Author’s Note
To follow is an excerpt from the Author’s Note which appears at the end of my book. A recent reader of an advance copy of the book posted in her review that, for her, it would have been helpful to have this information at the beginning of the book, for context and to better appreciate how I created Joan, the protagonist. From this particular reviewer’s comments, it seems like she struggled with this very complicated, often frustrating, main character, and that served to bias her against the storyline. I get it. Even readers who loved the novel felt like they were riding on an emotional roller-coaster with Joan. That’s good!
For sure, this is not a book which will appeal to everyone, yet I hope readers find the story compelling and the character multi-dimensional. There are, I believe, many layers to analyze and upon which to reflect.
Below is my Author’s Note:
A Letter in the Wall is a work of fiction, but the inspiration for the story came from a letter found in a bedroom wall of my house in 2007. I immediately began researching the name on the personalized stationery and quickly learned a lot about the real Joan’s family, but not much about Joan herself. What I did find out, and what was overwhelmingly the most prominent piece of information about her on the internet, was that she had been murdered in 1971. Thus began my journey to know Joan and learn how and why she ended up in Oklahoma. My initial goal was to try to piece together a biography of this woman, who had been raised in the Quaker tradition but who seemed to have strayed far from her ancestral and geographic roots.
The internet is a miracle of our time, a storehouse of information that, when used effectively and critically, can shed light on who a person, long-deceased, may have been. Websites such as Ancestry.com can supply a wealth of information in the form of public records, and from these sources I learned of the real Joan’s multiple marriages, divorces, the births of her children, the death of her mother and other family members, and her various addresses.
But public records from the past, I discovered, are often unreliable, with multiple and conflicting dates, misspelling of names, and barely legible handwriting serving as the only method of record-keeping. And even when complete and accurate information can be found, it cannot provide the why, the juicy meat of a person’s life that reflects decisions, conflicts, challenges, hardships, and longings—all the drama of being human and existing among other humans in a world that is, more often than not, out of our control.
So I took what scant information I could piece together about my letter-writer and began to imagine the person she had been, from her early childhood up until her death. She became real to me, to the point where I knew what brought her joy, what motivated her, what frightened her, and what confounded her. I crafted a story about someone named Joan, so that she could exist somewhere, forever.
Perhaps the truth would make an even more compelling story because, as Mark Twain famously said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” I wanted to explore the possibilities through a fictionalized story. I wanted to make sense of my character.
