The Uncoopertive Antagonist
by Jennifer Pescio Russell
Just as in fiction, the memoir relies on a workable plot, a compelling narrative to drive the story forward, to keep the reader reading. The essential truth of the story, truth being the operative word in memoir, can slow it down or speed it up at the wrong time. Some of the best memoirs rage with conflict between characters. Somewhere in the middle of the melee, the protagonist has a light bulb moment and is propelled into redemption that requires reckoning or resolution.
In fiction, characters are the carefully honed creations of writers. They can be neatly crafted with the proper responses. Or not. The memoir, though, relies on truth and on real people. The real people in my memoir don’t act predictably. Sure, there is some level of the expected, but overall, the theme grapples with the idea that nothing appears to be, as it should. And, the antagonist is extremely uncooperative.
My memoir began with a simple plot: girl meets boy and falls in love with him. He falls in love with her. Girl wants to marry him. He lives across the United States with his wife. He moves to California to be with girl. He is still married to someone else. He has no job. He has a drinking problem. Girl loves him anyway. Girl will do anything to be with him.
With conflict at every twist and turn, the writing was easy. Like the DaVinci Code, each scene ended with just enough suspense that the reader was compelled to read on, if for no other reason than to feel the protagonist’s pain with every misdeed of the antagonist. By mid-novel, as the action reaches its peak, the reader develops an appropriate hatred for the antagonist, as does the protagonist.
Somewhere during the redemptive part of the plot, the place where the protagonist feels that she can’t possibly go on the way she has been, she remembers who she was before she met this man, before he sucked the life out of her. She exacts a protective boundary around herself and continues to love him but refuses to accept certain behaviors. When she finally learns to accept the alcoholism, the antagonist finds sobriety.
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The antagonist makes a decision to move across the country again, she lets go. Surrenders. She is empty, done. At this point in the story, I want to place this man in the path of an oncoming bus, not a luxury, passenger bus, but a retired city school district bus, yellow-gold with rusted wheel wells. I could even employ a bus driver with a serious drinking problem offering the protagonist vindication and the reader a sense of atonement and a great dramatic ending. But this is not fiction.
This is my memoir and since the memoir is essentially true, the truth of the story is that the protagonist found love again and married. Encouraged by her husband, she reconnected with the antagonist, watched him change his life, give up the drink for good, find faith, forgive.
Two decades slipped by like story ideas that slip through my mind. The antagonist tells me to look for the invitation in the mail. Now he has found love again. He is getting married. And this is where I have the problem. What reader in their right mind would believe a story like that?
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Jennifer lives with her husband and daughter in San Marcos, CA. She has a Masters in Writing from Portland State University and teaches a class called, “From Journal to Memoir.” She is still working on her memoir. |
Jennifer Russell |
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Thanks Jennifer for the essay... John Wolf
