1. Story Statement
Susie Cole is enjoying her last summer at home before she leaves for college: playing golf, hanging out with her new boyfriend, and generally trying to stay out of her unfathomable and mercurial mother’s way. That works until Nancy makes a discovery on the 4th of July that changes both of their lives, and alters the relationships of all the members of the family. Why does Nancy react the way she does, and how will Susie’s view of her family and her upbringing change after she leaves the sheltered cocoon of her 1970s suburban life? This is a coming-of-age moment for both women, as a mother is forced to acknowledge and reconcile her past, and her daughter searches for a way to forgive her.
Or, if you are looking for a single sentence:
Mysteriously missing birth control pills propel a 1970s suburban housewife and her daughter into conflict, requiring them to resolve decades-old traumas as they both embark on coming-of-age life changes.
2. Sketch the Antagonist/Antagonistic Force
Nancy, the mother, is the primary protagonist. Her daughter Susie is the secondary protagonist. They are each other’s antagonists. There are other minor antagonists along the way, helping to waylay each of them, but primarily this is a tug of war between the two of them.
Susie has pretty simple teenaged goals at the beginning of the book. She’s enjoying her last summer before college with her new boyfriend. Nancy thwarts that when she discovers missing birth control pills and punishes Susie because she thinks Susie took them. Later in the book, Nancy throws up new barriers as Susie develops new goals. She wants to date a boy from college but Nancy disapproves. She wants to get to know her maternal grandparents but Nancy blows that up at the Christmas dinner table. Susie perseveres and ultimately finds answers, and comes to understand her mother and how her mother’s life has impacted her own.
Susie is Nancy’s antagonist simply because she exists. Nancy became pregnant while she was unmarried and in college. Her decision to keep the baby changed her life. She left college, deferred her own career goals, married a man she didn’t know well and moved to an unfamiliar city. She has made those decisions work for her, but deep down she harbors resentment toward Susie, and as Susie is maturing into womanhood, Nancy is jealous of the opportunities that Susie will have that were not available to her.
In the present day, Nancy is her own worst antagonist, if that is a conceivable structure. She has not dealt with the traumas of her early life in any constructive way. Instead, she has built a fortress around her heart in order not to be vulnerable and be hurt again. This behavior has limited the emotional depth of all of her relationships.
3. Breakout Title
1. First working title was “Aiming for Par”, with the idea of multiple meanings for the use of par. Parity, equality, norms, etc. But it seemed too golfy. And as the story evolved, addressed only the women’s exterior goals, not their inner conflicts.
2. Second working title is “Maps”, because I saw a little theme of maps developing – literal usage of road maps and atlases, the making of plans, trying to chart a path, to see where one comes from and is going, etc. But it seems not enough.
3. “Rough Terrain” is a thought. Terrain is a great word for both literal and figurative landscapes. Rough terrain is exactly where all of the characters are in their life paths and relationships. And being in the rough on the golf course – which is an analogy Jack uses to Susie at the end of the book – is, well, rough. It requires recovery.
4. Develop Two Smart Comparables
I’ve really struggled with this one.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: Also a period piece. Also about a smart woman who wants a career and is being thwarted by the social mores and paternalistic workplaces of the era. Also a protagonist who is not warm and fuzzy, but intriguing enough to engage the reader. The writing addresses serious personal and societal issues, but in an easy-reading kind of way that seems similar to my own.
The Precious Jules by Shawn Nocher: A broken family struggling with secrets. Similar time and setting.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: Ditto.
Writers and Lovers by Lily King: This is aspirational. I don’t compare myself to Lily King, but this story of a young writer grieving her mother’s death as she struggles to find her way in the world touches on a lot of topics I do, and is the book that reignited my desire to write.
5. Write my Hook Line with Conflict and Core Wound
A suburban mother discovers that her birth control pills are missing in the summer of 1976, which forces her to reevaluate her relationships with her teenage daughter, her husband, and her estranged parents, and to address the unresolved traumas of her own youth which have affected them.
6. A. Protagonist’s Inner Conflict
Nancy’s daughter Susie has invited Nancy’s estranged parents to Christmas dinner. They drive several hours from out of state to get there. Nancy is anxious for a week beforehand for many reasons. Susie doesn’t know the nature of the estrangement; she knows only that she rarely sees these grandparents. The estrangement goes back nearly twenty years to when Nancy became pregnant out of wedlock in college and then decided to keep the baby against her parents’ wishes. She has made a new life in a new state and, she believes, has escaped her devoutly religious, blue collar upbringing. The tension of this holiday meeting comes to a head when Nancy overhears Susie describing her new college boyfriend at the table to another relative. Nancy fears that this boyfriend is unsuitable for Susie and that a relationship with him could result in a reenactment of Nancy’s own experience. With her parents looking on from across the table, Nancy loses her cool and sabotages the dinner, causing her parents to walk out, and Susie to be confused.
B. Secondary Conflict
Earlier in the novel, Nancy and Jack throw their annual dinner party at their home for his business associates. The party goes well. Nancy is a good cook, organized, meticulous, and adept at cocktail conversation. Everyone except her drinks too much. Toward the end of the evening she accidentally spies Jack flirting in the darkened kitchen with one of his business partner’s wives. She reacts by retreating, heading upstairs to the bedroom and leaving him to close out the party. When he comes upstairs later, she is in bed, awake, but has locked him out of the bedroom. As currently written, there is not much interior monologuing from Nancy at this point. We know she is angry, but it is only later in the book when she brings up this night in a conversation with him that we learn how insecure she is. She wonders if he cheats on her, whether he still loves her, or ever loved her. Because of her parents’ and boyfriend’s rejection of her nineteen years before, she believes herself to be unlovable.
7. Setting
The setting is upper middle class suburban life in 1976. Action takes place in the following primary settings: A suburban Baltimore Country Club; The main characters’ family home in suburban Baltimore; Ocean City, Maryland; Duke University; a modest home in Pittsburgh. It is a time before electronics and internet, a time of paper road atlases and payphones. Nostalgia for older readers like myself, for sure. But I also see it as a set piece. I envision this mid-century home that Jack designed twenty years ago. He’s an architect, so it’s kind of Mad Men. I see Nancy in this pretentious country club that is so far from her upbringing, which she hides from everyone in her efforts to create a life where she belongs, but where she is beginning to chafe from the confines. Susie arrives wide eyed and naïve at Duke for her freshman year, and there are many scenes of college life on campus, and in the dorm, when she begins to expand her life experience. There are many party scenes in the book. Adult parties and teenage parties, each a little different, designed to be compared and contrasted with each other. Each party can be recalled with a single food or drink item which plays a role: homemade cannoli; frozen daiquiris; a pot of chili. The main characters always learn something about themselves and their friends/family at these parties. There are a few suspenseful action scenes that take place in settings where the characters are forced to struggle against a natural element such as the ocean, and a dark, foggy highway. Because it is a book about family and loved ones, many of the most pivotal scenes take place in an ordinary place, a home: The Coles’ home, Nancy’s childhood home, Susie’s college home. Sometimes the scenes are very intimate, as a bedroom discussion behind closed doors. Sometimes they are holidays, with family gatherings, and all of the tensions that those gatherings create.
