The Meandering Story of a (Not Quite Finished) Novel
Can it be a good thing to sleep with your boss, just as you’re about to marry someone else?
For the past decade, I’ve been writing a novel that tries to answer that question. Well, I say for the past decade; it’s not like I’ve written faithfully every single day of those ten years. More like every single month.
(Actually, no… sometimes two, three, four, or even five months can pass before I saddle up the writing-horse again).
I’ve never written about my novel before. Not properly, anyway. The reason is twofold: one, I’m embarrassed about how long it’s taking me to finish. I shivered when I wrote “for the past decade”. Ten whole years? Really? It’s especially strange when I think about how, when I first started writing this book, I was only a few years older than its protagonist. Now I’m old enough to be her mother.
Two, I’ve never really been able to sum the novel up. I knew its starting point — the whole ‘sleeping with your boss’ thing — but not really where it would end, or what its overarching theme was. Those things seem to have evolved over time.
(I think I might have needed to give them that time… or is this just an excuse for lazy procrastination?)
I’m writing about it now because I want to. I think it might help me finally finish; though I’m slightly sad about the idea of that. I won’t be able to live alongside my characters anymore.
“What a great idea for a book!”
The original idea came from Mandy*, a young woman I worked with when I was a young woman as well. Mandy was having a not-very-secret affair with our boss. She came into work one day with an ashen face, and when I asked if she was OK, whispered that our boss’s wife had found out about her. “I’m terrified she’ll walk in here and make a scene,” she said.
Immediately I thought: what a great idea for a book! (I didn’t say that out loud, of course). How did the wife find out? I imagined her paying a private detective to spy on her husband, then storming into the office with the evidence.
Then I thought: what if the Other Woman was about to get married? Why would she do something so self-destructive?
Hmmm…
Maybe because she grew up in a family that never talks about the Big Stuff… like one of her parents dying when she was a small child.
Maybe because she’d been in a comfortable relationship for so long, that when it came to the ‘next steps’ — marriage and children — she unthinkingly agreed to take them… because what do you do if you don’t?
Maybe because she felt trapped by that lethal combination of a dead-end (but well-paying) job and other people’s expectations.
Maybe because she was seduced by someone who seemed to ‘get’ her, in an intimate way that her fiancé, her family, and her close friends didn’t.
Maybe because she was still just about young enough to question “what happens next?” and feel intimidated by the sheer amount of potential options.
Maybe because somewhere deep down, she knew creating a future that was honestly hers could only happen after she’d burned all of her boats.
(Back in real life, there was no in-office confrontation. Things like that never actually happen, do they? The boss’s wife must have ignored what she’d discovered, or her husband promised to behave in future. But the affair continued until he emigrated a few years later, taking his family with him).
Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…
The name of my protagonist, aka the woman who would sleep with her boss before her wedding and get found out in a humiliating way, came to me while I was out walking. That’s often how ideas whisper themselves to me; it’s why I don’t distract myself with headphones when I’m out. Helen doesn’t, either.
That’s her name, by the way. Helen Miles.
Helen and I have plenty of other similarities. We’re both annoyingly quiet, stupidly curious, and missing a parent. I’m definitely not twenty-seven anymore, but that’s how old I was when I got married.
The run-up to my wedding wasn’t all giddy happiness; more a strange, heavy kind of bewilderment. I called it “pre-wedding jitters”. I didn’t recognise it as a warning, because I hadn’t been in a long-term relationship before. I didn’t know how you were supposed to feel.
I don’t know if the men around me could smell the bewilderment. Maybe they just saw an almost-married young woman as a challenge, but I got propositioned plenty of times during my engagement. I was a mixture of never tempted and always tempted. Never, because I’d made a commitment and I wasn’t the kind of person who blows her life to smithereens.** And always, because there’s something so exciting about the idea of blowing your life to smithereens. Will it ruin you, or could you emerge stronger than before?
When I started writing my novel I’d been married almost five years. Nothing about my life felt right, but I couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was. I thought: what sort of life would Helen be living now, in the aftermath of all that destruction? I was almost envious.
“Now you get to find out what you’re really made of…”
Helen’s uncle says this to her; as part of a drunken late-night conversation in which he reveals something she hadn’t known about her missing parent.
That’s what happens when you blow your life up. Suddenly, you find yourself in places you wouldn’t normally go. You start hearing and seeing things you wouldn’t otherwise have heard or seen. You can close your eyes and ears, fight it all off, and try to reclaim whatever you had before. Or you can take the risk of grabbing it all with both hands, owning it, and channelling it into becoming someone new.
Guess what Helen does?
I can sum up my novel now. It’s about a woman on the edge of ‘proper’ adulthood. She must reckon with her past and examine her present, before she can create a future that fits her.
I bloody love it. It gives me goosebumps, and I’m only two chapters away from finishing. I’ve told myself it’ll be done and dusted by the end of the year.
Wish me luck.
*Mandy isn’t her real name, obviously.
**I did eventually become a person who blows her life to smithereens, but it was a very civilised explosion on the whole.
I did emerge stronger than before.
I think most people do.
