Friday, December 11, 2009

Marianne

Marianne, one of the two main stars of my novel "All the Time in Our World" is not an entirely fictional character because she embodies characteristics of at least four real life people.

She looks like a girl I went to high school with. (I'll call her "LH".) I actually met LH in 6th grade and had a crush on her for the next seven years. Never had the nerve to ask her out on a date. I always thought she was beautiful. She was never really "sought after" though, so I was always a little miffed at my fellow male students. I would have been really ticked if one of them had asked her out, but on the other hand, I felt like they were all stupid for not noticing how pretty she was. I got out my annual about three years ago and looked her up in it and I still say she was really pretty. What she looks like now I have no idea, for even though she is one of my Facebook friends, she never posts any pics of herself.

Marianne is named after a cousin of mine who I always thought had such a cool spelling to her name. I haven't seen this cousin in twenty years--which is sad because we only live about an hour apart--but I see her brother about once a year when we meet at an Amarillo Dillas baseball game.

Marianne's personality--at the beginning of the story--is a lot like the girl I had the crush on, LH. Or so I think. While we hung out together some, my impression of her personality is probably somewhat idealized. As she grows as a character, Marianne's character and personality becomes more and more like my wife's. I've worked in some of my wife's foibles (see the town party in Trahlad in part 3), but Marianne also has a lot of my wife's better qualities, like her determination and extremely strong faith. Marianne also inherited one of my wife's phobias, which also pops up in part 3.

And, finally, one little part of Marianne comes from a friend of mine. Marianne lost her father before this story starts and I have a good friend (CH) who lost her father about when I started writing this story decades ago. What's strange is that I had forgotten that I got that particular element from CH and, in the years of writing and re-writing, I guess I got so swept up in the story (the characters do seem very real to me now) that I thought I had patterned that little tidbit on LH's actual life. I was really surprised to find that her father is still alive. When I learned that, I wondered how much--if any--of Marianne's other traits that I thought came from LH or even my cousin actually came from somewhere else. Some of them, surprise surprise!--I even made up on my own.

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