before anyone bombards me with messages or hate mail or anything, I said this was a true story and it was my story. I was left, as I went through my pregnancy overwhelmed with fears over my unborn child's health, to deal with the nuclear fall-out of this information in light of how viciously I had been condemned. And it meant my journey as a spiritual person was very complicated. It's perhaps a testament to faith that I am who I am now, a praying person.

But here's the thing . . . when I think of why fiction matters, I think of how I touched on--however briefly--the issues of Catholicism and faith in Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven. Michael was a devout Catholic, struggling with his faith in light of his homosexuality, while Lily was facing the prospect of death without any faith at all. I wanted to explore faith as part of my characters' world. Fiction gives us a vehicle to do that. I think about books like The Kite Runner exploring politics and the Taliban and definitely haunting me. I think of The Handmaid's Tale and its more-realistic-than-ever tale of oppression of women. I think of Waiting, and its story of oppression and political allegory in China.

And I am aware of how compassion and anger and debate and mourning and grieving and empathy are stirred by novels. Fiction matters because it can make a world so foreign from your own seem real. It can bend your compassion and help you understand, in perhaps a way that journalism can't always. It can make you uncomfortable as you try to determine where you stand on an issue. It can bring you into a world where you have to look around and feel something. It can help you understand the "other" side of a debate. I think Jodi Picault does that in many of her books. Talk about going somewhere gray, somewhere where "right" and "wrong" have no meaning and are in a sticky middle ground.

This really isn't about my story . . . but it is about how I worked through some of my story through my fiction. I no longer think back on that time in anger at all. I think back with compassion and sorrow and a peaceful heart. But this post is about that part of my fiction and it's about how my worldview has been shaped by some fiction authors. How I feel things deeply when I read.

Sometimes fiction is pure escapism. But sometimes, simply, it matters. It unites us, it divides us, it makes us debate, it makes us cry. And that's a good thing, I think.

Has some work of fiction helped you? Has it meant more than simply "a book"? Have you explored something that in "real" life you hadn't quite figured it out, but in your fictional world you have?