This is Not What I Set Out to Do
But sometimes even your own stories surprise you
Hey hey,
How goes it? I'm hoping your week is off to a good start. In New England, it's gone from incredibly rainy to incredibly hot, and while I'm thankful to be able to get outside, I often find myself longing for some more moderate weather.
I don't think that longing will be going anywhere. Partly because, in this small slice of the world, rarely do we get to glimpse weather that's not too much of one thing or another. But also because there's just less moderate weather to go around these days. The West Coast is burning; the Northeast and parts of the Midwest are under water. Nothing's looking to get better anytime soon. And here I sit behind my computer, feeling helpless to change anything.
I didn't set out to plop a discussion on climate change into your inbox. Sometimes, though, despite what we set out to do, the process and the end product turn out to have a mind of their own.
That's precisely what happened with The Other Women. I started this book with a question in my mind: What if we lived in a world where women were not allowed to carry and give birth to their children naturally? That's it. I wasn't thinking about politics, or feminism, or reproductive autonomy. I simply imagined a device where we could watch our babies incubate and then imagined a world where the government mandated its use. If you've seen the timelines (I'll put the link in the PSs in case you haven't!), you'll notice that the world of the book came about quite logically. First one thing happened, which allowed for another thing to happen, and so on.
And as the book took shape, rather than a flat story about a bunch of people who belong to a group but otherwise don't do anything particularly notable, TOW became something different entirely. I had to keep asking myself questions, getting deeper into the heart of the story my characters really wanted to tell...and realizing that, if things continue the way they're going, we could quite possibly end up in a very difficult place 200 years from now.
I began writing the book in 2018, midway into a presidency that turned the existing rifts among our country's population into giant, gaping chasms that I've become ever more doubtful we'll ever be able to overcome. The installment of two very conservative supreme court justices heralded a haunting step backwards for women's rights, and while there have been some surprisingly progressive rulings recently, there have also been some very troubling ones, with more anticipated.
I wasn't particularly interested in politics until around the time I started writing the book, but the more I write, and the more questions I ask, and the more I learn about our nation's history, the more I realize that it's all interconnected. Why was it so easy for me to believe a nation's governing body would make a decision that went against the will of the people? Because I see it happening all the time. Businesses run our government, because they have the money to fund the politicians' campaigns, and in return, the politicians they help elect support the business and industry that put them in office.
So is there really a question that, if there was sufficient business interest in, say, nursery wombs to be put to use by all American families, the politicians would support it? I don't think so.
Was I thinking about any of this when I set out to write a book about a woman who just wanted to have her own baby? No. No, I wasn't. But, sometimes, even your own stories surprise you.
Until next time,
P.S. Yep, there was a blog this week. As promised, Avatar came up again - but only as a proxy by which we could talk about how we use language to talk about our friends...and our adversaries.
P.P.S. Got parents? Siblings? Friends? I bet one or two of them would enjoy this newsletter. Forward it along. They can click that big, beautiful button below to sign up and share in the joy!