My parents split up when I was six years old.
They got back together when I was eight, but in those two years of loss and longing and learning, something miraculous happened. I became a writer — long before I first “picked up a pen.” It’s a story shared by many (if not most) writers: out of pain, loss or loneliness is born wonder, salvation, and ultimately craft.
Believe is semi-autobiographical, but I won’t spill the beans here about which parts aren’t true because I don’t want to be a spoiler. I will tell you some of the things that are true. Melanie’s beloved, dilapidated house is very like the one I lived in when I was eight, the year my parents reunited. It was in an quiet, residential neighborhood in Rochester, Michigan. I remember it being deliciously old, with odd angles on the second story, and a comfy, lived-in feel. We had a wall-sized painting in the living room just like the one Melanie’s father is painting in Believe, a three-dimensional wonder of colors, whorls and textures. And Fairview is a bit like Rochester, as I remember it, with a small town feel (at least then, in 1977), and kids riding their bikes without helmets down the big hill that ended, more or less, at our house.
We were all latch key kids and liked it that way.
Like Melanie, I used to watch the squirrels in the tree outside my bedroom window, and I did get up one morning for an early morning bike ride to watch all the stores open. I played with broken glass in the alley and can remember being captivated by the idea that the different colors were types of jewels. I liked to get “lost” on bike rides, and I definitely laid all my treasures from the public library out on the floor when I came home with an armload of books. I can still remember the sense of anticipation and wonder I felt as I contemplated which “place” I would go first.
Buckminster is a lot like the school I started attending when I was nine. Having reunited, my parents decided to make a fresh start all the way out west, in this town my mom had heard about when she was living in San Francisco. I was called Eugene, Oregon, reportedly where old hippies went to die. We moved there sight unseen, driving out west in our tin-can Honda Civic, coming over the Cascade mountains with our jaws in our laps because the fir trees and mountains and ferns and waterfalls were so darn pretty.
Corridor school was a public alternative school, newly minted. It occupied just one corridor of a conventional school and had a student body of about a hundred kids, first through sixth grades. We staged Peter Pan, but unlike Melanie, I played the part of Wendy. Singing and acting were my true loves, after reading, of course, so it was easy to imagine what it was like for Melanie, up on that stage, dreaming herself into another world. Most of the Buckminster teachers are inspired by ones I had at Corridor school — Mike, who in the book became Matthew Howard, Laurie, who became Laurelann Gorman, and the shop teacher, whose name now escapes me. And yes, we called our teachers by their first names.
Lastly, the emotional content for Believe was informed by my own parents’ separation. I knew what it felt like to circle that abyss, inside your child self, to scramble for purchase on shifting ground — and finally to find sanctuary in your own imagination.
It felt odd to write a book that was so true and so untrue at the same time. I had formed the idea for it some years before when I was pitching an agent. A couple of years later, I had secured a very good agent (although a different one) and we were shopping my book Vasilisa around to editors. On a flight to the Yucatan with my family, Believe fell together in my mind as I was looking out the window for eight hours, and I had an epiphany about Peter Pan and what a wonderful metaphor it was for Melanie’s plight. We flew home two weeks later, and the following day I came down hard with some gastrointestinal disaster that kept me laid up for a week. Towards the end of that time, as I lay on the couch, finally able to think, I started writing, and twenty days later, my first draft of Believe was done.
My agent loved it, and over the course of several revisions, I layered in more material, building on the skeleton of that first draft. Unlike many of my books, not much had to be discarded. It seemed like the book wanted to be written, like I couldn’t get home fast enough as I was out driving the car, maybe taking the kids to school or doing errands — and all the while, the book was writing itself in my head. That’s probably because it’s so close to home, and once I had Melanie’s voice, I pretty much had the whole thing.
An editor at HarperChildrens was interested in Believe and requested what seemed to be some pretty minor revisions. But in the meantime, my agent had told me that she didn’t feel she was the right agent for me. Neither Vasilisa nor Believe had sold on the first round, though both had received revision requests. This wasn’t unusual, but she had come to feel like she didn’t know how to market my work, how to guide me. At least, that’s what I took from her “Dear Julie” email, shortly before I broke down in tears. If you’ve never spent years trying to get an agent, this may seem extreme, but the truth is that it is very hard and competitive. You can’t pitch editors without an agent, so if you lose representation, you’re out of luck until you find someone new, and it seemed to me that would be even harder now, that I might be perceived as “damaged goods.”
I gave it a shot and started pitching to agents again, but my fears were borne out. Even though editors at two major houses had expressed interest in seeing revisions, no offers for representation came through. In the meantime, friends were encouraging me to “go indie.” I spent a lot of time researching this, and the more I learned, the more I felt it was right for me — less exposure, credibility and support, but more freedom, more ownership, and much shorter production times. I took the plunge, and that’s another story for another post.
Believe will always be close to my heart. It has proven to be a book for all ages. It is so special to have heard from both adult and teen-aged readers who found themselves awake in bed in the wee hours, finishing Believe with a pile of tissues at their bedside. The book has hit some readers in a really deep place, and because it comes from a deep place in me, I find this profoundly satisfying. There’s something about turning our pain into art that gives us distance and resolution. Melanie does this with her imagination, just as I did it when I invented Melanie as a proxy for my own child self.
So here’s to the imagination with it’s power to create, to heal, and to keep us company. May we all be as lucky as Melanie Harper!
Image attribution: free image, compliments of https://www.pexels.com; photo by Froken Fokus
