324. Blending Magical Realism and Contemporary with Angela Brown

Author Angela Brown discusses adding a touch of magical realism to contemporary fiction, the fine line of blending genres, and how she kept her story, Some Other Time, centered.

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Transcript

Jennia: Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Writing allows us to speculate, imagine and dream about the various possibilities. But how do we convey that in a story that is rooted in very true to real-life events? Angela Brown is here to share how she did just that by blending real-life events like Empty Nest Syndrome with magical realism in her new book, Some Other Time.

Jennia: Well, I'm so excited to have you here!

Angela Brown: Thank you so much for having me! I'm really excited to be here and to just talk writing and talk about the book. Thanks for having me.

Jennia: Yes! And I'll just say for everyone listening, it is such a good book! I read it in one sitting (Angela laughs) and so that is really my version of a five-star review.

Angela Brown: Thank you so much! And that, as a writer, is probably one of the best compliments that somebody can give that it had that effect on them. So thank you for—

Jennia: Yeah, you're welcome!

Angela Brown: —Know that I appreciate it.

Jennia: Yeah. When the book starts off, it seems as though it might only follow those real-life events. We don't get that magical realism right away. So how did you decide when you were going to introduce that component?

Angela Brown: Sure. So Some Other Time—just as a little bit of backstory—is about a woman, as you mentioned, Ellie, who her only child has recently left for college. And as she's going through the motions of empty nest, her and her husband grow apart. They decide that they're going to end their marriage and get divorced. They fly to Florida from their home in New Jersey to tell Ellie's elderly, retired parents, Bunny and Frank, about the news. Everything explodes and then the magical realism begins. Ellie wakes up for one week in an alternate version of the present where she's never been married to her husband.

Jennia: Mmm.

Angela Brown: So to me it's really important—My first book before this, Olivia Strauss is Running out of Time, didn't have any magical realism in it, but it sort of, like, flirted with the idea of speculative—

Jennia: Mmm.

Angela Brown: —and a lot of my work since then sort of leans into magical realism. But I like to do it in kind of a pragmatic way where it almost feels like maybe this could be real. You know what I mean? Like, it's really important to me that the magical realism is there to serve the purpose of the real-life events and the real-life emotion in the book. So in Some Other Time, it was really significant to me that we understood these characters lives and we really understood the emotion and the backstory so that when we get to the magical realism, it's fun, but there's kind of a purpose for it outside of just being a fun, structural thing to play around with. So, yeah, the whole first act of the book is really just us getting to know them, see their current circumstances. It's a really emotional, character-driven book, even though it is magical. And so I just didn't really feel like I was doing it justice until I really showed each of these characters and this family—it's really a family drama too—fully on the page, so we understood them once they get into this alternate timeline so we see the changes and whatnot that they're experiencing there.

Jennia: Yeah! Could you share a little bit more about it being a family drama? And one thing that I thought even when I was reading it, is that Ellie is balancing all these other people's emotions throughout the entire book. So even, for instance, when their daughter—and this is early on, I'm not spoiling anything—(Angela laughs) decides she's vegetarian. And then how she presents that information to her parents when they go out to dinner while she's also going through everything else about announcing the divorce and these feelings of, "my daughter leaving and wanting to move away" and everything, of course, that comes along with that final moment of your marriage. And she's worried about these little things as well and still worrying about other people's feelings. So I'd love to have you explain why you added that in and even how it helps support the story as a whole?

Angela Brown: Yeah! So, I mean, to me, I love Ellie. I just adore her as a character. She is, to me, an everyday, typical mother with the volume turned up by, like, 50 percent. Like, she's—everything she feels, she feels really big. She is—I don't think she's dramatic, but she's just so invested in her feelings and she is so . . . truly, even though the story is about her and her husband getting divorced, she is so in love with her family. She loves her parents. She's so connected to them. She's absolutely in love with her daughter. And she's just—it's killing her that they're growing apart because her daughter's in college now and she just, she needs her in different ways, right?

Jennia: Mhm.

Angela Brown: —Ellie was a stay at home mom. We learned she made a choice to leave her career early on and she consciously chose that she wanted to be there to raise her family. She wanted that to be her day-to-day. So, to me, the book is very much Ellie's story. But I don't think—because of the type of character that she is and the type of woman she is and mother—that you could tell her story without telling it in relationship to her family. So the family drama aspect of it to me was very natural. Like, I just couldn't see how we would understand her and the way she ticks and what motivates her and what breaks her without understanding the relationship she has to her aging parents, who—her mother in particular has a very big personality as it is—

Jennia: Yes!

Angela Brown: —just the way that they communicate and the ways that they show their love to each other because it's not always, like, these big grand gestures. Sometimes it's just these, like, off-handed comments and stuff. It was also really interesting to me—and one of the reasons why I wanted to set the family precisely as it is—again, it's Bunny and Frank, the grandparents, Ellie and Jonah, the couple that's splitting and then Maggie, the college-age student—is . . . The book is very centered around Ellie as a mom and what it means as a mother when your children enter that next stage in your life.

Jennia: Yeah.

Angela Brown: And if that's a good thing, if that's a bad thing, what it does for your own identity as a person. When a lot of times mothers, whether we're working outside the home or not—you know, whatever we're doing with our day, our brain is very often, all of the time, tuned in to our kids when we get to that next stage. So in thinking about Ellie as a mom and where she's at in her life, the idea of motherhood was very central to the book to me. And I thought it would be interesting to have these three generations of women too. So, like, we have Ellie, who's kind of in the middle, she's middle age. And then we have her mother, who is, again, retired senior citizen, very, like, devout Catholic, kind of, like, old school, I would say—

Jennia: Oh yeah, she has very strong opinions that definitely root her in when she grew up.

Angela Brown: Absolutely! It's very central to who she is. Her faith is very important to her and her beliefs about marriage are centered very much in her faith. So I thought that was interesting because they're both mothers, they're both married, they've both been at turning points in their life. But to see the way that two women from the same family, but of different generations, view the same topic. And then of course we have Maggie, who's not married yet, she's in college, but her reactions and belief systems as well. So that was a really interesting pairing to me. And thinking about the family—was not just that it's the whole family, but these three women, in particular, and, like, the generational aspect between them, what's important, what's not, and that type of thing.

Jennia: Yeah, I noticed that, too, even throughout. And like you were saying, that core of who they are, even when we do get into the magical realism component, that core is still very, very present. It doesn't feel like, this is Bunny if she grew up in, say—I don't know—1940s Paris or something, and (laughs) went to fashion school or something (Angela laughs) this is still very much—

Angela Brown: That's very—

Jennia: —Yes. There might be different events occurring in her life. She might have different decisions that she's thinking of making, but she's still very much Bunny, just like Ellie is still very much Ellie.

Angela Brown: Yeah. And I think that was important to me too. I've always loved, like, time-slip novels and movies, like, give me Midnight in Paris all day, every day. I'll watch that a thousand times. I just, I love those kinds of stories. But I really knew from the start that, just like, if you made a few different choices in your life but you were the same person, what would your world and your greater world end up looking like? That—to me, that's the kind of magical realism I like. Right? Like, that idea that it feels kind of real in a way that, like, you know, they're not completely different people. They're not waking up in a fantasy-land type thing. It's the real world, but the idea that's centering it, it's just based on a couple of choices, feels very real to me. You know, what if we had changed a few things, would this be the way that we woke up today?

Jennia: Well, speaking of that, how did that then guide your characters reactions to when they realized, "This is not what I went to sleep living in? This is not the reality that I remember having last night?"

Angela Brown: Well, it's funny, when I was writing it—I tend to write in like a very typical three-act structure when I write fiction. I knew I wanted act one, like we talked about, to be very, like, this is real life. This is what's happening in their real circumstances. And I knew when I got to the second act, that, like, murky second act, what is going to happen? (both laugh) How are we turning pages? What events were happening? I kind of set out that I was like, I want this to feel fun. Like, I want it to be tender and I want there to be tearful moments, but I want it to feel fun. I never wanted the characters to wake up and be terrified that they were somewhere. Like, I wanted it to have a little bit of a playful aspect because that's, I think, how I would almost react, right? If it wasn't like—I didn't wake up in a magical world of, like, dragons and fairies and stuff. But like, "This is my real life, but nobody who I love knows me"—

Jennia: Mhm.

Angela Brown: —It's strange and alarming, but there's also a little bit of comedy in that, I think. So when I approached the second act and when I approached the actual magical parts of the book, that was really important to me. I was like, I want it to be driven by emotion in a lot of ways, but I don't want it to feel heavy. Like, I want it to maintain a playfulness, I think, as we go. So that was sort of, like, my vibe, I guess you could say (laughs). As I was writing, I had to keep reminding myself that, like, keep it kind of playful even in the moments where it's serious, right?

Jennia: And how could it not be playful with a character named Bunny who wears loud (both laugh), obnoxiously colored prints?

Angela Brown: Bunny was such—honest to goodness, like, all of these characters were really fun for me to create. They're very much fiction. Like, many of my characters, but particularly in this book, there is a lot of sprinkling, personality-wise, of people my own life, who—again, just taking certain traits and just ramping them up a bit. But Bunny, in particular, was really fun. There are different pieces of her that I sort of pulled from a lot of different maternal figures in my life. And, again, I just find her a real joy. She's so, as we said, stuck in her values. She's full of love and very loving, but she doesn't necessarily show it in a mushy, like, hug—

Jennia: No, she doesn't (laughs).

Angela Brown: She's very sarcastic. She's very blunt. If I had to define her in a gesture, she would be, like, a woman defined by a good, strong eye roll, probably, right? But she's very real to me in that—again, she's not all lovey dovey all the time. She shoots it really straight. And that to me is more real life in a lot of ways. I really loved creating her as a character and seeing what she would be like in two different versions of the present. Like, the ways she would or would not change. Like, what parts of her were really so authentic that they wouldn't leave her even in a time slip.

Jennia: Yeah. And I think having these really well-developed secondary and tertiary characters is what lends itself so well to having that pragmatic versus whimsical or frightening magical realism. Because, again, they are who they are. People already know what they're like. They're drawn to them. They have an emotional connection to them so you can believe Ellie's emotional connection to them. And a lot of her focus shifts to these other characters when she wakes up in that alternate reality. And I think that helps, too, keeping it centered on what the plot is really about rather than, "How did this happen and why is she not freaking out?" And, "Should she not just be in a dead panic?" Because, again, we already know that these relationships are there and how strongly rooted they are, so we can understand why she should be able to push aside whatever is going on with her for the moment because, "I need to now go help these people," or, "I need to deal with whatever's going on with them." She still cares about them, even if it's not the exact version of who those people were that she last was left with.

Angela Brown: Yeah. It was fun. And, yeah, again, a little bit of what you were saying there, too, like, the core of the book. So, okay, when I came up with the idea to write the book—I had an idea for a really long time that I wanted to write something in a butterfly effect structure—

Jennia: Ahh yeah.

Angela Brown: —I'd always wanted to do that, but I didn't know how. So that was kind of, like, sitting over here for a long time in this part of my brain. And then over here, at the time I was getting ready to write it, I had just had my second child, and I was thinking a lot about, like, motherhood and my older child. And my daughter, you know, was kind of, like, growing out of the baby phase, and she was getting a little bit older. So I was just thinking a lot about, like, that tug of when your kids—and, again, my children are—my daughter will be nine tomorrow. My son is two and a half. So they're young. They're not the same age as the characters in the book. But just thinking about that idea of, like, the ways that your heart gets pulled when your kids grow up. Right?

Jennia: Mhm.

Angela Brown: I wanted to do something magical realism, something butterfly effect, like "It's a Wonderful Life type thing. But I really—what I wanted to do when I thought about the novel, was I want to write a book about motherhood and about your kids getting older. But I don't want to do it in a super sappy way, and I don't know how to get it on the page. So it took me a while to figure out. But once I realized I could marry the two, I was like, "Aha! That's how I could do it!" Because there are—and hopefully you felt it too—I think, a lot of really sentimental moments in the text, and a lot of passages that really reflect on motherhood. But I think the magical parts keep it from, again, getting a little too somber or anything like that.

Jennia: No, I agree. I mean, even the regrets you have, and these are things that I've even had with my own kids, right? That, "I'm going to go take them to see The Nutcracker every single December." I didn't, and now one is going to college and—

Angela Brown: Yep.

Jennia: —Yeah, and so Ellie has some of those same kind of regrets where I wanted us to be this kind of family or I wanted us to have done this. Or I think it's one of the earlier scenes where she sees a little girl dressed in a princess dress on the way to Orlando, and the memories that that brings up too. And that just felt very real. So since your own children aren't yet in that age bracket, did you talk to other parents about what that was like? Or maybe do interviews? Or was that just all from your own head?

Angela Brown: It was honestly all from my own head. I am a very isolated writer. I really don't ever do any kind of research. I don't have any beta readers. Like, nobody reads my work, usually. Otherwise I get really funny and I lose myself in a creative sense when I try too much to, like, research or anything like that. So, no—that's a long winded way of answering your question. I didn't talk to anyone else, but I think that I am, just by nature—and I always have been my whole life—I'm just, I'm a very observant person.

Jennia: Ah, yeah.

Angela Brown: And I don't mean that in any sort of, like (puts on posh voice), pretentious way. Like, "I'm just so observant, naturally," right? But it really—It's just very much who I am. I listen a lot to the way people speak and the things they say, and I don't mean to, but I tend to, like, keep it (laughs) up here in my head. So I'm sure there were moments that came to me because of conversations that I'd had with people, but I definitely did not intentionally, like, go out and talk to anyone. I once heard somebody say something to the effect of writing is just a form of your own anxieties on the page—

Jennia: Oooh.

Angela Brown: —and, like, whatever thing is making you really anxious and that you're worrying about—because we're anxiety, really, I guess. Right? I'm not talking like a clinical sense or anything. I'm just speaking in general terms—you know, [anxiety] is you projecting into a future that hasn't happened and worrying about what it will bring. Right? Like, very, very, very simplified terms. And so when I heard somebody say that, like, I went, "Oh my gosh! Like, that is me!" Right? So I think in some ways, because of the stage I was at in my life, my son was born, my daughter was getting older. So it was like one child needed me in certain ways, another child, I couldn't give myself in the same ways to her because I was busy with a new baby too, right? And that happens. I think a lot of this book was me reflecting on my own anxieties related to that and just thinking down the road.

Jennia: Yeah, I can see that. And just thinking even again about the airport, we do make a lot of those observations of people when we are in airports because we see a lot of those family interactions and different types of relationships that we normally wouldn't see just on a day-to-day basis. And you have so much time, even, for observing. And I do think that that comes across in that scene in particular because Ellie's doing a little bit of that herself.

Angela Brown: Yeah.

Jennia: Well, shifting a little bit to some of the real-life events, were there any stereotypes that you wanted to avoid about being a middle-aged woman, or Empty Nest Syndrome, or even feelings about divorce?

Angela Brown: I think sometimes that I tend to write—my new work in progress isn't—but my past work tends to focus on middle-aged, suburban women because, spoiler alert (both laugh), that's precisely what I am. I am 42-years-old living in the suburbs, and that is my life. So (Jennia laughs)—

Jennia: Yes.

Angela Brown: —You too? Okay, cool. And I'm fine with that. I love that. I love my life. So I think for people for whom maybe that isn't their life, sometimes some stuff comes across as, like, trope-y, right? Like, "That's cliche!" And I'm like, it's really kind of not. Like, that's really how it is. And I know a lot of women who feel these things, like this, you know. So I don't think there's anything in particular that I was trying to avoid that felt stereotypical to me. But I could see how for some people, some parts of Ellie may be like, "Oh, she's so in love with her children. Like, doesn't she have her own life or something?" I'm like, a lot of women? No, that is their life. They've chosen that. And that's okay too. And I want to highlight those people, too, in my stories. That's significant to me.

Jennia: Mhm.

Angela Brown: Divorce. I don't know about divorce. So I've never gone through a divorce. I've never gone through anything even, like, flirting with it. My husband and I have been married for a very long time and are very stable, fortunately, and we're both happy that way. So I—a lot of the stuff about divorce, again, I tried to just put myself in the shoes of the character and think, well, how would I react? And how would I feel? And what would make me angry?

Jennia: Ahh, yes.

Angela Brown: If we're having an argument—again, like, I can be a really—you know, really catty when it—Like, what would I be yelling about? Like, I'd probably be mad about something stupid like the laundry on the floor—you know, so a lot of that just me thinking, what would I be doing?

Jennia: You also share both the start and the end of Ellie and Jonah's marriage, or what could be the end, when we see them in that first opening segment. And I wanted to have you explain why you felt it was necessary to show both the start, and then the end, and kind of cutting out a bunch of that middle chunk where we don't really see what's led to it, we just see that final, "Okay, I'm done"?

Angela Brown: Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the point of it for me, to tell you the truth. Like, there are a few flashbacks that get woven in, in relationship to their daughter, Maggie, and how that was maybe, like, fueling the fire. But, yeah, so there's this one fight that they had where Ellie basically snaps and is like, "I've had enough. I want a divorce." Like, she's the one who says it. In its entirety, it's brought up—if I'm remembering—one time, but then she thinks back on it several times. So we sort of get, like, pieces of it and certain lines of dialogue from it sprinkled in several times. But it's really—to your point, it's just the one big moment. I mean, the novel is about her questioning her choices throughout her life—

Jennia: Mhm.

Angela Brown: —particularly, her choice to get divorced. So I think for her, that scene becomes like an echo in some ways that she keeps going back to and replaying in her head. So there were moments that led up to it, but I think it's that particular moment when it finally broke. Because I think—and, you know, people have all different kinds of marriages, of course—all different kinds of relationships of every kind. But I think there are—people fight, right?

Jennia: Right.

Angela Brown: —Like, people—you live with a person and they get toothpaste all over the sink every day, and you just fight about it. (Jennia laughs) Like, this is what—But to get to a point where it goes beyond just fighting and screaming about the dishwasher to saying you want your marriage to end, I have to imagine is a pretty big jump. So I think that particular moment, just having it serve, again, like a ripple, or like an echo, that she keeps going back on, it gets to where a lot of her uncertainties are. Because up until that moment, they were just fighting. But then she's the one who kind of nudged them forward into divorce territory. So, I think she carries a lot of guilt about it. Maybe regret as the novel goes on too. But I think a lot of people, right, like, relationship or not—you know, whatever life event you might be thinking about—like, there are moments that you go back to all the time that you think like, if that one day had played out differently, this all would have been different. And I think to Ellie, that that's the moment. Right? It was just there. So, yeah.

Jennia: Yeah. I think that's also a closer approximation to what we do in real life. So there might be that one day or that one incident or whatever it is that we might regret or, going back to the theme of the book, wish we'd made a different choice. But we do tend to think of whatever that tidbit is at the time that is most striking to us. And so then as we go through and we think about that regret again, something else might come up or—

Angela Brown: Exactly.

Jennia: —Yeah. And it's only in that assembly of pieces that we get the whole story. But, again, throughout our life or even a given day or a week, yeah, we're not going to sit down and have this half-hour flashback.

Angela Brown: Yeah.

Jennia: Well, before we end, I'd love for you to share what you most hope readers take away after they've read Some Other Time.

Angela Brown: I hope Some Other Time is a story that makes readers think about their choices in life. I am a very, very big believer, not just in the story, but in my day to day, that the choices we make genuinely matter. The big ones, the small ones. We have an impact on the people around us and the world around us. And I hope that comes through. And more than that, Ellie, to me, is a woman who is the type of woman who in real life, I think, can be overlooked. As I said, she is "just"—and you can't see me, I'm doing air quotes, because (Jennia laughs). She is the type of woman who in real life would be considered as "just" a mom. She's "just" a stay at home mom. And that's not what she is. And it's really important to me that readers take away from this that whatever choices you've made and whatever things you've decided to dedicate your life to genuinely matter. And we don't always have to live a really big, glossy, fancy life that, many times, it's the really quiet lives that can make a really big difference. So I hope readers see that when they get to the pages of the book.

Jennia: Ah, well, thank you again so much and thank you for this wonderful conversation!

Angela Brown: Absolutely! Anytime. I'm so glad you had me. Thanks for the opportunity!

Jennia: And thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information. And please join me next week when author Jeff Heggie will tell us how he writes about adversity and why he thinks it's an important topic to cover. Thanks again!