the what & why of goodbye hope valentine

I hope that most who read Goodbye Hope Valentine will read it as a thriller with twists, and are not too distracted by the asides into literature (the use of Bolaño, the mentions of Kundera, Cheever, etc.) and my preoccupation with the power disparities among the genders and between the working-class and the wealthy. If you’re seeking a thriller, by all means skip the following excuses and explanations and go to the book.

Regarding its opening and closing chapters, which act as bookends to the rest of the novel, they provide for me a rationale to its first-person narrative by placing the latter in the context of a mother’s explanation to her daughter about why their lives could be at any time upended by her past. My attempt to create veracity begins with the first short line of the novel—“Allegra (use our password).docx”—which is both the file name that contains the mother’s testament and is also an instruction to her daughter on how to unlock the password protected document.

Whether or not these strategies are convincing to a reader, they were useful in convincing me that the text was as bulletproof as I could make it—that is, close to a credible reality. Other of my self-convincing strategies include providing accurate air travel timelines, moon phases, weather conditions, and so forth. While such scrupulous accounting may be invisible or unimportant to the reader when compared to narrative interest, keeping the details correct, or correcting them upon revision, are one means by which I can persuade myself that a story I’m writing has some real-world believability.

As an admirer of writers who write unstoppably while maintaining both the reader’s absorption and a real-world fidelity, I think firstly about Knausgaard, who appears to have written some of the six eight-hundred-page books of his opus in a few months. He is writing from autobiographical memory and with the assistance of an editor and fact-checker, which helps speed the work. And the writing at times, and to which he readily admits, can be stilted. Nevertheless, Knausgaard keeps one reading. My hope is to obtain that result, a compelling novel, by the opposite means—through the process of revision and self-correction . . . since, necessarily at this point, I have become my own fact-checker and editor.

Yet, by what right can I claim to write credibly from the first-person point of view of my female narrator? Early versions of Goodbye Hope Valentine were written in the third-person, which distanced me from my central character, much of whose experience I subsequently filled out from my own experiences and those who have been closest to me. It was at this point, revising the novel after putting finished drafts aside, sometimes for years, that I allowed myself to insert ideas and references outside of the ones that might normally be found in a thriller. I was giving Hope Valentine a background with which I was thoroughly familiar, that of a person raised by a single, working-class mother. Intelligent and ambitious, Hope seeks to transcend her circumstances and have a richer life than if she had accepted the world she was given and the expectations of her family, who see her ambitions as a useless rebellion against forces that, from their experience, she will be unable to escape.

To have a right to live, and to live the way one chooses, corresponds to the dual aspects of Hope’s story, the former relating to the novel’s thrillerish side, the latter to my attempt to inject into a thriller some depth and psychological realism. Hope, by birth and gender, is enclosed by boundaries that she works diligently to transcend. Entering an unequal marriage with a man of higher status, she unexpectedly finds herself under the threat of greater restrictions, and then outright violence—against which she instinctively and fatally reacts. That she would do so is foreshadowed by key events of her childhood and teens, which show her as independent and assertive when confronted by those who would bend her to their wishes.

Hope’s independence is different from my own. And the challenges she faces are not the same. She is in many ways an idealized fiction. But although her survival instinct is strong and sure, she is not a superhero. I have imagined into her some of my own weaknesses, such as my inability to conceive how I might survive if compelled to live on the street or within the American penal system. What Hope does to avoid either of those fates is part of her story.

As to the subsidiary characters, Renee may be the most controversial. My near namesake, she is in transition and has given herself over to a relationship that she must certainly know is doomed. That she enters into it and allows it to continue comes less from her desire to deceive another than to allow herself to dream of what might be possible in a different world. Perhaps she sees in this impossible relationship her last chance to gain what time and age will, sooner than later, permanently exclude her from having. It is a desperate gamble, but one that shows her as a credibly flawed and believable character, rather than as an idealized representation of a demographic. Renee, to me, is a tragic figure not because of who she is but because of the societal attitudes that limit how she is perceived. She is a character in whom I have complete sympathy.

A life experience about which I have a more exacting empathy is Hope’s uncertain parentage. Both of us have only the most minimal information about our biological fathers, and not even their names. Hope, from flashes of sense memory, suspects hers might be a sailor or work in a boatyard. Parents rarely give their children a full account of their lives for the good reason that people wish to present themselves positively, and so the painful turns and difficult decisions evaporate from memory and family history. But if Hope’s mother chose not to tell her daughter much about her father, Hope’s situation, after she becomes a mother, won’t allow permanent secrecy. Hope’s fraught history is ever waiting in the wings, and from this derives her decision to tell her daughter all—at least in the written testimony of a document that Allegra can access if the worst unfolds. As with my mother, Hope has protected her child from knowledge she rightly thinks too complicated and threatening to reveal: her history of self-defense and escape. In my case, illegitimacy was the concern, the era of my birth unfriendly to unconventional families. Likewise, Hope’s daughter receives only the most abstract and tenuous clues about her father, one being the name her mother gives her, Allegra, the name Lord Byron chose for his illegitimate child, and an oblique reference to her father, Will Byron. My clues were my birth certificate, reissued five years after the fact under what I would later learn was my adopted father’s name, and the hospital where I was born, Misericordia NY, an institution founded to serve the needs of unwed mothers. My mother’s first marriage was short-lived, and observing her struggles as a single parent gave me a depth of knowledge about the difficulties faced by women during an era that was particularly disadvantageous to all women, let alone one with an illegitimate child and without a high school degree. I used many of my childhood observations to develop the challenges Hope faces, in particular the scenes of domestic violence. The great photographer Nan Goldin has spoken about viewing the self-portraits she made after being savagely beaten by a boyfriend as the reason she was able to leave him. The direct witness to the violence inflicted on my mother by her second husband was myself, psychic images that remain as powerful to me as Goldin’s photographs.

Yet Hope is not solely a character built from autobiography. She has more than a few similarities, I have only lately realized, to Henry James’s Isabel Archer—both being parentless in foreign countries, both being subject to abusive marriages. There are other oblique connections, such as my references to the Diana Monument in Mexico City (the goddess Diana being an archer), and Hope’s nighttime wander in search of refuge through a street called Isabel la Católica. Though I did not consciously attempt any parallel to James’s most significant heroine, I did deliberately base my Thackery Muir on the actual Henry James. Although Muir is taller, his manner is Jamesean in that he resembles the character in James whom I think is most like James, Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors. That Strether and Muir turn out to have identical missions, which is to bring a wandering American safely back to America, seems to be another initially unintended connection I made to the Master.

Why I might make these deliberate and unintentional links to James is explained by my immersion in his novels over the years of part-time study it took for me to complete my doctoral dissertation, Fear in the Art and Life of Henry James, written for the University of Maryland. That I chose James as my subject was thanks to a course on literary research taught by Howard Pearce at Florida Atlantic University during which I wrote a paper on James’s “Daisy Miller,” which was accepted for publication by The Explicator before the end of the term during which I wrote it.

My career as a scholar and educator was short-lived. I’ve only published one other scholarly note and I taught as an adjunct in south Florida for just a year before, like many others, I succumbed to the realities of the university job market. But that did not diminish my interest in literature. I continued my studies to achieve an advanced degree, much as Hope  had wished to do after she received her Bachelor’s. The striving to expand my life that I felt as a first-generation student, I instilled in Hope as one of her driving motivations.

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert allegedly said. As I’ve suggested above, this is also somewhat true about me and Hope Valentine. Where we differ most is the aspect of her personality that makes her an interesting protagonist for a thriller: under threat, she is possessed of a cool nature that some might read as borderline psychopathic. She is not stymied or diminished when faced with traumatic situations that would cause most of us to retreat or paralyze us into inaction. Rather, these dilemmas bring out in Hope the reserves of her personality. The concept that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is a Nietzschean fantasy, but it may have some limited truth in that one never delves into one’s most profound capabilities until pressed beyond what seems tolerable.

Hope is not a psychopath. She cares about others and the world. It is the world that misunderstands her, tries to restrict her, and limits her dreams and prospects. If her personality and intelligence undergird the conflicts she has with both her own family and the family she will marry into, it is the latters’ obstinacy and shortsightedness that will test her to the extreme and activate her hidden nature. Such women, women who stand up to their circumstances, are usually given short shrift in Western culture’s earliest fictions, myths. Prominent figures such as Medea or Clytemnestra are read historically as problematic femme fatales. One exception would be Atalanta the huntress, who is a follower of the goddess Artemis/Diana—who, as mentioned above, is one of the guiding spirits of Goodbye Hope Valentine.

Besides Diana and Henry James, the other guiding spirit of Goodbye Hope Valentine is the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. I had not read him before composing an early draft of my novel, in which I overemphasized a Mexican cult deity, la Niña Blanca. La Niña Blanca, or Santissima Muerte, is a skeletal figure of worship, particularly in the Mexico City barrio of Tepito where much of Goodbye Hope Valentine takes place, and it is related to that country’s Day of the Dead tradition. After reading Bolaño’s 2666, which alerted me to Mexico’s femicide problem, and coming to an understanding that la Niña Blanca (which translates as “white girl”) was a defense against violence rather than a glorification of it, I tried to eliminate from my text the cultural exoticism la Niña initially inspired in me and present this folk saint for what I believe it primarily is: an intercessor who offers hope and protection to the downtrodden and dispossessed.

The horrifying and endless middle section of 2666 forensically relates a series of actual slayings of young women in the nineties and early aughts, women generally employed in the border factories of Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s fictionalized name for Juarez, Mexico. The police, in reality and Bolaño’s fiction, catch a meager few of the perpetrators and most of the crimes remain unsolved and the murders go on and on. Hope in Goodbye Hope Valentine could easily have been a similar victim. Fatherless, and having grown up poor in one of New Hampshire’s industrial towns, she is of a demographic most likely to be exploited in one way or another. The grip of her social powerlessness follows her into a marriage to a man from a privileged family, whose patriarch considers her a means to the end of extending the family line. When she asserts herself against that and becomes defiant in other ways, Hope’s marriage unravels, and her husband turns abusive.

Many women fight back against their abusers, sometimes resorting to desperate extremes. Often such women are convicted and imprisoned, their citations of abuse having made little impression on the courts. This is the situation Hope faces, and it determines her decision to run—a decision I leave for the reader to decide as justified or not, at least until the culminating revelation of the novel, its principal twist, or as James might have put it, the final turn of the screw.

RC