Breaking The Mold

A little while ago I started writing a book about a woman with a son who has severe cerebral palsy.  After writing a few chapters I shared it with a few people I knew who worked in publishing.  The child’s disability was only one part of a larger story but it was the part that caught these people’s attention. “It’s going to be hard to feature a woman who resents her child in commercial fiction,” I was warned. “It’ll be a very tough sell.”

My female protagonist actually adores her son and has basically given up her life in order to take care of him...and therefore is somewhat resentful of him.  I shared the same chapters with a friend who works in Hollywood and relayed the concerns of my publishing friends to him. 

“I come from a small town with abstinence only education," He said. "That town also has the highest per capita teen pregnancy rate in the nation. Maybe it's because of my experience with that but I just see this as realism.  A lot of the female friends I went to high school with had children too young and, well, under the wrong circumstances women have moments when they resent their kids.”

I personally think that EVERY parent has moments when we resent our kids, regardless of the circumstances.  I remember being in a mom’s group when my son was a baby. Someone complimented my friend Cherrie’s daughter and Cherrie immediately brightened. “It’s so good when other people pay compliments to your children on the day they’re driving you crazy,” she sighed before bending down to smile at her 8 month old. In a sweet baby voice she cooed “See? You’re not just mommy’s little nemesis are you? No you’re not. Who’s more than just a nemesis? You are!”

There are moments when we all feel a twinge of resentment toward our kids.  It goes away and then somewhere down the road it comes back and then it goes away again. That’s parenthood.

It’s also true that the decision to get a divorce isn’t always clear cut which leads me to another point. My Hollywood agent suggested that we hold off for a while on trying to shop So Much For My Happy Ending as a film because the response she was getting was that it was too dark. The book has some dark moments but I actually think Romantic Times got it right when they called it a dramady.  The darkness was balanced out by a lot of humor and it doesn’t end on a bad note. So what’s the problem?

Well the problem is you have a protagonist who walks away from a man with a mental disorder.  If the man had just been an undiagnosed asshole everyone would be cool with it but women aren’t supposed to walk away from their husbands unless their husbands have cheated on them or abused them. Mental abuse sort of counts but not if it can be linked to an illness. The fact that the husband refused to get treatment for his illness is beside the point. She should have stuck with him like the wife in A Beautiful Mind.

Except of course the real wife that character was based on DID divorce her schizophrenic husband and only remarried him after he pulled himself together 38 years after their divorce. But Hollywood didn’t want to touch that. Her husband was falling apart and it was her duty to stand by him regardless of whether or not he wanted to take medication. Period, end of story.

Again I relayed the news about So Much For My Happy Ending to my Hollywood friend who shook his head and said, “I feel like people are always judging you!”

He has a point, one I hadn’t thought of before. Not just that some people are judging me but they’re judging women, even fictional women, who don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. Both Hollywood and the publishing industry seem to be nervous about it. And yet when they take the gamble it usually pays off. Gaby, from Desperate Housewives, who slept with her teenage gardner is one of the viewers favorite characters.  (500) Days Of Summer featuring a woman who wouldn’t commit to her leading man was a huge success.  And now female protagonists in fiction are frequently allowed to engage in adultery...but they must see the error of their ways eventually.  But God forbid a woman should leave her husband just because she’s truly unhappy in the marriage. Side-kicks and minor characters can do all sorts of sordid stuff but not the protagonist. Not the woman we’re supposed to connect with the most.

I’m not advocating that everybody run out and get a divorce the moment their marriage hits a rough patch. I’m certainly not advocating infidelity and I’m not saying we should be nursing resentments against our children.

I am saying that male characters ARE allowed to resent their kids.  There are countless films and books about men trying to come to terms with being a father when they kinda don’t want to. And male characters get to put their dreams and ambitions first and the women in their lives (if they’re good) will support them even if it means mortgaging the house or flirting with bankruptcy.  If it had been a woman playing Will Smith’s part in The Pursuit Of Happyness, a woman who had risked everything to take a non-paid internship instead of a sales job at, say, Nordstrom which would have paid for the preschool and perhaps kept her from having to camp out in a subway bathroom with her kid the film adaption of that book might never have been made. The Astronaut Farmer, a movie where a man risks his family’s entire fortune just so he can build a rocket ship in his farm....do you really think that would have had the romantic appeal that pulled in the big time studios if it was a woman who was undermining her children’s financial security to pursue a dream?  I don’t.

But like I said, I AM going to shop my book and I’m going to hope that there’s a publisher who has as much faith in my readers as I do. Faith that they can appreciate nuance and shades of grey.

Because guess what? I was told by one editor that So Much For My Happy Ending would never be published for the same reason I’m being told that it won’t ever be made into a film. One month later I had offers from two different publishing houses. It was a harder sell, but not an impossible one. Breaking the mold is never impossible. You just have to work at it.

Kyra Davis

Bestselling Author of:

The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
and
So Much For My Happy Ending
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