Imagining Wonder: What if…the best things happen? by Barbara O'Neal

LUCY BURDETTE: you’ve heard me say that one of my favorite writers is Barbara O’Neal. I’m reading her latest, Memories of the Lost, and trying to make it last longer so I don’t feel the sadness of it ending. I follow her sub stack and really loved a recent post, which she agreed to share with us. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O'NEAL: My sister, a lifelong nurse, visited me last week. We were talking about aging in general, and our mother in particular.  I made an off-hand comment that I supposed everyone gets frail in their 90s. 

My sister said, most emphatically, that that wasn’t true at all. She sees lots of very aged people in her work, and sees a lot of 90-somethings who are quite vigorous, who live their lives the same way they always have, doing things, traveling, having adventures. 

I blinked. A huge sense of…potential bloomed in my body.  Expansion. 

In that instant, I realized that the idea of looming frailty has weighing on me in the weirdest ways.  My mother is in her early 80s, but she’s suddenly facing frailty from a dozen directions. I guess my mind was casting me into that 80-year-old frail role, too.  My cats are getting older and I think about what it would be like to get new kittens, and then my brain says, but you’re getting up there, and who will take care of the cats if something happens to you? 

I worry about how long we’ll get to stay in this beautiful home by the beach, and if the medical care will chase us back to a city. I wonder how long I’ll be able to do the vigorous travel I love so much. 

All of this has very much in the back of my mind, not anywhere in view, but until we had this conversation, I had not realized how much I’ve been imagining myself frail at 80. While it’s fine to be practical and make arrangements for alternative outcomes (and I think it’s smart to do that), I don’t want to live in that space of vague dread. 

None of us know when something might befall us—an accident or a random disease or whatever—but in our 30s and 40s, we don’t keep looking up at the scythe hanging over our heads. We just go about our lives, make plans, looking forward to things we anticipate doing. 

I want to return to that sense of spaciousness, claim it, as my sister-in-law used to say. I claim a vigorous old age. I am visualizing lots more time to raise kittens, travel, explore long walks on my beach and around the world.  

My sister said that people who stay active stay strong. Which we already know, but it was a great reminder. I can focus on more exercise, less extra weight, more activity, tons of great nutrition. I’m going to start looking for examples of vigorous older people and focus on them. There are many in my community. My neighbor is almost 78 and she’s planning a hike on the Coast to Coast walk in England. 

I’m just going to live without looking up at that scythe and imagine a great future. What if I’m still writing a book every (other) year, traveling with my husband, enjoying my many grandchildren on active vacations in my 90s? What if, like Esther Hicks says, I thrive, thrive, thrive, croak?

Does aging weigh on you? If you allowed yourself a sense of wonder, what might you see? 

Barbara O’Neal is the author of many titles of women’s fiction, including When We Believed in Mermaids and the forthcoming The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth. She writes regularly on Substack and lurks heavily on TikTok.

Memories of the Lost by Barbara O'Neal

 

LUCY BURDETTE: I adore Barbara O’Neal’s books and gobble them up as soon as they’re released. Her newest, MEMORIES OF THE LOST, is out next week and I’m delighted to host her today. I think you’ll find her blog about the process of writing fascinating. Welcome Barbara!

BARBARA O’NEAL: I am in that strange between place that career novelists know well. I spent the past year writing a new book, which I turned in to my editors a few weeks ago. They’ll have it for a month or so, and I’ll get it back for revisions and fine tuning. After the hard push on the book (that last month is always so very deeply enmeshed in BookLand!) I’m taking July off to spend with my family, visit my mother, hang out with my granddaughters, but in the back of my mind, I’m communing with the next book. At this point, it’s only vaguely a book, a wispy bit of storyline, a situation and characters. It was getting solid enough that I opened a Scrivener file for it the other day, but I can’t look at it too closely, or it will evaporate. 

Finally, my new book, Memories of the Lost is arriving in the world, all shiny and polished like a perfect apple. It is a highly romantic and mysterious book full of secrets, set in both New York City and England. I loved writing about Tillie the artist, and Liam the all-too-famous meditation teacher, about the loft where Tillie lives and paints. I also loved Clare, a Devon woman of middle age who has secrets and traumas of her own, and the farm where she lives with her husband and their collection of animals, a blind dog and a hare who can’t hop and the cats who run through everything in this book. 

The thing is, Memories is fully finished. I worked on it for more than a year, many drafts, and many edits to bring it into a place it could give a reader the experience it gave me in my head. It takes a lot of hours and work to get a book to that point, and it’s exhilarating to get it there. Such an accomplishment! (Whether the world loves the book is beside the point, honestly. An artist of any kind can only do the best work she is capable of producing at any given time.) 

The book I just turned in, titled only with the characters’ names, Mariah and Veronica, is in a different state. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and mental energy to get 100,000 words of a book onto the page, and getting to the end in a relatively readable, whole state is an astonishing thing every single time. I love the book madly when I turn it in the first time; I’ve done it! Written a whole book! 

Of course, it’s quite raw yet, full of plot holes and dropped timelines and inconsistencies and probably different names for secondary characters (editor: “is he Joe or Jim?”). There are always overworked words, different ones for every book; I am known to fall in love with some glittery description and then drop it in over and over. There are the plethora of justs and maybes and shrugs (so many shrugs, so many one-shouldered shrugs, so many raised eyebrows and sideways smiles!). I will wince upon reading all of these things in revision, but most of us just can’t see all of them in a rough draft. It’s all forest in rough draft; revision brings in the individual trees. 

And the new book, the misty idea, is just that. I always think I know what it is about when I start, and I’m always wrong. The girls in the basement lure me in with something that sounds like fun—two women, different ages, thrown together on a long journey!—and ends up being about something else entirely. I can see a luxury stateroom, an exotic destination, a—wait, is he—?

I just have to follow it, and see what happens. 

The day after I turned in Mariah and Veronica, I was sitting in my office/studio, feeling the sense of satisfaction that I’d managed to get it done before my guests arrived. The little girl part of me who said writing books would be the best job ever said quietly, “And I was right, don’t you think?”

She was.

Summer is an in-between time for many of us. What books are you reading to keep yourself company?

ABOUT THE BOOK: An unsuspecting artist uncovers her late mother’s secrets and unravels her own hidden past in a beguiling novel by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.

Months after her mother passes away, artist Tillie Morrisey sees a painting in a gallery that leaves her inexplicably lightheaded and unsteady. When a handsome stranger comes to her aid, their connection is so immediate it seems fated, though Liam is only visiting for a few days.

Working on her own art has always been a refuge, but after discovering a document among her mother’s belongings that suggests Tillie’s life has been a lie, she begins to suffer from a series of fugue states, with memories surfacing that she isn’t even sure are her own. As her confusion and grief mount, and prompted by a lead on the painting that started it all, Tillie heads to a seaside village in England. There, she hopes to discover the source of her uncanny inspirations, sort out her feelings about Liam, and unravel truths that her mother kept hidden for decades.

The fluidity of memory, empowering strength of character, beauty of nature, and love of family braid together in this artful tapestry of a novel.

You can find Barbara on Substack and Facebook.