And Again (39 page)
Authors: Jessica Chiarella
“Whatever the case,” Dr. Bernard says, “I think you all need to appreciate what a singular experience you’re having. This might be the next frontier of human evolution. I think you need to reflect on your place in history.”
Pioneers,
I think.
Blazing the trails.
And then Connie snorts.
“I’d love to reflect and all, doc,” she says, smirking from under a messy knot of blonde hair. “But all I really want is a nice strong cup of coffee.” We toast to this, raising our cups of cocoa.
“I had a dream last night.” I can feel the pulse of disbelief around me as soon as I say it, followed by a thrill of elation.
“What?” Connie asks, leaning forward, her hands tight around the sides of her chair. “Are you sure?”
“I know what it’s like to dream,” I reply, before thinking that our last meeting might be a good time to temper the snippy edge in my tone. “I’m sure.”
Connie breaks out into a smile; Linda clasps her hands together in front of her mouth. Even Dr. Bernard gives a small, sharp chuckle.
“You know what this means?” Connie says, her eyes wide. Linda speaks before I do.
“Maybe it will all come back,” she breathes. “Maybe if enough time passes, the rest of it will come back too.”
Dr. Bernard adjusts his glasses, uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation. I can tell he wants to warn us not to grow too hopeful, that dreaming is one thing, while being able to drink coffee or paint or have children is another thing entirely. But he remains silent, perhaps because it’s our last meeting, or perhaps because he realizes how much we all need to hope irrationally for a little while. For now, it’ll be enough.
We’re all talking at once, our voices crisscrossing our little circle, notes of laughter bouncing from person to person. And then Connie shouts over everyone, silencing the room until it’s all one muted note of expectation.
“Hey, Hannah. So what did you dream about?”
I take a moment to remember, pull it all forward, to drape myself in the feeling of it. Standing at the water’s edge. Feeling the cool wind on my face. Feeling him approach behind me, warm and solid, the way you can in dreams when you can feel the whole world because the whole world is inside your body. Waiting an extra moment, savoring the weightlessness of it, feeling myself drifting out of my skin, pulled by the wind until I’m sure I could let go of my body and fly out over Lake Michigan if I wanted to. But instead I hold on. I remain. And then I take a breath, and turn.
I would like to thank Rebecca Johns Trissler for being such a wonderful mentor. Thank you for so much, but especially for never letting me second-guess my work. Many thanks to my agent, Melissa Kahn, for her skill in championing this book and her patience in guiding me through this process. I am so grateful to my editor, Sally Kim, for her enthusiasm, her kindness, and for providing such insightful answers to all of my questions. Thank you also to the fantastic team at Touchstone for making this process such a joy.
Thanks to Jeremy Barr for his lawyering skills and for being generous enough to let me put my writing first. Thank you to Mandy Graber for being such a wonderful source of support and advice along the way. Many thanks to Valerie Paulson, Janet Hickey, Daniel Stolar, and everyone who made DePaul University feel like a second home. To my support group, the incredibly talented class of writers who lived through the first draft of this novel with me, thank you for the early advice and for always keeping my feet on the ground.
Love and thanks to Vanessa Bordo and Ashley Grebe for keeping me sane for over a decade. Thank you to my brother, Christopher, for being my 3 a.m. phone call. And, finally, thank you to my Mom and Dad for giving me a childhood filled with stories. This one is for you.
TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE
And Again
By Jessica Chiarella
Introduction
Four terminally ill patients receive the chance to enroll in the SUBlife program, a scientific advancement that gifts them with brand new bodies free from their old illnesses and the ravages of time. They’re exact replicas of their former selves . . . or so it seems.
The four patients are Hannah, an artist who cannot seem to recapture her prior inspiration; David, a politician whose meddling with FDA approval for the SUBlife program is a secret he’s hoping to keep; Linda, who spent eight years in a “conscious coma” and is trying to reconnect with the family from whom she became estranged; and Connie, a soap-opera actress trying to revamp her career.
And Again
raises the question: is getting a second chance at life as miraculous as it seems?
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. When David wakes up with his new body, he vows to be a different man who won’t drink, won’t smoke, won’t indulge in extramarital affairs. How much of our habits are tied into our psyche and our genetics? Do you think old habits die hard? Or can we really re-train ourselves?
2. Speak to the ways in which each of the four characters sees their body as a tool, an object separate from them, something not their own, after the SUBlife program. Hannah cannot summon her old passion for painting. Linda feels helpless after her husband signed consent papers while she was in her coma. Have you ever felt separated from your physical body in this way? How much of your personhood do you think lies within your physical body?
3. Despite their external differences, what bonds do you see between Hannah and David that might lead them to be attracted to each other? If they had never met inside the SUBlife program, do you think they would begin an affair in real life? Have you ever been drawn to someone who seemed completely wrong for you? Why?
4. Connie’s life with Dr. Grath, a blind man with a love for old black-and-white movies, contrasts sharply with her life in Hollywood meeting sleazy agents and managers. Why does Connie find sanctuary with Dr. Grath? How much does his blindness factor into her sense of comfort around him?
5. Hannah is drawn to personalities like Penny and Connie, women who are unafraid to speak their minds. Think about Hannah’s voicelessness compared to Linda’s literal voicelessness. How would Hannah’s life be different if she spoke her mind more?
6. Though our society does not currently have something resembling a SUBlife program, author Jessica Chiarella’s alternative present does not seem far off. What similarities and topical themes did you notice throughout the book, from stem cell controversy to Linda’s lack of choice in having her child? How probable does SUBlife seem to you in our current society?
7. Linda feels a close bond to Connie due to years of watching her on
Stratford Pines
; this bond sometimes verges even on the sexual. What do you think spurs this false kinship, and why is it especially keen for Linda?
8. When Hannah learns the truth of why Sam was not at the hospital when she was at her illest—not that he had an affair with Lucy, but that he fled the state—she throws him out in a rage. In what ways is this worse than an affair for Hannah? Which would be a worse betrayal, in your opinion, and why?
9. Is there a part of your anatomy worn by time that you’d like to reverse? If you had a SUBlife body, what parts of your old body would you miss?
10. After having blinking yes or no as her only form of communication for nearly a decade, Linda finds it difficult to relearn how to communicate the breadth of her feelings with her partner Tom, and with the therapy group at the hospital. Imagine yourself in her situation—how do you think it would cause you to rethink how you communicate and what you choose to share? In what ways would you feel frustrated, and how might it be a relief?
11. Hannah makes the decision to re-ink her new body with a tattoo of a phoenix designed by Penny. If you had to choose a defining tattoo for yourself in this moment of your life, what would it be?
12. When the four SUBlife participants encounter one another in real life, outside the realm of their weekly therapy sessions, they share with one another an intimate secret, a special bond. If these four had not gone through the SUBlife program, do you think they would still share a bond? Do you detect a similar thread of experience that still binds them together?
A Conversation with Jessica Chiarella
How did your training at DePaul University prepare you for writing your first novel?
Being a student in DePaul’s writing and publishing program really made all the difference for me in writing this novel. I wrote the first draft in a two-part novel-writing class run by Rebecca Johns Trissler, who has become a wonderful mentor to me throughout this process. The class was essentially a novel-writing boot camp, where each of us wrote sixty thousand words in ten weeks, took a week off for spring break, and then came back and revised those drafts over another ten weeks. There were about fifteen students in the class, and we were absolutely exhausted by the end, but I walked away with the raw material that eventually became
And Again
. It turned out to be an extremely rewarding way to write a first novel, because I was sharing the experience with such a talented group of students, and we all sort of leaned on one another for advice and moral support during the process. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the novel included a support group that met every week, because that’s exactly what class felt like by the end!
Why did you choose these four characters to explore and investigate in their SUBlife journey? Were there others you discarded in your drafting process?
There were absolutely other characters that I had to lose as I revised the novel. The first draft was written from only Hannah’s point of view, and as soon as I finished I realized that I was spending most of my time thinking about the other characters in the support group, wondering what their lives and futures would look like. There were originally six or seven members of the support group, so when I finally decided to write from the other points of view, I knew I had to create composites of some of the characters to keep the novel from becoming too crowded with perspectives. I still think about the characters I cut though, because there are so many different ways I wanted to tackle SUBlife’s effects, such as through issues of gender identity, disordered eating, and mental illness.
Which character do you find yourself relating to or empathizing with the most?
Each of the characters has traits or attitudes that are drawn from my life, and each has some that are diametrically opposite to me as well, so that answer has shifted a lot depending on where I was in the writing and revision of the book. But in the end, Hannah is very close to my heart. I think her duality is something with which I strongly identify—her perfectionism contrasted with her rebellion against societal standards, the ways in which she grapples with her own privilege and yet still gives in to her selfish impulses—those are the things that made her come to life for me. She makes some very poor choices out of a very human desperation for connection. Sometimes she held up a very challenging mirror for me. But I knew that the more uncomfortable she made me as I was writing her, the better a character she would be.
How do you envision these characters’ lives ten years after getting their new bodies? Do you think the SUBlife program could happen in real life?
I think they would certainly be more at home in their new selves. The initial shock of it would probably have worn off, though I think they would still be contending with the aftermath of some of the choices they made in that first year. They’ll probably all have some serious regrets regarding how they reacted to the transfer initially. But I think, ten years out, they’ll have stopped thinking of themselves as patients, stopped thinking like people who have dodged a bullet, so their problems will be more practical and less existential than they were in that first year. I’ve always been amazed at how adaptable people are in the face of profound change, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they spend whole weeks without thinking about the transfer at all, after a decade.
I’m not sure that something like SUBlife could happen in real life, but I think the idea behind it—that the miracle cure will not be a pill, will not be something we’re anticipating, but something much more holistic—is possible. I spent a lot of time thinking about human flight while I was writing the book, that it was less than a century between the Wright Brothers and landing on the moon. I think the next big medical advance will happen that way; there will be very little time between the first breakthrough and its logical conclusion.
What inspired you to write this story? How do you think you would cope if you were a member of the SUBlife pilot program?
The book started out as a love story, as an examination of how a relationship would be altered if a person went through a transformative physical experience. But very quickly I realized that something like SUBlife would have such an impact on the patient herself that everything in her life would be transformed, not just her relationship.
I’m not sure I would fare any better than the characters in the book if I had to go through SUBlife; I’m not great with change as it is, so the idea of such a profound physical alteration would be incredibly difficult. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about losing my tattoos, and it’s always an upsetting idea. Then again, the idea of a fresh start is very appealing. I would probably spend a few months falling apart, and then thank my lucky stars I’m still alive and march myself straight to a yoga class.
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Re-tell a chapter of this story from the point of view of the main characters’ partners: Sam for Hannah, Beth for David, Tom or Katie for Hannah, and Dr. Grath for Connie. Share your chapter with the group and see how the narrative changes.
2. Create a piece of art that you feel conveys your physical body as it is today, affected and informed by a lifetime of experience. Then have a friend in your group do the same, objectively drawing your body as a physical entity. How is it different? What surprises you?
3. Research articles in the news today about stem cell research and the advancement of cloning underway. Then look back on archived stories about Dolly the Sheep dating back to the mid-nineties. How have our society’s views on cloning and even stem-cell research changed? How do you think they will continue to change?