On Imaginary Marriages

fictional marriages, how we create them, banning Toni Morrison's Beloved

Happy almost Thanksgiving (if you celebrate it)!

Still stuck on subtext here—the idea of it, the what of it. What a strange thing to be obsessed with. And yet, in my writing, editing, and teaching, it’s what I keep coming back to.

How much of our lives is spent listening for what isn’t being said?

And how can I bring that more into interactions between characters?

This photo makes me think of subtext (taken during art project by Rina AC Dweck)

Especially in a marriage. A fictional marriage.

Writing about marriage. That’s a thing. A difficult thing. The marriage has to be a character in its own right.

We’ve been talking about this in my Sackett Street advanced fiction class. My students, some of them, are writing about marriage. Or at least there is a marriage in the story, sometimes foregrounded, often backgrounded.

We’ve been noticing how hard it is to imagine your way into such a textured and layered relationship, one that has had so many iterations, as many marriages do.

And how do you convey all of this in a fictional marriage—where private language and the language of not-saying matters as much as what you are saying? Each word a call-back to other past uses of the word? Marriages speak in a language marked by —and filtered through—time.

That’s the thing—a marriage is two people bound together in time.

As a form, the novel struggles to layer time onto the linear narratives we are most familiar with.

One of my students is working with a short-ish marriage that is failing disastrously. The writerly question is: how to position the reader in a novel that begins at the marriage’s nadir? Another student’s work depicts a 30+ year marriage that is a solid partnership but is being strained by a crisis with one of the couple’s children.

two novels that feature marriages as main characters

And the marriage in my novel has, I realize now, distinct phases —

1) the courtship and setting up house

2) the young family, the two-parent worker juggle

3) a third child is born, not exactly planned, and the mom loses her job and the family changes shape again , and new roles to be assumed and financial stresses that come with them, and

4) the stage at which we meet these long-married people, where they are confronting a crisis with their third daughter.

It feels to me in stage #4 that they are confronting their marriage anew, and each other as strangers, almost severed from their pasts.

But of course that is not true; the past is never past. Because the present is made up of the past. As my daughter’s elementary school principal used to say, loudly, over the loudspeaker every morning, which we were storing away lunchboxes and raincoats and the kids were settling into their seats, as she concluded the announcement, “Remember children-the choices we make today create our futures tomorrow.”

I am tempted to edit this newsletter another five times (the battle against perfectionism) but I want to get it out before Thanksgiving, so I can wish you all a very good Thanksgiving holiday (if you celebrate it). If you don’t celebrate, I wish you just a very good break with some space and time for curiosity and consideration of how all of us exist in layered time, where our pasts are our presents. Maybe it’s these holiday times, cyclical by nature, that lend itself to this type of cyclical remembrances.

Oh, also, here’s the piece I wrote for Teacher & Writer’s Banned Books series on Toni Morrison’s extraordinary BELOVED, which I can’t stop re-reading (won’t post another pic of the dog-eared cover). It’s essentially an ode to this brilliant novel with its subtle layering of time that gathers so much force.

Prompt: Marriage: If it were a thing, what would it be? Who would a marriage be if it were a character? What would its personality be?