Reader, I got it wrong.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I was describing a book to someone the other day, and realized I was actually describing the movie. It might have been To Kill A Mockingbird. Or Silence of the Lambs. Anyway, the reality of the book vanished, replaced by the easier-to-remember movie. And I was so surprised, reading Mockingbird again, that the movie is only a tiny bit of the book.

I was reassured, then, to hear from the amazing Michelle Gagnon that I’m not the only victim of misremembering.

ooh, Orson Welles!

Her new book, by the way, is a newly imagined version of Jane Eyre. Brilliant.

Misremembering Jane Eyre

By Michelle Gagnon

 

“Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment; is it not?”

                    Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

I first read Jane Eyre in high school, and dove into it again after college. Since it’s one of the few books that I’ve ever re-read, when I decided to write a modernized, deconstructed version, I was confident that I remembered the story.

And then I read it again.

Memory is a funny thing, I quickly realized. It turns out that I mainly recalled about the romance between Jane and the tempestuous Mr. Rochester (I chalk that up to being a teen when I first encountered it). Although in truth, I hadn’t even remembered their relationship entirely correctly.

There’s a phenomenon called “The Mandela Effect,” a situation where you might think something happened in a particular way, but it turns out you’re mistaken. According to Buzzfeed, “The name of the theory comes from many people feeling certain they could remember Nelson Mandela dying while he was still in prison back in the ’80s. Contrary to what many thought, Mandela’s actual death was on Dec. 5, 2013, despite some people claiming to remember seeing clips of his funeral on TV.”

Bizarre, right? And yet it applied directly to my mistaken memory of the plot of Jane Eyre. For example:

·      I remembered Jane’s time at Thornfield Hall taking up the bulk of the book, while in fact the lengthy outset of the novel relates her childhood and time at the Lowood Institution; and then there’s an equally long chunk at the end where she becomes acquainted with the Rivers (who turn out to be long lost relatives, a coincidence I’ve always had trouble forgiving Bronte for).

·      Rochester. In retrospect, not as great a guy as I thought. He quickly becomes weirdly possessive. Re-reading the book twenty years later, I couldn’t help but think, “Stalker much?” as he rattled off lines like, “But listen-whisper-it is your time, now, little tyrant but it will be mine presently; and when once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I’ll just-figuratively speaking-attach you to a chain like this,” touching his watch guard. “Yes, bonny wee thing, I’ll wear you in my bosom, lest my jewel I should tyne.”

I mean, dude. Simmer down. Part of what I loved about Jane Eyre was how revolutionary a strong, independent heroine was for that time period. Yet in the chapters leading up to their aborted marriage, it turns out that Rochester doesn’t really seem to get her at all. Mind you, I’m still Team Rochester, but his character wasn’t exactly how I’d remembered (although maybe I just found his full-throttle courtship more romantic as a fourteen-year-old).

·      Elements of the supernatural. Because of the pervasive Gothic atmosphere, I’d thought that Jane Eyre incorporated many supernatural elements. In fact, there are only two truly strange occurrences in the entire novel. The first is when, as a child, Jane sees a glowing light glide across the room; as she puts it, “I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world.” 

       Reflecting as an adult, however, she chalks it up to a childish fit of nerves. (Mind you, the light never returns, which was a bit disappointing; why introduce a fantastic McGuffin like that if doesn’t factor into the story later? Unless it was meant to be a foreshadowing of future fires…) 

     The second supernatural occurrence (and, at least according to Jane, only true one) is when Jane hears Rochester calling for her at a pivotal decision making moment, despite the fact that in actuality, he’s miles away. Tres romantic, yes? But that’s the only truly unexplained supernatural element in the story.

·      >The fire. Perhaps because Wide Sargasso Sea is another favorite of mine, I mistakenly thought that we actually saw Thornfield Hall burn in Jane Eyre: alas, not so much. The reader only finds out about the tragic fire afterward, when Jane returns to discover nothing but blackened ruins. So my vivid recollection of those events must be due to Jean Rhys’s fine work.

So I’m curious: Did any of you suffer from the same “Mandela Effect” in your memory of Jane Eyre? Or perhaps with another book?

(My favorite non-literary example, by the way, is this: in the film version of Silence of the Lambs, one of the top quoted lines is “Hello, Clarice.” But guess what—Hannibal Lecter never said that. Here’s a link to more if you’re curious) 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: And politicos, Woodward and Bernstein have said no one ever admonished them to “follow the money.” That’s only in the movie. 

But hey.  I remember the fire too.  Definitely. 

So let’s do a giveaway.  When did you read Jane Eyre?  Or did you? Did you just see the movie?  What do you remember? And are there other books you get mixed up with the movie? Or where the movie got it wrong?
Every comment is entered to win Michelle’s Unearthly Things.

 

UNEARTHLY THINGS 

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre retold against the backdrop of San Francisco's most fabulous—and dangerous—elites.

After losing her parents in a tragic accident, surfer girl Janie Mason trades the sunny beaches of Hawaii for the cold fog of San Francisco and new guardians—the Rochesters—she’s never even met. Janie feels hopelessly out of place in their world of Napa weekends, fancy cotillions, and chauffeurs. The only person she can relate to is Daniel, a fellow surfer. Meeting him makes Janie feel like things might be looking up.

Still, something isn’t right in the Rochester mansion. There are noises—screams—coming from the attic that everyone else claims they can’t hear. Then John, the black sheep of the family, returns after getting kicked out of yet another boarding school. Soon Janie finds herself torn between devil-may-care John and fiercely loyal Daniel. Just when she thinks her life can’t get any more complicated, she learns the truth about why the Rochesters took her in. They want something from Janie, and she’s about to see just how far they’ll go to get it.

"Effortlessly paced, full of heart, humor and horror, Gagnon revives the spirit of a classic while putting her own unique spin on the story…addictive, fast-paced and haunting."
—Madeleine Roux, New York Times bestselling author of the Asylum series

Michelle Gagnon (www.michellegagnon.com) is the bestselling author of thrillers for teens and adults. Her young adult PERSEF0NE trilogy (Don’t Turn Around, Don’t Look Now, Don’t Let Go) was nominated for a Thriller Award, and was selected as a top read by Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, Voya, and YALSA. Her standalone thriller Strangelets was a Junior Library Guild pick. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

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What We're Writing: @HallieEphron, the sister who didn't

HALLIE EPHRON: It's What We're Writing week again, and (bowing) thank you, thank you, I get to kick off the festivities. I am working on a new book but it's still very much in flux so I'm keeping it under wraps. Instead I'm offering up part of an essay I wrote about having sisters who write. I wrote it to celebrate the publication of my somewhat autobiographical novel Night Night, Sleep Tight in which the protagonist who really is the virtual me has no sisters.  

*** Whenever I get together with my sisters and reminisce about something that happened when we were growing up, one of them will pipe up, “It wasn’t like that.” Another will pile on: “And you weren’t there.”

And maybe I wasn’t. Memory is like that. Photos in family albums morph into memories, while events that weren’t seared into consciousness fade.

For years I sat back and didn’t write while my sisters did, and it’s always illuminating when one of them writes about a time when I was there.

My older sister Delia’s first book, the huge bestseller How to Eat Like a Child, has a chapter on “How to torture your sister.” In it she reveals techniques that she and I practiced on our younger sister, Amy. (“I’ve got to tell you something. You’re adopted!”) Delia would go on to write Hanging Up, miraculously finding humor in our screenwriter father’s bouts of alcohol-soaked self-pity. 

My oldest sister Nora, who inspired a generation of women to feel bad about their necks and who wrote and directed some of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’ best films, gave me a moment on the page as the "good" daughter (“to distinguish her from me,” the protagonist explains) in Heartburn, her painfully funny autobiographical novel about the breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein.

Then there’s the time I nearly killed Amy. She immortalized it in her first novel, Cool Shades. She couldn’t pedal her tricycle fast enough to keep up with my two-wheeler, so I tied my bike to her trike. Soon we were flying along. Near the corner, I hit the brakes. But tricycles have no brakes, so Amy kept on going until the rope snapped and she flew off, skidding face-first across the macadam. Reading her book brought back the full horror of that moment when I realized what I’d done.

I've gotten used to being written about, and whenever one of my sisters publishes something (as in just about every other week), I brace for another cringe-worthy episode from my life to get aired. 

For years I couldn't fight back. I didn't write.

Then, one day I got a call from a freelance writer. She wanted to write a magazine piece about me. “You’re the sister who doesn’t write,” she said, like “the fourth Brontë sister.” Which sounded unappealing, not just because the fourth Brontë sister died young of tuberculosis.

Then it struck me: the longer I waited to write, the less material there would be to claim as my own.

I told that freelancer that if anyone was going to write about me not writing it was going to be me.

***
After telling that freelance thanks, but no thanks, I started where most writers start, essays about my own personal experience. I piled page on top of page, thinking maybe I was writing a book. But when I read it, I knew that while the words were fine, and some of the sentences were lovely, the story was circling the drain. I had no idea that characters need arcs, that there had to be stakes, and the story had to go somewhere.

I tucked that unfinished manuscript away. When I pulled it out about three years ago, I was surprised to find that it didn't smell as bad as I thought it would. In fact, pieces of it are in Night Night. (The episode where Deirdre gets nabbed for shoplifting at J. J. Newberry's really happened. Sadly none of my sisters were involved so I missed an opportunity to humiliate one of them.)

Which leads me one of my hard and fast WRITING RULES. Save everything you write because today's garbage is tomorrow's compost. Which is a corollary to my other WRITING RULE: Just hold your nose and write.