Mary Jacobsen's Blood Sisters.________
In Blood Sisters ( Haworth Press, $16.95 ) , Mary Jacobsen details the two-decade-old friendship between two women—one lesbian, the other straight—via a series of letters they write each other. Recently, Jacobsen, a clinical social worker, talked with Windy City Times about the book's characters, friendship and a ( hypothetical ) movie adaptation.
Windy City Times: How much of your life is in this book?
Mary Jacobsen: None of the things that happen to [ main characters ] Val and Emily [ who is also called Ashmont ] exactly happened to me; they're both exaggerations of qualities I possess. However, I don't have the impulsiveness and romanticism of Val, nor do I have the passionate clarity of judgment of Ashmont. The adventures I ascribe to them are things that the good or dark side of me might have liked doing.
WCT: Did I read that it took you 20 years to write this book?
MJ: Well, it didn't take 20 to write it—it took about 20 years to get started, and 10 years to find a publisher. [ Laughs. ] I've always wanted to be a novelist. I majored in English and graduated from college; I wanted to write, but didn't have anything to say. It wasn't until I began meditating around age 40 that something clicked for me and that characters began to come to me. But I had formed the intention of writing a female version of the epic Gilgamesh when I was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary [ in Virginia ] ; I just didn't have the wherewithal.
WCT: Do you think you had nothing to say or that you had something to say but didn't realize it?
MJ: I think I had inchoate seeds of things I wanted to say. I certainly had opinions. [ Laughs. ] But I didn't have the foggiest idea how to put them into story form or how to embed them into characters so that they came across in a narrative way instead of a didactic way—and, certainly, didacticism is the death knell of an entertaining story.
WCT: As a reader, you go through all of these emotions. How were you able to put humorous and tragic elements in a cohesive form? What is your writing process like?
MJ: First, thank you; it stirs my heart to get that kind of feedback.
I am not that structured a person except when it comes to writing. With Blood Sisters, I began with an idea; I knew that I wanted one woman to be lesbian and other straight because it would add dramatic tension. I also wanted the story to work on different levels simultaneously; I wanted it to be about friendship but also wanted them to grow individually.
I wanted Val to recognize that love means cherishing the happiness of a person that you love, even if it means that you have to give up certain aspects of what you want or need from them. With Ashmont, I wanted to show that the pain of the abuse that she experienced within her family led to a judgmental, passionate and rigid understanding of how to help children. She's heroic, but her rigidity gets in the way of her being effective. I wanted her to understand that, if you want to prevent the mistreatment of children, you have to help parents—which is a conviction I share.
I then mapped out what I wanted each section of letters to accomplish. That's where the more open-ended creativity occurred. There is a lot of loss in the book but, at the end, I wanted this elegiac acceptance that the life that finds them is full of joy and growth.
WCT: You mention loss, and I think of Val's cousin Dez and his partner Raymond [ who suffer tragic fates ] . What is their function in the book?
MJ: Dez and Raymond are really Val's family. One of the things this book is about is what happens to children when the parents can't take proper care of them. In some ways, Val has been orphaned. Dez and Raymond take her in and become kind of a surrogate family. They give her an opportunity to work in and, ultimately, inherit an inn—which Val has mixed feelings about.
WCT: Is it just me, or is the correspondence between Val and Ashmont one-sided?
MJ: It is one-sided. One of the things I wanted to do is to show that, sometimes, people who appear to be the brightest and passionate on the outside are actually the biggest cowards on the inside—and that describes Emily. She's bold but terrified of being rejected by Val. Val, on the other hand, is oozing all over the place but doesn't always see herself as being bold; however, in a way, she has that in abundance.
WCT: Seduction plays a role in this book. You can have an enduring friendship without seduction, so I'm curious why that's in there.
MJ: Well, Val ( in her 20s ) thinks that Emily can choose to be gay and that she's willfully withholding herself from Val. There's a part of Val that's not very mature; she thinks that if she keeps whittling away at her, that Emily will cave. It's a fantasy, and is not realistic.
What I was also trying to do is show the evolution of love on Val's part, and how it's tied to sexuality [ to a point ] . Val has a hard time understanding how somebody she feels that close to ( and who feels that close to her ) could not be attracted to her. There's a youthful narcissism to it—but that's true about life! [ Laughs. ]
WCT: You've written in another piece that people fear the healing power of friendship. What do you mean by that?
MJ: I don't think people fear it in a conscious way, necessarily. But friendship can be seen as dangerous, because people don't know what to do with it. People can't imagine people being friends on a deep level. There are people who want to sabotage friendships—maybe unconsciously—because it goes against the narrative arc they feel life is supposed to take.
Maybe it's more comprehensive to say that there's a failure of imagination, although fear is a part of that.
WCT: Who would star in a movie adaptation of this book?
MJ: Someone asked me that at a book-reading—and my mind went blank. I'm tempted to ask you!
The one person who comes to mind for Emily is Mary Louise Parker. I have to figure this out. [ Laughs. ] I should be able to work it out; I'm a therapist. [ She later e-mailed Windy City Times with her choice for Val: Hilary Swank. ]
WCT: What do you want people to take away from Blood Sisters?
MJ: That is an excellent question. Well, you made reference to the multiplicity of emotions that the book contains and evokes; that's certainly what I had in mind. I also want the book to be deeply entertaining. I want readers of any generation to be able to revisit certain aspects of earlier eras in their lives—to be able to recognize what was beautiful and joyful about romanticism, but also to be glad they're no longer there. [ Laughs. ]
I also wanted to evoke what close, loving relationships can do for people.
