Doors, Memory, and Writing...
After a long night of reading, specifically Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, I thought I would make a post. It was excellent! I have to say I was not expecting it to be the way it was. Most of my expectations came from reading Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha (a very very long time ago), which, I remember to be funny and sad at the same time. This book however was gloomier than anything else. I decided to go back to Doyle after reading his interview in Tin House and can honestly say I want to read the sequel to this book, and anything else out there by him.
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is about Paula Spencer, a mother of four, a widow, and an alcoholic. The first half of the book is deceiving. Paula is just telling you about her life, about how she use to write in elementary school, and her marriage, her children and her work. Then you get into the second half of the book, where you learn her husband Charlo had a tendency to beat her. I wasn’t surprised. There are hints throughout the novel, but the way she describes the beatings is heart wrenching. The fact that she feels hopeless and no one, not even the doctors ask if he is hitting her is worse.
There are a lot of reasons why I like this book, and why I am so impressed with it. As a writer I was impressed that he so accurately took on a female persona. She did not feel like a false character, and the story seemed honest. So honest it felt less like fiction and more like a non-fictional account, like Paula wrote this herself. The writing felt like it all happened at once. There are breaks in time that are not always linear. This can be confusing but for some reason with this book they felt natural. I guess what I am trying to say, very inarticulately is that this felt like stream of consciousness writing.
The end of the novel becomes incredibly heavy. Paula describes the 80’s as a blur or one beating after another. You might ask, why are you impressed with this? Most stories about women and domestic violence seem to end in a Lifetime movie script. Doyle stays away from this by not making it about domestic abuse. The story is about Paula’s abuse. It is about the fact that she blamed herself for it. It is about the way she remembers her life.
The novel left me thinking about memory and how we write about memory, fictional or non-fictional memories. Paula admits that things are blurry, and speaks a lot about whether or not her memories are honest or if they have been changed by time. The fact that Paula has this conversation with the reader makes it feel more comfortable with her. I felt a level of trust with Paula that I may not have had without that conversation. In fact, when I started reading I questioned her actions because of her alcoholism and that her sisters remembered events in their lives differently.
On a different note…the title, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors ended up being extremely important throughout the novel. You do not know what its importance is until the end of the novel, but looking back the imagery of doors was everywhere. When Paula meets Charlo’s mother there is a conversation about the door in his house. It is heavy and you have to lift it to close it. The beginning of the novel you find out that Paula is scared to answer the door, because she doesn’t know what is on the other side. She hates the doorbell and any association with it. The fact that she blames her beatings on running into a door or falling down the stairs, and then is constantly afraid that her husband will walk back through the door to kill her create an interesting conversation about what doors represent. I’m not sure I’ve figured it all out yet, but I know it will be on my mind. Well Captain is scratching at the door, time for a walk. I guess my big question of this post, and to my readers is how can anyone write with such intention? Do we outline everything to make these things appear or do they come naturally?
3 comments:
I bet this is one of those “depending on the author” questions. I hate physical outlines since I tend to not pay attention to them at all, but I do start outlining a story in my head – usually in terms of scenes that I see in my head before I write them – before I write it. I don’t think in terms of “this may be a symbol” or “that may be a symbol” while I write although I haven’t ever finished a longer work. Perhaps while writing a novel you can catch on to important objects or ideas and start repeating them without it seeming false.
The problem, though, with thinking too much about symbols and other fiction tropes while writing is that you can lose sight of your characters and plot and see the author chuckling to herself about that cool repetitive image or symbol. Too many similes and metaphors for every single concrete item, especially, tend to clog up my thoughts and annoy me. You have to make me care about what’s going on with these characters, not just the author’s technical conceit.
I try to write with that in mind. Sometimes the people who read my stuff pull interpretations and symbols out of things that were just part of the plot: I always listen, with my little internal writer laughing hysterically. I think when my intention is to care about my situations and characters the most, the symbols/meaningful dialogue/whatever just come naturally without me thinking about them.
Haven’t read the book you’re talking about, so I’ll pass on that.
-babybird
I have to say that I think it's a mix of both. When I write, I don't have a set outline of intentions, but usually one idea to get across. By the time I'm done, I see more links through the way I have written it than anticipated. Sometimes I feel that these intertwining ideas come out of the subconscious. Or, as an alternative, the story really does write itself. In that case, then we are nothing but a vessel used to write a story that needs to be told, where it could be argued that it's not really our story, just one that wants to be written.
This is also a problem I have when looking at literature analytically. I know people who insist the author intended a symbol to be in the book and what it represents, but since the author is dead, we can't ask them. I don't agree that the intention of an author should be assumed. While I'm sure some authors do plan out their books meticulously, I believe others just write, and happen to stumble upon something that stands out, like a symbol. In my mind, it ends up being a combination of what an author wants to say, the idea they need to convey, and the pull of the story that they have no control over. Some of it is planned, and the rest comes naturally. I agree with babybird, in that my work has been read in a completely different way than intended, but the reader’s believe it was my intention to have it set up in a certain way. That is an instance where the writing happened naturally, given the idea I set out with. I think this is an interesting topic to explore, but that there isn’t one answer. Every writer is different. Their work stems from different inspiration, which allows them to write in a unique way.
Just some thoughts.
-Drea
This story sounds like another wrenching depiction of the capacity of the Irish to be better than anyone at despair and depression. Not that I contest that fact, after seeing it through Pat McCabe's work (Breakfast on Pluto, The Butcher Boy)- and his made me so sick from sad symbols that I was ready to flush my eyes.
The question of intent in an author to build on intricacies is to me a question of inertia. Once you have a female character hugging booze because there is blood all over her dress and her arm has been pulled out of its socket, there are only so many ways to go. Also the idea of a writer stepping away from the characters to analyze how objectively effective his writing will be displays an ugly ego-stroking, but that's a different argument all together. Despite the talents of 'techincally conceited' authors or on the other hand hyper-analytical readers, the fact is that the work says what it says whether it has been grown organically or pasted through from storyboards by robots.
Post a Comment