By Melissa Connelly
[TRIGGER WARNING: mention of child sexual abuse and grooming mentioned in this post. Please take care while reading].
In my debut novel, ‘What Was Lost‘ (out October 8, 2024, She Writes Press), the young protagonist grows up when I did in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The novel shifts between that era and the year 2000 when she is forty-three.
Workshopping my novel in a class where most students were younger, I had a rude awakening; my life was historical fiction! Students asked questions like “What are they listening to music on?” I soon embraced this, describing the process of listening to a record: putting the needle on and hearing the record skip because the character had been careless with it, leaving records strewn about in and out of their sleeves and covers.
But writing in the time period of 2000 was surprisingly, a challenge also. What would the daughter be listening to her music on––not a phone or iPod––not yet, but we were done with Walkmans. How about an MP3 player? Nope. It was a CD player, which was used only briefly.
Getting these details and others, like styles of clothes, language, etc., were important and fun, yet the real issue was how to portray the vast social changes that have occurred since the 1960’s. Such sea change, it’s difficult to even fathom. It was an era of protest: civil rights, the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, Stonewall, and the list goes on.
This turbulence swirled around my peers and I, and it changed us. Many of us rebelled against the norms: we didn’t go to school dances, not even our proms. We didn’t go to our graduations––if we even made it that far. Sometimes I look back with a twinge of sadness; we missed a lot of fun, didn’t we? But I know that mirage of the perfect,1950’s suburban nuclear family had to be smashed.
And so it was.
In the 1950’s and 60’s you didn’t talk about unpleasant subjects. Alcoholism, sexual abuse, physical abuse, none of it could be addressed. People from dysfunctional families had nowhere to turn. Homosexuality was hidden. Even divorce and death were taboos. I never went to a funeral as a child. Children weren’t meant to see anything sad. Sad things didn’t exist, and something was wrong with you if you thought they did. It’s not as if death didn’t surround us: I had only one living grandparent and an uncle who died in the war. The War, that’s what it was called because it was huge and all-encompassing. Maybe the adults were so traumatized by it, they needed to sanitize everything.
I remember feeling blindsided while reading ‘Little Women’. Beth dies? No, can’t be. In ‘Little House on the Prairie’, Mary loses her sight–permanently––another shock. Both books were written in earlier eras.
Disabilities were never discussed, and many people who were differently abled were sent away to institutions; we’re blameless for having not seen them.
But here’s the irony: when things are swept under the rug, they’re allowed to grow and fester. Dangerous boundaries get crossed. Teachers would socialize with students out of school sometimes inappropriately. A friend of mine was taken away on weekends by the music teacher supposedly to see concerts. We were all a little jealous; she was a better musician, wasn’t she? No, that wasn’t it; that was just the hook for sexual abuse.
Two girls I went to high school with married teachers as soon as they graduated. I worked at a summer camp that included Deaf children, and there was an older man who volunteered at the camp. He was accomplished in sign language and we all thought he was so generous with his time. Why, he’d even take the children home on weekends! No one questioned it. Years later, a case went to court and he was convicted of sexual abuse; the unspeakable thing we never named.
In my novel, a fourteen-year-old is sexually abused by her teacher. A teacher smoking marijuana with students after school in his classroom, really? How is that plausible? I had to craft my language carefully so modern readers would believe that he even invited students to parties at his house.
There’s a character in my book whose younger sister has fetal alcohol syndrome. She’s institutionalized and her older sister knows that she’s not to talk of her––as if the sister doesn’t exist. And of course, there wasn’t awareness of fetal alcoholism, and not much awareness of alcoholism, period.
My novel has a gay character who’s completely closeted in the 1970’s, but in the 2000’s he has a male partner and two children. No marriage yet––not in 2000, and they had to adopt their children from another country. 2000 isn’t yet 2024.
Time keeps moving and everything changes. One of the ways we understand these changes is through literature. We learn our own history through reading. A novel is such a pleasure we don’t even realize how much we’re learning.
A book is perhaps the greatest invention humankind has ever made. It’s so powerful that it’s dangerous. That’s why American slaves were forbidden to learn to read and why books are banned then and now. Literature sometimes reveals a window that shines a new way of being for ourselves and sets us free.
Melissa Connelly is publishing her first novel, ‘What Was Lost’, on October 8, 2024, after a long career working with children in a variety of roles in schools, hospitals, psychiatric clinics, and day cares. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and also spends time in the mountains of Western North Carolina. You can see more of her work on her website: melissaconnelly.com. You can also follow Melissa on Facebook and Instagram.
ABOUT THE BOOK: In a world before Roe v. Wade, young Marti is fourteen and pregnant by her 27-year-old art teacher. In desperation, she looks for ways to abort the baby. With the help of her friend, Peter, she hitchhikes across state borders to seek the procedure out. Soon after the abortion, she runs away. Thirty years later, Marti is confronted with disturbing memories from her past and returns for the first time to her small Vermont hometown. She drags along her unwitting and unwilling teenage daughter, heightening the tension between them. Encountering her old friend Peter she learns how the lies she told impacted his life. Together they concoct a plan to find her abuser. Marti is seeking forgiveness for lies told, and revenge for secrets held. Exploring the vast social change from 1970 to 2000, ‘What Was Lost’ unfolds in times before language such as #MeToo helped give voice to these all-too-common occurrences. It is a raw, powerful tale of one woman confronting the ghosts of her past.
