Sounds Like Crazy (43 page)

“Hi,” I said.

I went to open the door.

I stopped, held up my index finger, and said, “One sec.”

I reached into my pocket. I pulled out my mother’s sunflower and pinned it to my jacket.Then I opened the door.

Shana Mahaffey
lives in San Francisco in part of an Edwardian compound that she shares with an informal cooperative of family, friends, and five cats. She’s a survivor of catechism and cat-scratch fever, and is a member of the Sanchez Grotto Annex (
http://www.sanchezannex.com/
), a writers’ community. She welcomes all visitors to her Web site,
www.shanamahaffey.com
, and is happy to meet with book groups in person or in cyberspace (phone/ webcam/the works).

conversation guide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich the
individual reading experience, as well as encourage us
to explore these topics together—because books,
and life, are meant for sharing.

Q. Where did you get the idea for your novel
Sounds Like Crazy
?

 

A. I’ve always been fascinated by how the mind works, in particular by our ability to find creative ways to survive when faced with loss, guilt, fear, anguish; and by our inability to forgive ourselves and others. Pondering these ideas led me to discover the flawed narrator of the novel—Holly Miller—whose childhood was so painful, she fractured her mind into five additional personalities, allowing them to become an inexorable part of her.

 

 

A. Many of Holly’s life experiences are based in part on my own experiences or those of people close to me. I chose the aspects from these experiences that best fit Holly and her journey, and then developed them until they were what I needed to make Holly the person you meet at the start of
Sounds Like Crazy
and the person she becomes by the end.

 

 

A. Ha! No. Although if you ask one or two of my ex-boyfriends, they might give you a different answer. In all seriousness, I believe everyone has aspects to his or her personality that dominate in times of crisis or heightened awareness. For example, I am very squeamish about blood. The thought of something as simple as getting a blood test causes me to become light-headed, sometimes to the point of fainting. However, one day I came home and found my cat’s nose torn and bleeding. I didn’t for one minute think about passing out. Instead I grabbed something to stanch the flow and got him to the vet. When it was all over, I had my reaction, complete with nearly fainting in the vet’s office. Does this mean I have multiple personalities? You tell me.

 

 

A. I read quite a few books on the subject and I did a lot of research online. According to the psychiatric community, multiple personality disorder (MPD) is no longer a diagnosis. Rather, the condition is called dissociative identity disorder (DID). The deeper the trauma, the more the person dissociates. Whatever acronym you want to apply to the condition, the most poignant information I found was in the blogs and comments written by people who are truly suffering from a fractured psyche. This helped me understand how someone like Holly would cope under the circumstances, and it helped me feel compassion for her and for anyone suffering from DID.

 

 

A. My own demons drove me into treatment when I was twenty. Mine were nothing like what Holly has to cope with in terms of DID or MPD, but they were enough to help me fail all my courses at university. When this happened, I was given a choice: See a therapist or go home. I had the same reaction Betty Jane does—I thought it would be easier to deal with a quack than leave school. I was referred to a man very much like Milton. At the end of our first hour he told me I had one month to clean up my act and follow his prescribed program. We’d regroup after thirty days and he—not I—would decide if we would continue treatment. Maybe it was the survivor in me who recognized the real deal, because I did an about-face and never looked back. We worked together two days a week for six years, with phone calls between sessions. The work we did changed my life. It was no picnic and I hated him much of the time. That said, looking back on what that process did for me, I feel nothing but gratitude for the time and effort of my “Milton.” I know that I would not be the relatively healthy, happy person I am today without him.

 

 

A. I’d love to say that the story unfolded for me the way it ultimately ends up in the novel. But the truth is that to differentiate each character, I had to write each story separately and then find
a way to weave them all into the book. All I can say is thank God for Paul McCarthy, Kevan Lyon, my early readers, and finally Ellen Edwards, because there was a lot of reviewing and a lot of moving stuff around before the story got its footing.

 

 

A. A bit of both. I am such a chameleon that if I read any commercial fiction while I am writing, I immediately feel a different voice creeping into my own writing. This is heartbreaking for someone who is as avid a reader as I am. Thankfully, I can read nonfiction, which is great, because I needed to do research for
Sounds Like Crazy
. The other assistance comes from my old standbys—a few beloved books I’ve probably read more than a hundred times since childhood—The Chronicles of Narnia (all seven), the Amber series (five books by Roger Zelazny), the Belgariad and Mallorean series (ten books by David Eddings). I know these books so well I can recite lines from them. Suffice to say, they are so familiar the writing does not influence my own; as a result, like old friends, they are always available when I need to escape to another world without impacting my own writing.

 

Q. How much did the process of writing affect the ending? What I mean is, did you get into the characters in unexpected ways, to the point that you often found yourself changing how the story would end? Or did you start with a fixed ending and work backward
?

 

A. I had a fixed idea of different personality types I wanted to explore. The idea was flexible enough, though, to allow each
character to unfold for me over time. So, I guess the best answer, is I started with a template, but as my writing evolved, each character told me who she/he was.

 

 

A. I tried to end
Sounds Like Crazy
in a way that is open to the reader’s interpretation. I know how it ends for me, but when I talked to early readers, I realized that only a few of them read the ending as I thought I wrote it.

 

 

A. One of my favorite authors, Robertson Davies, writes trilogies in which characters cross over into other books in the collection, sometimes as a significant character and other times as a mere mention. I have always enjoyed this style of writing because it provides me, the reader, with different perspectives on a character. And when it is a favorite character, I am thrilled to meet him or her again. All to say, you might meet Holly, Peter, one of the Committee members, Walter, Pam, and/or one of the kids again in a future novel. You just might.

 

 

A. I was in a writing workshop several years ago and we were discussing my book. At this point, I had Holly, the Committee, and the backstory for how the Committee came to be. We were struggling to pinpoint exactly what was missing when the
woman running the writing group exclaimed, “She needs a job. Holly needs a job.” We stopped discussing the book itself and turned to the very important task of finding the perfect job for Holly. After a few moments, the person sitting next to me said, “Voice-over artist.” When I considered a voice-over artist with voices in her head, I knew Holly had found her job.

 

 

A. When I settled on the idea, I had zero experience with voice-overs. I went to the bookstore, bought a bunch of books, and started reading. After I got a sense of what a voice-over artist does, I went online to find voice-over artists. Turns out, I had one—David Henry Sterry—in my writing community. I bought him breakfast and he gave me the inside scoop. I also e-mailed several working voice-over artists. Mark Evanier was kind enough to respond to and answer my questions. Another friend in my writing community, David Gleeson, is a Grammy-winning music producer. He gave me a complete tour of his recording studio and showed me firsthand how the work is done. Besides figuring out how doing voice-overs works from a practical standpoint, I learned that doing voice-overs is a pretty cool gig to have. If I wasn’t writing and if I had the voice for it, I would love to be a voice-over artist.

 

 

A. Taking the scenic route to the answer, I’ll share one of my fondest childhood memories. When I was a child we used to go to my maternal grandparents’ house on Corbett Drive in Burlingame,
California, for weekends and throughout the summer. My mother is one of four children; I am one of eighteen grandchildren. Suffice to say, with such a large crowd of cousins, we had a lot of fun.

My grandparents had a small pool in their backyard. To play anywhere other than by the stairs on the shallow end, you had to first show that you could swim the length of the pool. I desperately wanted to join the older kids in the deep end, but I was only five years old and terrified of drowning. My father, grandfather, and four uncles had a long discussion with me to find out what was preventing me from trying. When I told them, we struck a deal: They would position themselves around the pool edges, ready to rescue me at the first sign of danger. I agreed and went to the deep end to prepare myself for my swim. I remember marking where each one of them was. Then I inhaled, dove, and started doing the crawl to the other side. The thing is, I’d never learned the proper breathing technique of turning your head to the side for air. Halfway through my swim, I ran out of air and lifted my head. Next thing, I heard splashing and screaming—“I got her, I got her”—and I had about ten pairs of hands holding me high up in the air. Man, was I angry, because I’d almost made it. But I never forgot how secure I felt, and looking back as an adult, I feel an even deeper appreciation for all of those men who wanted me to feel safe. Of course, my swimming lessons resumed in earnest after that. I got to swim in the deep end of the pool, and I had the perfect template for the character of Sarge.

 

 

A. Peter. I think most people have had at least one relationship that is all wrong for them. I have had more than one. The guy
or the girl who made you feel light-headed when you met him or her. The one who made you ignore your gut instinct to leave because you could always find another reason to stay. The thing is, Peter is my least favorite character not because of who he is but because of how hard it was to write him and to write the relationship Holly has with him. He is kind of the Judas character in
Sounds Like Crazy
because he is necessary to help Holly grow as a person. I know from my own experience that having a relationship like Holly’s with Peter, and then having the courage to finally leave it, is what helped me grow the most as a person.

 

 

A. I find a theme or an idea I want to explore and I ponder it, sometimes for months. After I have a solid understanding of the theme, I figure out how I want to explore it through storytelling. Once I know this, I go back to pondering until I have a beginning, and then I continue until I know where I will end up. For my writing process to work, I have to know how the story is going to end before I can start it. Once I have the beginning and end, I can invite the characters to come forward and show me how they want to get to the end. The characters are free to take whatever path they choose, but they are never free to change the end.