Themes and Metaphors

For some reason-- granted strange and unknowable—I often latch onto some sort of symbol, talisman, or metaphor for my novel. For my first novel,  Mail, it was anything postal: envelopes, stamps, manila folders (this was before email!). For Host Family—a novel in which I wanted to use my experience hosting international students who came to study at Harvard-- I seized on parasites. I'd read an article in the Science section of the New York Times about parasites and as soon as I saw the word host, I had my aha! moment, my metaphor.  In my fourth novel, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, the character was in the antiques business, so antiques, and specifically a chamber pot that had belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, became my touchstone. (I now have, courtesy of friends, three antique chamber pots on my desk, holding pencils, paper clips, notecards.) In my novel, Of Men and Their Mothers, chickens and chicken pot pies seize center stage. (To find out why, you'll have to read that novel.)

In The End of an Error, birds and nests take over thematically.  (Though-- this has just come to me-- there is also an important chicken scene. I must have a chicken obsession that maybe only Freud or Frank Perdue could explain.)

Birds and nests provided a comforting framework when I was trying to find my way through the novel and acted, at times, like welcome directional signals. Slipping through my fingers and onto the page are all the telling bird images: mother birds feeding their young, birds leaving the nest, airplanes—giant birds—crashing.  Appropriately, the cover of the hardback showed a birdhouse with a winged cupid flying out of it. When I settle on these images, I start to see them everywhere: the grandmother's apartment is like a bower bird's, two characters visit a Birds of Prey Center. The parents, binoculars dangling from their necks, are birders.  A stranger discusses the story of the accidental bird.  After such a saturation,  my problem becomes one of pulling back.  I was utterly enamored, for instance, of the phrase, raptor rapture.  Please? I begged my editor, Let me use it! But my very wise editor refused. Enough, he used to say.  

Still, what lies underneath all the bird imagery are the many kinds of love—the love of a small town girl for a worldly, glamorous grandmother, the elation of first love, the secure love of a woman for a husband who's her rock, the love of a mother for her children, and the pain of not only the losses in life that we all have to bear but also the changes that occur both between people and inside ourselves.

Another thread I weave through the book is the safety of the known: husbands, parents, home, hearth, familiar food, the side of the bed you sleep on, etc. as opposed to the excitement and adventure of the unknown: an exotic grandmother, foreign cities, a boyfriend you knew when you were 18 and no longer know, the terror and thrill of leaving what's comfortable, of leaving the nest. Not to mention the difference between being eighteen yourself and having children that age.

People always wonder what they might have missed.  In life we don't usually have a chance to find out, but my character does. It's a gift for a writer to play god that way.

Second chance at first love. The End of an Error is a featured book in Fictions Readers, a group to discuss contemporary women's fiction, books, women's issues and much more. Click here to join the group.

Click here to buy the book.