My book club’s last selection was Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I admit, I’m a fiction addict, so whenever the club makes me read non-fiction, even biography, I feel initial resistance. But this book kept me hooked – and it’s one of the few books that everyone in the club enjoyed. If you haven’t read it, check it out and see if you agree.
And yet . . . Several of us in the club are authors. And we all said, “If I wrote a heroine like that, readers would say she’s too stupid to live, and they might heave the book against the wall.” But the heroine of Wild isn’t fictional, she’s very real. Real enough that her biography caused Oprah to re-start her book club.
In romance fiction, typically our heroines (and heroes) are flawed. They’re human; they’re not perfect. If they were perfect, they wouldn’t have any growing to do. For me, the point of romance fiction is that the heroine and hero, both flawed and vulnerable individuals even if they don’t want to admit that to themselves or the world, confront some of their fears and grow to be stronger people. It happens because they start falling for each other, and that brings up issues they need to confront if they’re to deserve and win love. We writers call it character arc.
It happens in women’s fiction too, where some person or incident in a woman’s life starts her on a journey of personal growth.
But in romance and women’s fiction, we have to be careful about just how flawed our characters are. Readers may lose sympathy, think the character is unrealistic, and say she’s just too stupid to live.
Well, how about a woman who deals with her mother’s death by sabotaging her wonderful marriage, sleeping around like crazy, and using heroin? That’s not exactly smart. It’s flawed. Pretty seriously flawed. If I put a heroine like that in a romance novel, would you want to read it?
Then, let’s say I have her decide that, even though she’s really never done much hiking or camping, I’ll have her tackle one of the world’s toughest hiking trails? Alone? And in preparation, she buys a whole lot of equipment, yet she never actually puts on her new hiking boots to see if they fit, much less break them in? She never even loads her gear into her brand new pack to see if it fits – or if she can lift the pack, much less carry it for ten miles a day?
Have you heaved my novel against the wall yet? My guess is, you may well have.
But all of that’s in Cheryl Strayed’s book. As a reader, I had to marvel at her dumb and even self-destructive behavior, yet I kept turning the pages. Why? Because she was real. She might have been kind of dumb, but she clearly wasn’t “too stupid to live” because there she was, a woman who’d survived the adventures and was writing about what she’d learned.
My aim is to create contemporary characters who come alive on the pages, who could very well be real. Human, flawed, vulnerable; people who are about to be launched into painful character growth.
And so I do have to wonder, why is it that readers are tougher on fictional heroines than they are on real live women who do stupid things?
Interesting, Susan. I haven’t read the book, but my husband did. His reason for reading it was his interest in the Pacific Crest Trail, not in the woman’s journey, but I asked him what he thought of the story and her decisions.
He said the only saving factor was that she learned from her mistakes, but he thought she did some truly idiotic things. He enjoyed reading her comments on the actual hike, but I don’t think he got much our of her internal journey.
His comments reminded me how we all take different baggage with us when we read a book. DH went for the action, not the internal issues she was trying to deal with, and I have a feeling those went right over his head. For him, the book was all about the PCT.
And yes, he’s just about as connected to MY internal struggles as well.
..I’ve learned to work around that lapse.
Very interesting, Kate. I’ve been meaning to recommend the book to a guy friend who’s done a lot of hiking (and would be far too sensible to make the mistakes Cheryl did). I must do that, and see what he thinks of it. Yes, we do come to books with our own expectations and needs. I always look for the character arc, and that was part of what kept me reading, with Wild. At first, I didn’t see much learning happening and, had the book been fiction, I might well have tossed it. But I knew this real live person had come out the other end, and I figured that somewhere along the journey she was going to wise up, so that kept me reading. I guess it’s kind of like a romance, where you know there’s going to be a happy ending, and you want to see how the poor confused characters are going to get there!
As for your internal struggles… Well, he is a guy. They can be pretty hopeless about that stuff. Especially about reading minds, or reading between the lines. Have you tried absolute straight talk, and then repetition? Or there’s the counseling method – one person speaks and the other has to repeat back what they heard, which means they actually need to listen! But in general, thank heavens for female friends, right?
Susan, I haven’t read the book, but I’m glad it turned out to be an interesting one in which the real-life heroine learns from her not-too-bright decisions.
I find myself avoiding books and movies about people who are bad role models and yet triumph over adversity. One example: the young couple with a baby who were stranded when they drove in a snow storm and almost died because of that decision. I think Neil Patrick Harris played the husband in the TV movie. While their making it out alive is wonderful, a part of me wanted Human Services to put their child in a home with parents who have more than two brain cells to rub together.
– Marcia
Yes, I hear you on that, Marcia! If the lesson is, “You can be a total idiot, but somehow the universe will rescue you,” that’s not healthy. In Cheryl Strayed’s situation, on the trail, it was only her own life in danger, so it wasn’t like she was responsible for a child. But, as soon as I say that, I immediately think – but she had friends who’d be shattered if, due to her own idiocy, she died. And I also think of the poor search and rescue people who risk their lives on a regular basis for people who do idiotic things. Basic lesson: live responsibly!
I agree. People who make poor decisions and need to be rescued should have to reimburse police, search-and-rescue, etc for their time.
Wow, I sure sound grouchy today!
Justifiably so! And it isn’t just the expense – some people die trying to save others who did something stupid.
You’re right. The risks they take are real and wouldn’t be necessary if some people used common sense.
Getting back to another of your points, I definitely have problems finishing a book if the heroine or hero is TSTL. Usually there’s a way to create conflict and obstacles for a protagonist that don’t involve the character doing something blatantly unwise.
I just finished a mystery where the heroine has a gun but doesn’t take it with her when she leaves her house, despite several previous attempts on her life. {{eye roll}}
It’s largely a matter of expectations, isn’t it? It’s not that different from picking up a glass of clear liquid thinking it’s water and discovering it’s really vodka or Sprite or a flavored but colorless energy drink. When our experience is too different from our expectations, we’re likely to put down the offending glass . . . or book.
We pick up a romance novel with vastly different expectations than when we crack open a memoir. A lot of memoirs are like watching a train wreck for at least part of the book–all kinds of self-sabotaging behavior that I would not enjoy in a romance novel’s protagonist.
Very true, Eileen. Yes, somehow the train wreck is fascinating when it’s a real person – especially if they manage to survive it and learn from it. I guess we expect our romance heroines to be a little smarter than real people.
I found the book interesting, but frustrating at the same time. It was like watching a friend make a really boneheaded mistake. One where you want to know they’re going to be okay- but at the same time you want to slap some sense into them.
LOL. Yes, I found myself wanting to yell at Cheryl a number of times. It’s interesting, with our own friends, we’ll sit down over lunch or a glass of wine and they’ll tell us about something they’re doing – or we’ll tell them about something we’re doing – and it sounds kind of dumb. A good friend will politely say something like, “Have you thought that one through? Like, uh, did it occur to you that hiking boots – like new pumps – need to be broken in before you wear them for hours – carrying 60 or 70 lbs?” It’s hard to believe that no-one in Cheryl’s life, even the people at the mountain equipment stores, gave her commonsense advice. Or, actually, maybe they did (like, the book she relied on definitely did) but she wasn’t listening. And that’s another interesting thing, isn’t it? Why do we often just not listen?