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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

The lives we choose: My Real Children by Jo Walton

14/12/2014

15 Comments

 
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One of the joys of fiction is its capacity to let us sample alternative lives. But even in fiction, a character can follow only one path. Or can they? Some writers have played with our human desire to know what would have happened had we chosen that route rather than this by following both. In The Post-Birthday World (described in a mini review here from Safia Moore) Lionel Shriver shows us the consequences of the main character Irina’s decision to both give into and resist the temptation to have an extramarital affair. My Real Children follows a similar structure, with alternate chapters focusing on the Tricia who marries Mark and the Pat who doesn’t.

The novel begins with Patricia reviewing her life. Nearing ninety and resident in a care home, she is often described by the staff as “very confused”. But her confusion has an extra layer to the usual fictional dementia: she has vivid memories of two separate selves with two distinct sets of children.

Both threads begin with a little girl called Patsy, playing on the beach with her father and brother. They also include Patty evacuated with her school at the outbreak of the Second World War which kills both her father and brother. Patty makes it to Oxford University where she almost crosses paths with Wittgenstein and Alan Turing and, only a few days before graduation, falls for the somewhat intense Mark. After a two-year separation and countless passionate letters, Mark phones her to ask her, somewhat hopelessly, to marry him.

Acceptance means giving up her teaching career (married women not being allowed to teach in 1949), sex that is no pleasure to either of them and nine pregnancies, only four resulting in live births. Refusal brings a passion for Italy, a career writing guidebooks, and an idyllic lesbian family with high-flying scientist Bee and their three children.

But somewhere around the late 70s their trajectories change. Tricia (now Trish) divorces Mark, becomes active in the women’s movement, local politics and her re-ignited teaching career. Pat suffers a family crisis. But despite periodic forgetfulness, Pat is soon blissfully happy once more, while Trish gives up her own ambitions to care for others.

Time has been marked in both threads by snippets of global news (such as the Kennedy assassination; moon landings; and the Cuban missile crisis) which I dismissed as an irritating distraction from the human narrative until it dawned on me that they were straying from the facts (e.g. Prince Charles marries Camilla instead of Diana; United Europe is more powerful than the USA). But this external context strains credibility when Trish gets her first computer around the time her younger son gets married on the moon. Around the same time, a pregnant Pat is concerned about the fallout from nuclear bombs on Miami and Delhi. Meanwhile, the seven children are coupling and reproducing with a profusion of character names that left me as confused as Patricia.

When Patricia’s two halves are reunited in the Lancaster nursing home, it seemed that the message of the novel was that, wherever life takes us, most end in the same place with worn out bodies and/or minds. But the old woman’s musing on the butterfly effect suggested something more grand or, indeed, a grandiose delusion in her speculation that her response to Mark’s proposal had shaped the future of the world. Yet Patricia’s sense of omnipotence goes further: Trish’s self-sacrifice has brought world peace and prosperity while Pat’s decision to be true to herself has inadvertently brought about a nuclear war.

As Jo Walton is a writer of science fiction and fantasy, perhaps I ought to have anticipated such a preposterous conclusion. I might have been more inclined to swallow it had the parallels between the two lives been sharper, or their intersections more significant, and relayed through less pedestrian prose. There’s a lot of attention to detail in the novel but, unfortunately, not the type of details that might have helped me appreciate this novel better.

Nevertheless, an interesting premise. Thanks to Corsair for my review copy.

Do you ever look back at a decision point in your life and wonder how things would have been had you gone for a different option? It must be a subject that haunts me, as it’s one of the themes of my forthcoming novel, Sugar and Snails. Yet it’s the events that were not of my choosing that have had the biggest impact on my own life. Nevertheless, I do wonder if I’d still be stuck working in a bank in my home town had I chosen to leave school at sixteen rather than stay on for the A-levels that would get university. And I still struggle with muddled priorities, one of the themes of Charli Mills’ flash fiction challenges earlier this year. How about you?

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
15 Comments
Norah Colvin link
14/12/2014 04:45:54 am

I don't think this book is for me Anne. It sounds very confusing. Rather more like two different characters than two different options. It is an interesting question though and I often wish I could live parallel lives so that I could make as many choices as I like rather than choose between. It's not that I regret choices, it's that I would like to be able to do other things as well!! The old 'choose your own adventure' books of the late 70s and 80s (for 8+ year olds) were great for choosing plot alternatives. Of course you could always go back and try again if you didn't like the way that one turned out.
As a novelist and short story writer you get to choose from multiple futures for your characters. Playing around with those options can be a bit like trying it out before you buy. :)

Reply
sarah link
14/12/2014 09:06:13 pm

OH! I loved those books! Now you're making me want to search through boxes for my Choose Your Own Adventures! :-)

Reply
Annecdotist
16/12/2014 01:43:39 am

You're right, Norah, they were like two different characters, especially as the differences between them weren't always logical (e.g. why one had four children and the other three).
Would be we great if we could test drive our lives before making a major decision! I'm not sure even fiction can do that for us.

Reply
sarah link
14/12/2014 09:04:31 pm

Oh my gosh, I'm frazzled just reading the review. O_o Although, like you said, it is an interesting premise. As an author of science fiction and fantasy, I'm not surprised by the ending. Actually, I think I'd be disappointed (if I were a huge sci-fi fan) had it not ended so dramatically.

I think "what if" sometimes. I'm wondering if there's anyone who doesn't. I am fascinated by the idea of how the world (or just my little world) would be different if I hadn't done this or had done that. Really and truly fascinated by it.

Reply
Annecdotist
16/12/2014 01:47:20 am

Thanks, Sara, I'd be interested in your view of the novel if you were to read it. Although I'm not such a fan of science fiction I do read some (such as Station Eleven which I reviewed here http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/annecdotal/survival-is-not-enough-station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mandel)
But part of my problem with this one was that it wasn't science fiction enough, so it just seemed daft)

Reply
Linda link
15/12/2014 06:51:29 am

This is probably why I love reading and writing fiction so much, it lets me imagine other lives. I don't deeply regret any of my past decisions but the older I get the more often I catch myself thinking 'I'll do it differently next time.'

Reply
Annecdotist
16/12/2014 01:48:35 am

Oh, yes, that's lethal isn't it, Linda? It does sometimes seem preposterous that we really only get one life as we don't have the opportunity to become experts in being ourselves!

Reply
Lori Schafer link
15/12/2014 08:45:33 am

I'm very interested in alternative histories - whether personal or historical - although this one sounds too far-fetched for me. But I also think you can drive yourself crazy with might-have-beens. Maybe you land that dream job, but then get run over by a bus on the way to work. You marry the man you always wanted, and then he gets run over by a bus. There's no telling how things are going to work out, and I think it's important to make the best decisions we can moving forward without torturing ourselves with looking back.

Reply
Annecdotist
16/12/2014 01:50:24 am

So true, Lori. The "right" choice can easily turn into the "wrong" one in ways it's impossible to anticipate. As you say, we need to make the best of what ever decisions we've made.

Reply
geoff link
15/12/2014 11:44:38 am

I think I'm with Lori on this. I sort of feel I fall into this rather than make decisions that lead me here or there. But I make the best decisions I can. And I've always consoled myself with the thought that if the decision turns out to be a duff one then I'll just try again. I think the only place that wouldn't work was with having children; we explored sale or return options but the 14 years completely satisfied or your money back didn't seem to apply to us.

Reply
Annecdotist
16/12/2014 01:53:05 am

Lovely idea, Geoff. Unfortunately I think some people genuinely do believe in the sale or return option with children. But it's a good example of something that feels like such a definite decision (whether and when to have children) yet often even in the most organised of couples it can be only when looking back at you realise a decision has been taken!

Reply
Safia
16/12/2014 02:32:18 am

Thank you for the mention, Anne. I laughed towards the end of your blog when you mentioned the bank job! I was that girl who dropped out of A levels at 17 and worked in a bank, albeit for less than a year. I honestly don't think our early decisions are all that important these days - there is plenty of time to make up for dodgy decisions, and I think we do, if we're lucky enough to have the resources, find the life we're suited for one way or another!

Reply
Annecdotist
17/12/2014 09:23:25 am

Ha, ha, it clearly didn't do you any harm, Safia! You're right, we do get a second chance – or a third or fourth – with some decisions, although I'm not sure that we do with all.

Reply
litlove link
18/12/2014 06:33:19 am

I read Amongst Others by Jo Walton last year, and it was enjoyable but very light on plot. In this one it sounds like the pendulum has swung in the other direction! I would find those ultimate consequences worryingly grandiose, but I'm intrigued by sliding-door premises. I do wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn't fallen pregnant when I did, at the start of my graduate career, which led to chronic fatigue syndrome after three years of doing way too much all at once. But then I think perhaps it's better not to wonder too much. I might just stick with trying to work out the meaning of what I actually got! :-)

Reply
Annecdotist
19/12/2014 01:14:17 am

Good to hear from you, especially with another perspective on Jo Walton's fiction. In a way, this one doesn't have a lot of plot either, more a series of events to which the writer seems to ascribe more meaning than I did!
Agree, sometimes it's better not to look back on the possibilities – unless you're on the way to writing your own version of this, of course!

Reply



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