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Do you need to have experienced an affair to write about one? By Lucy McCarraher Isn’t the very essence of being a good fiction writer being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, emotionally speaking; to be able to imagine vividly and in detail what it’s like to live through situations and feelings outside your own experience? Lionel Shriver isn’t the mother of a mass murderer; J K Rowling was never a teenage wizard – as far as we know. Perhaps as writers of chick-lit fiction, though, we draw more directly on our journey as women navigating our way through the stormy waters of love and relationships than novelists of other genres. Maybe that’s why we make light of the darker sides of life and laugh at some if its deadly serious issues – precisely because we’ve been there, done that, got the g-string and survived to tell the tale. It’s probably fair to say that many chick-lit heroines bear more than a passing resemblance to their creators. Mr Mikey, star of my most recent novel, Mr Mikey’s Ladies, is a gay, middle-aged hairdresser – hardly a “me” character, other than the middle-aged bit. But like me he has a group of close women friends who share the intimate details of their love, and sometimes sex, lives – including, from time to time, extra marital affairs. My immediate inspiration for Bella having an affair with her best friend’s husband (who is also her husband’s best friend) came from two friends of mine who were similarly entangled – and like Corinne, one had no idea what the other was up to and kept confiding her worries and her own infidelities to me and her husband’s lover. The idea of Suzanne’s long distance liaison born out of an unfulfilling marriage, developed from another friend’s hell at home then obsession with a man she only knew on the internet. Ageing Estelle’s attraction to toy boys owes a little to an infamous writer who, as she got older, was always terrified that each affair would be her last, ever. Debra’s infuriating smugness about the perfection of her marriage and sex-life was a gentle dig at a couple of women I’ve known; I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy giving her her come-uppance. And we’ve all been through something like Dolly’s fixation with a man who was never going to reciprocate her desire. So, did I create the tangled web and mangled emotions of Mr Mikey’s ladies purely out of imagination and other people’s experiences? Time to come clean – or should that be air my dirty linen? At the tail, and rather bitter, end of my first marriage I had an affair. A major one. I fell in love with a man we both worked with, whose wife I was friends with. It was heaven – and it was hell. It rebuilt my self-esteem; and it shattered me into pieces. It was also, from any rational perspective, complete madness – and neuroscience now shows that the state of being in love produces the same kind of brain activity as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I don’t recommend it, but in retrospect it was great grist to my writing mill. Without having known that particular form of insanity from the inside, I’m not sure that I would have been able to bring alive aspects of my Ladies - like Bella’s irrational obsession with an unsuitable man then suicidal despair at being dumped, or Suzette’s self-disgust at her ability to deceive. Even Mr Mikey’s pervasive sense of loss after the death of his great love springs from feelings I have known and grown through. Perhaps, at this distance, it’s why I can treat them with the mixture of sympathy and cynicism which is meant to make the reader laugh and sigh simultaneously. Ultimately, you can do all the research you like, talk to all the friends you can find, but I’m not sure there’s any substitute for personal experience when you’re writing about something so heart-breaking and hilarious as the crazy world of people playing away. Lucy McCarraher’s latest novel is Mr Mikey’s Ladies. Her first was Blood and Water, followed by Kindred Spirits. You can buy them all on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, or order through any bookshop. Lucy’s website is www.lucymccarraher.com. Mr Mikey has his own Agony Aunt blog on www.tellmrmikey.blogspot.com . |
| Posted: 19/03/2009 19:01:48 Last Updated: 19/03/2009 19:07:35 |
Chick Lit > Writing Tips :: Do You Need An Affair?