I know that you grew up in NH, is Stained an autobiographical novel?

I suspect you’ve heard this before, in my story everything is true and nothing is true.

Here are the facts:

• I grew up in Peterborough, NH
• I was 17 in 1975
• My family left the Catholic Church when I was 7
• Once, in desperation, I called a priest and asked him to meet me at the high school. We spent fifteen minutes walking around the track. I wanted truths, truths about my soul. I didn’t get them.

The events in Stained have been fashioned from my imagination. Family and friends have tried to identify the characters, but all are amalgams –– a compilation of essences, spoken words, and actions. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote: “I never put real people into my fiction – I can’t see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.” (High Tide in Tucson)

Yet, when I write, I constantly ask myself: “Is it true yet? Is it true?” In writing about love, religion and misogyny in the seventies, I wanted to recreate the confusion I experienced (and the confusion I suspect many kids still feel today). So day after day I burrowed into old, hard places -- places where my sense of self and goodness were called into question -- and I’d recall the bewilderment, the sadness, the fear. These emotions became three points on my compass. Then in writing, as in life, glimmers of hope and release would bubble up. Hope became true north.

Why are there so many unsavory adults in Stained? Couldn’t there have been one positive Catholic role model?

There were more supportive adults in earlier drafts. But when a child experiences shame and self-blame, she doesn’t seek help from adults. She keeps herself hidden, pretending. This is Joss’s story, and by the time Joss was seventeen she had long functioned in isolation. In the end I felt I had to be true (there’s that word again) to her experience. (I for one, think Gabe’s mother may have come through for Jocelyn had she sought her help before Gabe went missing.)

The lack of Catholic roll models is not due to an anti-Catholic sentiment.  Believe it or not, as I was writing Stained, I was preparing to make my first communion!  I took my first sacrament at the age of 43 -- just as accounts of priest abuse were flooding the media. Incredulous friends asked, “This year? You’re joining the church this year?” And I would simply nod my head. I had been singing in the Sacred Heart church choir and realized that the mysteries and rituals of Catholicism went to the very root of me. I longed to make my first communion as a child, and I continued to experience this yearning as an adult. As for the scandal – I suspect I could only join after the church acknowledged the abuse. Secrets corrupt, revelations heal.

Did you know from the beginning that you would alternate between Jocelyn’s past and the present?

Not from the beginning, no. But this book took well over ten years to write and had many incarnations. When I finally tried writing a scene from the past, Jocelyn’s voice emerged. (Halleluiah!) This voice, and the scenes from her childhood, felt honest and they gave me the courage to keep trying with the 1975 chapters (which were harder for me to write).

That’s when I began alternating, hoping that each past chapter would inform the present, and each present chapter would hint at the past. The structure turned out to be more difficult than I ever imagined. Each time I came up with a scene I wanted to add, I would have to write two new chapters instead of one.

Here is a note from my editor, Dick Jackson, which speaks to the difficulty:

Before the truth or dare game, Joss has always felt on the fringe.  At the
time of the movie scene she has a reason to reject herself, as it were--that
is, since and because of the attack.  That attack establishes the "stained"
notion quite a while before her relationship with Benny confirms it (in her
anxiety, anyway).  My sense is that she needs to parse all this out somehow,
so her two acts of "bravery" can be seen as clear responses to her own
newly-gained sense of what's up with her, and what's up with life.
I almost want two more sections, one past, one present--though I hear you
groaning: "But what could happen in either?"  Ideally, the modulation in her
self-view is caused by an action (or two, past and present).  But what,
what?

And, as with most drafts, many scenes past and present were deleted. (I was quite proud of myself, when on a writing retreat, I cut more pages than I had remaining.) In the final writing days, I felt I was not just shaping a novel, but constructing a jigsaw puzzle made up of an infinite number of bizarre shapes. But perhaps that is how all novelists feel towards the end.

I’ve heard you say you “got” the voice? What does that mean? Did Jocelyn begin talking in your ear?

I stumbled around for a long time without Jocelyn’s voice and every draft felt, well, tinny. Then I read Jo Ann Beard’s wonderful book of essays, The Boys of My Youth. I loved how she could write about her own childhood experiences (with such amazing detail) in what seemed like an authentic no-holes barred “kid voice.” I also admired her use of present tense to recreate events from the past.

With Joann’s voice in my head, I gave Stained another try and, yes! I knew that I had discovered the voice of Jocelyn. I felt as if I were stealing though – and was prepared, not only to acknowledge Beard’s work, but promise her my third-born child. (I was too attached to my first two.)

And then I made another important discovery. I came across a dream journal I had kept in my early twenties. I had recorded my dreams in this very spare, matter of fact voice – Jocelyn’s voice. I hadn’t copied Jo Ann Beard’s style after all, but had simply recognized a long-ago style of my own. Phew! (Thank goodness that third child was never conceived.)

I still wish I could write like Jo Ann Beard though.