Beautiful Little Fools(98)
By March, I had excitedly written the first fifty pages and a detailed outline. I had a plan to leisurely spend the next few months delving into the fictional world of these women. Little did I know that the real world was about to shut down, my kids were about to be at home twenty-four/seven, and I was going to be worrying about buying toilet paper. I took a break from writing for two weeks. (Remember those days when we thought we would only need two weeks to flatten the curve?) But by April, it was clear we were in a worldwide pandemic that wasn’t ending anytime soon, and I had Daisy, Jordan, Catherine, and Myrtle paused and waiting for me.
And so there was the stress and worry and homeschooling and figuring out how to use Instacart and curbside pickup, but there was also the glamour and terrible recklessness of Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s marriage, Jordan pushing boundaries as a female golfer, Myrtle being trapped in a loveless marriage, and Catherine pushing forward as a suffragette. There were drunken parties in the midst of Prohibition, and sober mistakes in a world so unforgiving to women. There was friendship and motherhood, affairs and murder, darkness and eccentricity. Secrets and lies to unravel and reveal.
The week in the beginning of June when my husband and I had planned (in prepandemic times) to go to Hawaii to celebrate twenty years of marriage, I finished my earliest draft. Instead of the beach in Maui, I was on my back patio, well-worn college copy of The Great Gatsby in my hands, rereading yet again, highlighting details I might have missed that would make it into my revision. A few weeks later when a wildfire broke out in the mountains behind our home and we had to pack up to be prepared to evacuate, my tattered copy of The Great Gatsby went into a box with my most treasured photo albums.
The fire finally burned out, the pandemic raged on. By August I was living in the world’s Covid hotspot, my kids’ school year began remotely, and I dove back in to revise Beautiful Little Fools, debating over the perfect ending. I reread The Great Gatsby one more time and also, at this point, watched every movie adaptation ever made (including my new favorite, a lesser-known version with Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway). I found it fascinating to see how each filmmaker in every era reimagined the world and the women of Gatsby just a little bit differently. They were originally Fitzgerald’s fictional women, but then they were shaped and shifted by the points of view of the filmmakers. While it isn’t a plot point in Gatsby, the hedonistic 1920s were born from the tragedy of the 1918 flu pandemic—the women I was writing about had sprung from such a similar time to the one I was inhabiting. I considered how they had been shaped by my point of view, too, writing them against the backdrop of this century’s pandemic. And I wondered if my joy in bringing them to life, as fully drawn, complex people who are shaped by the time they lived in, was itself a way for me to rescue this time of my life, to create something beautiful.
Writing fiction has always felt like an escape from the real world for me, but also a way to process my own feelings about whatever is going on in my real life at the time. It’s why I’m drawn to women, mothers, daughters, sisters, wives. I love taking on the roles of my female characters in my head, embodying their voices with my words on the page, but writing about themes that impact my own life too.
In my search for the perfect ending in the final stages of my revision, I realized the story I ultimately wanted to tell was one of women helping women in their darkest moments, of self-preservation, of a fight for survival, and of the importance of home—all things I’d thought about many times in my real life in those long pandemic months. As much as I gave Daisy, Jordan, Catherine, and Myrtle a voice, maybe they gave me one too.