An Uneasy Grace

 

 

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction

 

This week’s prompt makes me uneasy because I’m not inclined toward the autobiographical, or, more to the point, self-revelation in life or my fiction. The truth is, I’m uncomfortable discussing childhood and trauma. I understand the impulse. We want meaning from pain, but I’m wary of turning suffering into a performance.

 

We live in a culture that can turn every hardship into a badge of honor. When I was a kid, status among adults was being in therapy and having Quaaludes within reach. Today, influencers offer advice, progress notes, breakthroughs and setbacks as their brand.

 

I live in a country that fetishizes its military power, promotes aggression as morality and policy, and has a long cultural romance with the idea that the person willing to do the most damage is somehow the strongest.

 

The cowboy became the robber baron in the Gilded Age, the gangster during Prohibition, who became the corporate mafioso quoting Marcus Aurelius and The Art of War in meetings.

 

As a crime writer, I get it. Injustice is part of the landscape. It’s material. Violence is a tool, a threat, a consequence.

 

Newsflash, folks: life is trauma.

 

I haven’t met a woman who hasn’t had to deal with a predatory man. We live in a world where the media sometimes informs us, sometimes misleads us, and often lies outright. Violence is treated as morality while sex is taboo and censored. We are subjected to daily assaults on our cognition and emotions.

 

News update: real violence is not cinematic.

 

It is fast and almost always uglier. In my experience, people who know violence intimately understand this and don’t talk about it.

 

I’ve seen what violence does to people and families.

 

My father’s best friend killed his wife and then himself in front of their two children. Their son was institutionalized and never recovered.

 

I grew up with weapons within reach: a .357 in one nightstand, and a .45 in a desk across the room, a combat knife tucked beneath magazines. I can tell you what gunpowder from a shotgun smells like on a hot, humid summer day because it hits my brain with the same immediacy people describe where they were when Kennedy was shot, or the song on the radio when they experienced their first kiss.

 

And then there is my own experience.

 

I have no criminal record, but at sixteen I came close. A cop understood context and circumstance and cut me slack he technically shouldn’t have. We made a deal. I kept my end of it.

 

That is one reason I didn’t walk out of a state prison in my thirties.

 

If I seem deliberately vague, I am.

 

All I’ll say is that I very nearly committed the irrevocable. I’m not religious, but there was, in that moment of chaos, an uneasy grace: a strange calm and a clarity that I have never forgotten.

 

People use terms like PTSD and mention flashbacks and nightmares. It doesn’t work that way for me. If I’m awake at 3 a.m., it isn’t necessarily because I’m replaying some horrific montage of images.

 

I’m rehashing something I said or did wrong in a relationship forty years ago.

 

I’m quirky that way.

 

What may surprise people who have never experienced their dark side is that, under certain circumstances, you step outside yourself.

 

I did.

 

You become Other.

 

That, too, is grace. You do what you believe you must do, and you discover you are capable of things you never imagined. The textbook example we all know is the mother who lifts a car to free her trapped child.

 

The scene of violence that has haunted me longest, however, wasn’t human.

 

A friend’s dog stepped into the street and was hit by a car. I watched the dog die and my friend become inconsolable. Somehow, that stayed with me more than the things that should have been harder to forget.

 

I have a soft spot for animals.

 

All that is to say that I haven’t emerged unscathed.

 

I still look for entrances and exits when I enter a room. I notice whether people are left- or right-handed. I register what is closest to me that I could use as a weapon. I dislike having people behind me. I become edgy in conversations when I can’t see the other person’s face.

 

Most days I have a dim view of the species. I often think we are screaming apes in clothes.

 

People tell me I have a dry and dark sense of humor.

 

They’re probably right, but it’s a defense mechanism and I know it.

 

In the years since, I’ve learned that you can never truly know another human being, just as they can never completely know you. I’ve had enough experience not to trust easily, but you have to know and trust yourself.

 

That is what I bring from childhood and trauma into my fiction. Not specific events, necessarily, and certainly not autobiography. What I bring is an understanding that the line between ordinary and terrible is thinner than we like to believe.

 

That matters when I create characters.

 

I’m less interested in the question, What happened to this person? than in the more difficult question: How did it change the way they understand the world?

 

Trauma doesn’t have to produce a damaged person in the conventional sense. People survive. They adapt. They become functional. They become successful. They can be funny, intelligent, competent and perfectly capable of getting through an ordinary Tuesday.

 

But survival can come with a price.

 

It can alter what you trust. It can alter what you notice. It can alter what you think other people mean. It can make uncertainty intolerable. It can make a person extraordinarily good at reading danger while being remarkably bad at understanding safety.

 

That is where trauma becomes useful to a crime writer.

 

My current work in progress, HUNGRY GHOST, the sixth Company File novel, illustrates this.

 

One of its central characters is Tania, a Hungarian-Russian orphan. Stalin liquidated her family. She was severely traumatized and abused, and as a result she is poorly socialized. She is also highly intelligent, multilingual and manipulative when necessary. She has killed, including once in self-defense, and in an earlier novel she took the initiative and killed believing she was helping ‘uncle’ Sheldon, only to discover later that she had been manipulated into it by Allen W. Dulles.

 

Tania could have joined the Company. She could have gone to the Mossad. She turns both down. She goes solo.

 

That decision makes sense to her, and that’s crucial.

 

A character doesn’t have to make sense to us. The character has to make sense to herself.

 

Tania’s logic is often eccentric. She can rationalize violence. She is a functional adult, but she doesn’t trust permanence. She has survived too many incompatible truths.

 

The novel opens with her arriving in Budapest, with revolution and Soviet reprisal in the air. It is a bittersweet homecoming. She is in her early twenties and following a lead to find a man she met briefly as a child, a man she believes betrayed her father and ultimately led to the annihilation of her family.

 

Tania’s real wound isn’t simply what happened to her.

 

It is the destruction of certainty.

 

Her epistemology has been damaged.

 

She cannot tolerate unanswered questions.

 

That gives me something much more interesting than a conventional trauma backstory. Her history becomes a force acting on every decision she makes. Her need to understand the past affects whom she trusts, what risks she takes, how she interprets evidence and, ultimately, what she is willing to do to get an answer.

 

If I had to reduce Tania to one sentence, it would be this:

 

Tania is a highly intelligent survivor of political terror whose greatest strength is adaptation and whose greatest weakness is her need to believe that the past can still be explained.

 

The crime writer’s job, as I see it, is not to diagnose the character or explain her to the reader.

 

It is to put pressure on the wound and see what happens.

 

That is also why I’m cautious about using my own experiences too literally. Autobiography can tell you what happened. Fiction has to ask what happens next.

 

My most recent novel, FOUR ON THE FLOOR, also touches that territory. Shane recognizes something of himself in an assassin. I won’t say more. What lies behind that character’s actions is part of the novel.

 

But the connection between that book and HUNGRY GHOST are the questions:

 

What does prolonged exposure to violence and uncertainty do to a human being?

 

Does survival make you stronger, or merely better adapted to surviving?

 

Can you learn to trust again?

 

Can you distinguish danger from the memory of danger?

 

And perhaps most difficult of all: can you accept that sometimes there are questions to which there are no answers?

 

That last one is where Tania eventually has to go.

 

By the end of HUNGRY GHOST, she has to accept something her entire life has taught her to reject: sometimes you don’t get an answer.

 

That, I think, is the difference between mining your past for material and allowing your past to inform your fiction.

 

I don’t have to put my childhood on the page. What matters is what it taught me to notice.

 

Vigilance. Uncertainty. The knowledge that people can surprise you, for better or worse. The knowledge that someone can survive terrible things and still be funny, intelligent, competent and profoundly wrong about something that matters.

 

Those are things I can give to a fictional character. The character gets her own history, her own logic and her own choices.

 

That is probably as autobiographical as I’m willing to get.

 

And perhaps that is enough.

 

As for the inevitable darkness at 3 a.m., the best thing you can hope for is an uneasy grace.