Author Lynn Kiele Bonasia:

How one author’s novel
became her own
instruction guide for moving on

“Life imitates art . . .”
I remember struggling with this rather counterintuitive concept from one of Oscar Wilde’s essays in grad school. I thought he was being a wise ass. After all, logic suggests it’s the other way around. Artists draw influence from life experience. How could life imitate artistic expression?

My first novel, Some Assembly Required, which came out in July, began around six years ago, when I was still in school down in Florida. I was homesick and in writing it, drew from my own experience of having lived on the Cape. While the plot and characters are purely fictional, there were certain aspects to my main character, Rose, that might be considered autobiographical. For example, while I’d never been a writer of instruction manuals as she had, I had written the words on dehumidifier boxes among other glamorous exploits during my 20-year stint as an advertising copywriter. Perhaps too, there were certain facets of my personality that meshed with hers. I’ll admit that for most of my life I’ve been one of those people who follows the rules. I arrive on time and never miss deadlines. I brush my teeth when I get out of bed, refrain from cutting out mattress tags for fear of karmic repercussions, and bring the car in for an oil change when the number on the odometer matches the one on my window sticker.

When I started this novel about a woman who moves to the Cape to start over after a bad break-up, I was in a relationship I didn’t foresee ending. Not by a long shot. I’d bought into that whole “ ’til death do you part” thing as one would expect––more rule following––and so when my husband of 20 years decided to call it quits, for reasons that in hindsight and all fairness were understandable, I was stunned. We were not the kind of people who did such things. I wasn’t.

Fortunately, at the time all this was going on, I had the upcoming publication of my book to look forward to. And so I threw myself into working with my publicist, each day having some new project or receiving some bit of news to keep me occupied.

One day, I received a blurb about my book written by a popular author and recall thinking: Hey, sounds like a book I should read. Because, after all, why do we read fiction except to figure things out, learn about ourselves and the human condition, and what motivations lie at the roots of our behavior? And then, in that instant with these half crazy thoughts swirling in my heart-broken, stressed out, sleep-deprived, cold-medicated brain, I was struck with the ultimate irony: six years ago, I’d begun writing myself an instruction manual on how to move forward in my own life.

It was as if a little part of my own psyche had reached out to a future me. There were things to be learned now from my own character about letting go, finding the strength to move on, about grace, humor, compassion, faith and even forgiveness. In another year’s time, like Rose, I’d be faced with the likelihood of moving to the Cape to start over. Was it sheer coincidence or had Rose been reaching out for something I couldn’t admit to myself, or even fathom I could possibly want? Dramatic irony is when the reader knows something a character doesn’t. How about when a character knows something the author doesn’t?

Last week, I spoke with an old friend who’s a practicing psychologist. I asked her whether she thought writing this novel might have been a way for me to work things out on a subconscious level. She emphatically agreed to the likelihood. I’ve always been an intuitive person with an ability to read people, to the extent that I sometimes feeling a sense of dread before bad news arrives. What happens when a person like that shuts off her intuition in order to keep the peace, or to hang onto something she’s convinced herself is precious? What happens when we hit the mute button on that “little voice”?

At the risk of over-thinking all of this, imparting meaning where there simply may not be, or even just ruining the beauty of my discovery, I remain humbled and even comforted by the character of my own character, so to speak, and at the possibility that my heart and mind may have been hard at work when it seems my senses had taken leave.

In the end, you never know where life will lead you. You just have to be open to what it can teach. In some ways, this was my “Dorothy” moment. Three clicks of the ruby slippers and I’d found that the power to heal and find home had always been mine.

But just in case Oscar Wilde was truly onto something, my next novel* will be about a wildly successful Cape Cod author (with a strapping young boyfriend) who wins the lottery.

*Ok, that will be the third novel. The next one, scheduled to come out the summer of 2010, is actually about a woman who runs a clam bar on Cape Cod.

© 2008   To order, go to:   www.lynnkielebonasia.com