The Story Behind the Story: The Power of Novels to Conceal, Reveal, and Heal

sasharpe
Feb 12
12 min read

I whooped with joy upon the recent publication of my first novel, a lifelong dream fulfilled at last. Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief is a suspense story about a pair of art forgers who fall in love: Nick, a brilliant con artist with a traumatic past, and Kate, a savvy therapist with a savior complex.

The Story I Thought I Was Telling

Much to my dismay, it was not very long before my initial elation began to wane and a feeling of dread set in. When asked in interviews why I wrote about art forgery, I’d start to feel panicky and draw a blank.

The panic was very real and almost debilitating, but why? I spent five years researching and writing about this oddball subject and a quasi-illicit affair, yet I was still unable to give a genuine answer. I’d cough up intellectual reasons that might contain kernels of the truth, but didn’t fully resonate with me.

As a psychologist, I felt compelled to look deeper for the source of this mysterious anxiety and soon found the emotional truth hiding out in the dark corners of my early childhood. The lost details of those enchanted yet heartbreaking years began to come back.

Being long experienced in ferreting out the motivations of my clients’ destructive or seemingly unfathomable behaviors, I’m an expert at solving these kinds of mysteries. From working with authors in treatment, I know that writing stories is often a form of therapy for them, a way to recreate the past and heal old wounds, to make right what has always been wrong.

The Story I Couldn’t Explain

Many writers don’t recognize the deeper meaning of their work, nor do they want to know. The subliminal wish may be for the story to heal painful aspects of the past without the need for a face-to-face encounter.

As when the hero of a story finally defeats the brutal villain, and the author doesn’t see the unconscious expression of rage against his abusive father, though he may feel a quiet inner triumph. But I needed to know why I wanted to run from certain truths about myself and the past, especially when I preached to clients, both verbally and in writing, the importance of facing your fears and past traumas (The Ways We Love, 2000).

The story behind my novel did not come back in the logical form it unfolds on these pages. It emerged in unexpected flashes, images, and disconnected scenes. The first memory was set off by a dream I had of me at about age four in the backyard of where my family first lived in the cheap housing for the junior faculty at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

We were scraping by in those days, my dad working at home to complete his dissertation and my mom working overtime as a social worker. The yard looked like a deserted playground for impoverished children, with its rusted, broken swing set and debris-filled wading pool.

The oasis was my little table, with my nickname, “Bunny,” painted diagonally in red across the top. In the dream, I was sitting there with Dom, the Italian boy next door, who was about seven years old. We were working on the same painting together, and he was helping me make a better tree. I was so full of happiness, I wanted to sing.

Since I’m big on dream analysis, I looked to what happened during the day that might have set off this dream, the inciting incident, as story writers call it. I recalled the rewarding experience of working with my writing coach on a talk about art forgery that I was to give as an introduction at my book launch.

There was the warm feeling of a close companionship, a lot of laughter and fun, and an exciting exchange of ideas. This experience must have triggered my past close relationship with Dom and the joyful scene of us making a painting together.

Snatches of those blissful days spent drawing and painting with Dom began to appear in sharp detail in my mind. My four-year-old self fell in love with making art at the same time I fell in love with him. He was three years older than me and already an exceptional artist. He taught me how to paint at a more advanced, realistic level. We also spent a lot of time copying pictures in books.

Dom had a natural gift for imitating any artist’s style, which I tried to emulate. Recalling this part of the past, I realized that I’d given Nick, my fictional art forger, the same gift. This was the first inkling that my rakish hero was based on Dom, and the real passion driving my novel came from bringing my first loves and that dream-like state of happiness back to life.

The Childhood Story Beneath the Novel

For a short while, it was mostly the happy times that came back. I remember one fight we had about our mothers, which one was prettier, which one was the better cook? Dom made fun of my mother’s tasteless dinners, but most of the time, he was kind, affectionate, and my protector in the rough Chicago neighborhood we lived in.

The street toughs liked and respected him, and to ensure we were always safe, he fostered the belief that his absent father was a Mafia Don. I believed this at first until I realized he had a gift for cleverly fooling people, the same quality I gave to Nick, my charming fictional rogue.

I continued to focus on bringing back more of the past. The good times continued for two to three years after my parents and Dom’s mother, Ange, decided to move into a two-level house together. My overworked parents probably paid a bigger share of the rent, so I’d have unemployed Ange to take care of me. I was thrilled. We lived in the flat upstairs, though I was always with Dom downstairs. He and I were inseparable.

Once, when he was away for three days, I kept him close by acting like his mother or his big-girl wife. I cleaned his closet, arranged his clothes, and his art supplies. I even slept in his bed, imagining he was next to me. His devotion to me became apparent when I was away at camp. Having given up an outing with friends, he sat on the porch all day rocking in the old, beat-up chair, waiting for me to come home.

As the happy scenes began to fade, the fear of remembering what came next made me feel edgy, feel the darkness lurking around the warm glow of these memories, waiting for the right moment to blot out the light. In addition, I was having a hard time managing my fear of public speaking about my book, and started going to Toastmasters to master this problem.

Face your fears has always been my motto, but had I known what I had to face and how I had to face it, I might have chosen to avoid Toastmasters and keep the traumatic side of my childhood safely locked up.

The Story That Returned Through Memory

The past, painful drama began to show itself in the present at Christmas time, the season to be jolly, though I rarely was at this time of year. New to Toastmasters, I was called up in front of the friendly group of mostly seasoned speakers dressed in gaudy and goofy holiday attire.

I was instructed to talk about an unknown subject without a podium, my hunched shoulders and quaking legs on full view. I should have run then. The perky Toastmaster wearing a Santa hat with bells asked me to share my happiest memory of Christmas.

I panicked, that scary blankness again, my whole body rigid with tension. “I can’t,” I finally choked out. “I don’t like Christmas.”

She responded with a giggle, as though I must be joking, and said, “Oh, but what about when you were a child?” She bounced closer to me, smiling, the bells on her hat tinkling.

My legs threatened to buckle, the room receding. “Childhood was the worst,” I croaked, the audience blurring into cheery smears of red, green, and white.

What I could see with perfect clarity in the sudden flashback was a pathetic-looking Christmas tree, scrawny, half-decorated, tilting, about to fall over. A little blonde girl was on the floor of a barren room, hugging her knees and sobbing, the loss of her beloved Dom intolerable. I tuned back in to the silent audience, gawking at me. I desperately wanted to run, but I couldn’t move.

A deep voice from the back of the room tried to rescue me with a less loaded question, asking something about my favorite Christmas gift. “This is Happiness,” I blurted, gratefully, “an uplifting novel by Niall Williams.”

Just the thought of that funny, inspiring novel comforted me enough to manage a slight smile. How fitting. A book to the rescue! The group’s admiring praise for having the courage to share a painful truth despite my fear encouraged me to stick with Toastmasters.

Gradually, I gained more confidence, now understanding that if I revealed my true motive for writing the book, the past trauma of losing Dom might surge into consciousness as it did in Toastmasters.

But fear of public speaking had always plagued me, and I still didn’t know why, though I’d drawn comfort from the fact that most other people are also more afraid of public speaking than death, so it’s been said.

The frequent visits of stress and fear about public speaking were destabilizing and cracked open the gates for more painful memories to surface. Now I remembered, the Christmas nightmare began when I was in the first grade. My parents decided to move across town for reasons they withheld from me. I cried and cried, begging to go back home.

I started to recall our dreary apartment, and I often felt sick and stayed in bed, the covers pulled up over my head. I hated my new school. I retreated to a fantasy world and started making pictures again, pretending Dom was with me. We copied the simple illustrations in books I could read. Thus began my interest in writing stories, which later were about two inseparable friends, a dark-haired boy and a blonde girl, solving mysteries together.

The True Story the Novel Was Trying to Heal

My parents never spoke of Dom or Ange. The photo album with their pictures had disappeared. Struggling to control my bitterness and anger at them, I started to lose track of myself. Who was I? Without Dom, I felt like no one. Half of me, the best half, was gone. Praying that Dom would someday return, I’d often pretend to be Snow White and sing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” while doing the dishes.

Years later, the miracle happened.

Dom found me living in the suburb of Olympia Fields when I was a senior in high school. Somber-voiced, he spoke of his hard, checkered life after his mother abandoned him when he was fourteen. She’d left him some money but no explanation of why or where she’d gone or when she would return.

His father also disappeared. Dom had scraped by with the help of an older friend. He also forged his mother’s name on documents so he could get her welfare checks. He made copies of popular paintings to sell at swap meets, just like fictional Nick did to survive in my novel. Said he’d waited to find us until he was self-sufficient. I winced at that sacrifice. All the pain of losing him came rushing back, propelled by a raging fury at my parents for abandoning him.

Dom had become a strikingly handsome young man, and I found it hard to catch my breath in his presence. He looked like a refined version of John Travolta. No longer a laughing, fun-loving boy, Dom had become serious and stiff, though still emanating a gentle warmth. He showed me a recent painting he’d brought with him. It was a moving still life in shades of blue, and I could feel the sadness and mourning expressed, possibly for the mother who had deserted him, much like I felt I had.

After I graduated from college, I saw Dom for a long weekend. I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, and was working for the Welfare Department. He was returning from serving in the Vietnam War. I was beyond excited to see him. This time, it seemed the stiff, earlier barriers had dissolved, and we fell back into something akin to our childhood closeness and camaraderie.

A passionate love affair soon followed that left little room for talking in the next couple of days and nights.

Weeks later, when I came home for Christmas, Dom and I continued our romance. I was euphoric, but it was apparent my parents were not pleased. Christmas night would be our last time together before I went back to my job in New Haven. Dom did not bring up the future, and neither did I. True to the lack of clear endings in our families, he said at the door after a long, goodnight embrace, “Let me know when you’re back in town.” Then he was gone.

I stood frozen at the door, the icy wind whipping around me. I would not be back in town anytime soon. I collapsed in the dark on the sofa, bent over, holding my aching gut. Was this a punishment? Was it my turn to be deserted and left without an explanation at Christmas? It felt like an angry lover’s eye-for-an-eye retaliation, but I couldn’t believe Dom could be that cruel, at least consciously.

The next day, I had a long-overdue fight with my mother. She was not surprised that things had not worked out with Dom. “After all, the difference in class was too great between us. Dom is bright enough to understand these issues,” she claimed. After all, I had plans to go to graduate school while he was a working-class, uneducated street kid who would unlikely amount to anything.

The rage in me boiled up. She was a social worker who helped the poor, but she’d deserted Dom and Ange in winter when they had no heat. Her eyes filled with tears when I said Dom was like my big brother who took more care of me than she ever did. She explained that we didn’t have the income to pay for Ange’s heat or rent. After we moved, she tried calling to check on them but never got an answer.

I looked at the tears streaming down her face as she spoke of our own serious problems at that time. Then it struck me. Why hadn’t I tried to call Dom? Wasn’t I old enough to use the telephone? Or I could have written letters. I knew how to print. I just went silent and turned inward, nursing my own wounds and silently blaming my mother.

I brought myself back to the question of why I cared so much about art forgers. Now, it seemed, my preoccupation with forgery had a lot to do with the fact that I’d created a false story of my childhood traumatic loss. I’d cast my parents as the cold-hearted villains, and me and Dom as the innocent victims. And I’d held onto this scenario as the truth for most of my life.

Maybe my parents hadn’t done enough to rescue Dom and Ange, but the important story, as I see it now, is that I hadn’t done anything to help them. And that is the baggage of guilt, sorrow, and regret I’ve been carrying ever since. I hadn’t rescued Dom from poverty and being abandoned, and I imagined that if the situation had been reversed, he would have found a way to rescue me. That possibility has secretly haunted me, even though I was just a child who didn’t have a grown-up’s ability to charge to the rescue.

My attempt to heal old wounds through redoing the past was now apparent in my art forgery story of Nick and Kate, who also shared childhood loss and trauma. The therapist heroine succeeds in saving her con artist lover from a life of loneliness and crime. With her, he learns how to love, and so does she. Their story redeemed me, at least in fantasy. It’s the ending I wanted for Dom and me.

I picked up my book with the picture of an art thief stealing a painting on the cover and held it against my chest, feeling its special smoothness and warmth. Whether you’re the writer or the reader, novels have extraordinary power to comfort, conceal, reveal, and heal. In my book, I could redo the painful past but when asked to speak about the origins of the story,

I was forced to face the truth hidden between the pages—the grief, the loss, the fury, and most of all the decades of festering guilt from my childhood about my inability to save Dom from devastating losses and the need to see my parents as the culprits.

In reality, no one was a hero or heroine, but no one was the villain either, excepting Dom’s parents.

Now that I’d faced what I feared from reliving the true story the agony, the ecstasy, and the love, I began to experience a new richness in life. A great weight lifted from my shoulders, resulting in a spring in my step. The world appeared in brighter colors, and I was less afraid of interviews and public speaking.

I currently hypothesize, that in my case, speaking in front of an audience threatens to take me back to being “Bunny,” a vulnerable, helpless child at the mercy of an audience of untrustworthy parents who have the power to shatter me. This insight plus facing the past, and practice with the supportive Toastmaster group has helped me remain a competent adult in front of them. Only some of the time. Change is difficult, especially for therapists.

Much as I gained from unearthing the traumatic story behind my novel, I was not prepared to dig up the past and face more of my fears anytime soon. That written in stone, I began to plan my next novel.

Epilogue

In the real story, Dom did not end up a loser, as my mother predicted. At a young age, he developed a couple of very successful video games and became a multi-millionaire. Both of us were married when I spoke to him on the phone for the last time.

We agreed with shared regret not to meet again and risk opening the floodgates to what might have been.

***

Find out more about my novel, Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief: A Kate O'Dade Art Crime Novel