Every draft of Cedar Hollow Promises had a version of Lena who waited. Who endured. Who was written as the still center of someone else's storm. I kept rewriting her until she finally talked back.
Every draft of Cedar Hollow Promises had a version of Lena who waited. Who endured. Who was written as the still center of someone else's storm. I kept rewriting her until she finally talked back.
The problem with women in Southern fiction — in a lot of fiction — is that their grief is treated as backdrop. The man has the journey. The woman has the wound. She stands in the doorway and watches him leave, and that's supposed to be enough character for us to care.
Lena wouldn't stand for it. I mean that literally: she kept refusing to hold still on the page.
There's a scene — early in the book, just after 1996, just after the arrest — where Lena is alone in her mother's kitchen. I wrote it seventeen times. Fifteen of those versions had her crying. The sixteenth had her numb. The seventeenth — the one that stayed — has her making biscuits. Doing the ordinary thing in the middle of extraordinary devastation. Not because she's strong. Because she doesn't know what else to do with her hands.
That's Lena. She's not waiting to be rescued. She's not waiting to rescue Malik, either. She's trying, imperfectly and honestly, to figure out what it means to love someone who hurt you — and whether forgiveness is something you give, or something that eventually just happens to you, like weather.
When readers tell me Lena feels real, I think it's because she has contradictions. She loves Malik and she's furious at him. She missed him for nineteen years and she's terrified of what comes next. She's not a saint and she's not a metaphor. She's a woman who deserved better, who knows it, and who is still trying to decide if "better" is even available anymore.
Writing her well was the hardest thing I've ever done. I hope she knows it.