This is going to be a far more personal blog post than any of my previous ones. It’s about my dad, so buckle up!
My book recently turned one year old. As always, birthdays make me reflect on the year that has passed – the good times, the bad times, the accomplishments, the failures, future plans and goals etc.
Write What You Know
This time, though, I’ve reflected on Let Slip the Beasts. As a story, but also Kallie as a main character and all the parts she’s made up of. There’s an old adage in creative writing: Write what you know. Lately I’ve been thinking about how I’ve utilized what I know when writing Let Slip the Beasts. And the thing is, my knowledge and experience has manifested in some unexpected ways. Specifically when it comes to Kallie.
Most new authors put a lot of themselves in their main characters (sometimes too much but we’re not gonna get into that right now). I’m no exception. Kallie is a lot like me, no doubt about it. But she is also, surprisingly, a lot like my dad. The stubborness, the recklessness, the alcoholic tendencies, the explosive mood swings – that’s all him. And by genetic inheritance me too, I guess. After all, I am what remains.
My Dad
You see, my dad passed away when I was 24. He suffered from a particularly virulent form of stomach cancer that ate him up in the span of a few months. He was diagnosed in January 2010. He died April 14th 2010, two weeks before his 51st birthday. I remember visiting him in the hospital in March, and the moment I laid eyes on him I thought “here is a dead man”. That man was not my dad. Just a walking dead who happened to look like him, too stubborn to give up the ghost.
We weren’t as close as I wished we could have been. He left my mom when I was four. We spent summers and every other Christmas together, but the visits were alway fraught with insecurity. My dad was a volatile man prone to drink. The older I became the angrier his behaviour made me. It wasn’t all bad tho. We had some good times too. Eating fresh fish straight from the sea, watching action movies, playing Trivial Pursuit and video games.
I remember being seven years old and my dad renting a Nintendo Entertainment System at the local video store and the two of us spending the whole weekend playing Super Mario Bros. Now, 30 years later, there are few things I love more than action movies, quizzes and video games. Not to mention how action movies and video games have inspired Let Slip the Beasts.
A Complicated Man
When my dad was 26 – young, dumb and reckless – he and a few friends got drunk at a party and decided to drive to another location. I’m fuzzy on the details as my dad didn’t like to talk about this incident. They ended up crashing. I think the driver died. My dad was far luckier. He only broke his back and was paralyzed from the waist down. The doctors told him he would never walk again. The stubborn motherfucker just said “fuck that and fuck you” (I’m most likely paraphrasing here, but I can totally picture it).
They sent him to Sunnaas, a hospital for physical therapy and rehabilitation. Incidentally, this is where he met my mom, who was a nurse there at the time. With the help of the good doctors (and my mom) at Sunnaas, and a healthy dose of stubborness and sheer force of will, my dad learned how to walk again. It took a lot of time and hard work and it wasn’t a completely perfect recovery – he was prone to severe cramps that would make his legs seize up. In his later years he used a wheelchair to better get around from A to B – a huge relief to me and my grandmother. We always worried he would fall and hurt himself when he was out and about.
The Ghost Between the Lines
Now, a year after my debut I’ve realized that this story about my dad, parts of it anyway, has made its way into Let Slip the Beasts. A subconcious homage to a complicated man who, whether I like it or not, has informed who I am today. Those of you who have read the book will know which part I’m referring to. And thanks for reading it, you are the best!
For the uninitiated here comes a little spoiler: Kallie acts recklessly (to put it mildly) and has her back broken, making her paralyzed from the waist down. With a little help from a friend, some potent drugs and a good dose of stubborness, the injury is fixed (the clock is ticking in the story, so there’s no time for months of gruelling physical therapy) and she can walk again. But she suffers from the occasional cramp that makes her leg seize up. When I wrote it I didn’t think much of it, it just felt natural. I mean, I could technically have given her any serious injury, but it never even crossed my mind. It had to be this one. Now that I’m older and wiser it’s clear my dad was a ghost between the lines, influencing the shape of things.
I don’t know, it feels kinda nice knowing that even after everyone who knows him is gone, after I’m gone, a part of him will still live on in that book. And isn’t that what we all want? A legacy. However small and unexpected.