HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Where do you get your ideas? we’re always asked. How do they grow?
Well, as the brilliant Juliette Faye explains so eloquently today, sometimes the world gets in the way.
But as writers, we have to embrace it at the same time we have to escape it.
Right?
And that’s not the half of it.
Well, actually, it is.
Rediscovering My Mental Soundproof Booth--
in the Midst of Covid Noise
At the beginning of the pandemic, I’d go for my daily walk, and neighbors would stop for a quick hello from the opposite side of the street. We’d check in: how’re you doing, how’re you holding up? And often they’d say something along the lines of, “You must be getting so much writing done!”
Writing? I’d think. How on earth would I do that?
Coming up with an idea for a story, inventing characters, building a world for them, “hearing” their voices, setting them on courses of action—or even inaction—takes an enormous amount of concentration.
You have to be able to mentally put yourself in a soundproof booth, away from real life, so you can be immersed in this other life that exists only in your head.
With Covid constantly pounding on the door—Wipe down the mail! Don’t hug anyone! Why did you just cough! Get more toilet paper! Check on Mom! Check again!—I found it impossible even to read for pleasure, much less write. Every writer I talked to felt the same way. We were all far too distracted to get much work done.
And not for nothing, my living situation wasn’t exactly conducive. My attorney husband, who was now working from home and needed a room with a door so he could hold confidential conversations with clients, took over my office. My two youngest sons were home from school, and my adult daughter soon moved back into our fairly small house. She set up camp in the living room with her fulltime-job Zoom calls and occasional yoga sessions. My laptop and I became nomads in constant search of a little corner to temporarily call our own until someone invaded, and we’d have to move again.
As social media constantly attested, many of us were finding new ways to manage our anxiety. There was suddenly a whole lot of bread being baked, musical instruments being dusted off, and rocks being painted. I dove into sewing masks for local hospitals.
But what really kept me on an even keel (or quarantine-even, anyway) was gardening. I’m here to tell you, my yard practically looked like the grounds at Versailles. (Not really, but in my head, yes.) And I couldn’t have cared less who saw me smeared with dirt, digging yet another hole, planting yet another hosta, jigging to whatever song came up next on my Spotify playlist (not coincidentally called Mom’s Playlist, like Helen’s). I was getting through however I could, just like everyone else.
About midsummer, I started thinking about how the pandemic was not only wreaking unimaginable havoc … but it was also putting us all on pause in some ways that might not be so bad. In my house, with nowhere to go, no white-knuckle commute for my husband, no revolving door of people coming and going as we usually have, there was time to think, to reflect, even. Paradoxically, with so many fewer choices available, I saw my family opting for things that were actually better for them. More exercise, more creativity, less running around for running around’s sake.
In August 2020, the opening scene of The Half of It popped into my head simply as a woman my age sitting on a bench by a river reflecting on her life. (The actual bench exists by the Sudbury River that flows through my town).
But of course a writer needs to add conflict, so her self-review is not a happy one; it’s one of regret. There’s some pivotal moment in her past that precipitated a series of wrong turns which led her to this point of admitting that she isn’t really happy and hasn’t been for most of her adult life. It needed some action, of course, so I sent a three-year-old running by to break her out of her navel gazing and force her to do something.
At first Cal Crosby was just another grandparent who, it turns out, also has regrets. They reveal this to each other as people sometimes do with strangers they never expect to see again. But then a friendship begins, and they form a little playgroup, getting together with their grandchildren, supporting each other to fix what went wrong.
Boring.
What if … what if this guy was with her at that pivotal moment when things started going south? What if he’s the reason for the regret? Woohoo! Now we’re talking!
I’ve always wanted to write a reunion story: two people separated for whatever reason who serendipitously cross paths years later. It always included a moment where one looks at the other and thinks, So this is how you turned out.
Until August 2020, I’d never come up with a satisfying context in which that would happen. Now I had it, and I started poking around, playing with it, writing notes, possible motivations, secondary characters, whole scenes.
By September, both my younger sons had moved out—one to his own apartment, and the other to a semester in the wilds of Wyoming. My daughter had shifted her “office” into one of their bedrooms.
I had given up resenting the loss of my office, in part because when my husband was on a non-confidential call, he liked to walk around and clean, sweeping the mudroom, unloading the dishwasher, making beds. One day I looked up and he was outside wiping the window next to me with glass cleaner and a rag, talking away into his earpiece. Losing an office and gaining a housekeeper was a tradeoff I was willing to make.
Covid was still banging on the door of my mental soundproof booth, of course, but it had become a familiar refrain at that point, one that was easier to ignore for a few hours. In fact, as the fall came and the yard went dormant, writing supplanted gardening as my go-to coping skill.
Being in Helen’s world was the mini vacation I couldn’t have in real life. With nowhere to go, I wrote more than I ever have in my career, sometimes logging as many as four or five thousand words in a day. I completed a full first draft in March 2021, just seven months after I’d started.
What made it really interesting was writing about the future—October 2021—which I hoped and imagined would be post-pandemic. (Boy did I guess wrong. I had to go back later and add in the occasional mask in revisions.) I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write about characters social distancing, and my agent confirmed this instinct as soon as I told her about my idea. “Oh, God,” she said. “Don’t write about Covid. We’re all so sick of it!”
The tricky part was waiting to see if what I hoped—that we’d be semi-normal by October 2021—would come to pass. In early January of that year, with cases spiking and the vaccine rollout slower than expected, I thought I’d have to shift the whole story to spring of 2022. I read the newspaper every day for clues as to what the future would hold, and not, I’m a little ashamed to say, only for the sake of the planet. I had Helen and Cal to worry about. I was on their planet, too, and I wanted them to be safe.
That’s the funny thing about writers. The world inside that mental soundproof booth? Sometimes it feels very, very real, no matter what’s happening outside.
HANK: Aw,this is wonderful. And true. Reds and readers, I know you cannot wait to chat about this. And Juliette is giving a copy of THE HALF OF IT to one very lucky commenter!
Juliette Fay is the award-winning, bestselling author of six previous novels, including Shelter Me, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist and Indie Next pick, and The Tumbling Turner Sisters, a USA Today bestseller. A graduate of Boston College and Harvard University, she lives in Massachusetts with her family.
USA Today bestselling author Juliette Fay returns with an emotional story of lost love and the ghosts of our past, perfect for fans of Jodi Picoult and Jojo Moyes. THE HALF OF IT (On sale: April 11, 2023; William Morrow paperbacks | $18.99 ISBN: 9780063235960) is an emotional, introspective novel that begs the questions: Can the past ever really be fixed? And what would you do if you ran into the person who sent your life into a tailspin after forty years apart?
When fifty-eight-year-old Helen Spencer reviews her life, what she sees are the mistakes. Over the years, things seemed to go sideways incrementally, one little wrong decision at a time. She can even pinpoint where it all started to go awry: a wonderous, romantic night in the woods her senior year of high school with a boy named Cal Crosby. A night she works hard to forget.
Four decades, one marriage, three children, and one grandbaby later, suddenly there he is—Cal Crosby!— right in front of her with grandchildren of his own in tow. The chance to finally get some answers and sort out what happened between them is within reach. But Helen would much prefer to keep that night and all the fury, hurt, and sorrow that followed tightly locked away where she doesn’t have to face it. Cal Crosby, however, is ready to talk. He has no idea of the can of worms he’s about to open. In fact, he doesn’t know the half of it.
A warm, poignant, propulsive novel about settling the past, THE HALF OF IT is centered around rekindling lost friendships, coming to terms with hurt, and discovering love when you least expect it. And as a SheReads Best Book Club Pick of 2023, there’s no better choice for your next gathering.
Juliette Fay is the award-winning, bestselling author of six previous novels, including Shelter Me, a Massachusetts Book Award finalist and Indie Next pick, and The Tumbling Turner Sisters, a USA Today bestseller. A graduate of Boston College and Harvard University, she lives in Massachusetts with her family.
