Content advisory: This story contains mentions of sexual assault. If you or someone you know needs help, RAINN provides a 24/7 sexual assault hotline: 800-656-HOPE (4673) or online chat.
What does it take to forgive and forget, and what if neither is deserved or warranted?
The answer is not simple, especially for the characters in “Whidbey” by T Kira Madden (out March 10 from Mariner Books). The novel follows the interconnected stories of three women who are navigating the aftermath of the murder of Calvin Boyer. Boyer abused two of the women, Birdie and Linzie, and is the son of the other, Mary-Beth.
Birdie and Linzie respond to Boyer’s death in different ways, whether it’s by running as far away as possible or writing a memoir. Meanwhile, Mary-Beth is trying to make sense of the death of her son. All of them are navigating the carceral and criminal justice systems, and just how dysfunctional they can be.
Madden sat down with The Seattle Times to talk about why fiction was the right genre for this story, her process for developing characters and drawing inspiration from real places, and what healing can look like over time.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In your reader’s note at the beginning of the book, you share that none of the characters represent your own experience, and that you have the genre of memoir for that. Were there any parts of your life that you did draw inspiration from for this book?
In my memoir “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls,” there was a section that explored my (childhood) sexual assault when two men locked me in a car outside of a shopping mall. One of my abusers from that experience came back into my life and initiated a stalking campaign and many threats, to the point where it went from a state court case all the way to a federal trial, which is to say that experience continued to evolve and grow. A book can only contain so much, and my memoir was largely about other things, and I didn’t want that narrative to take over.
I’ve sat on both sides of the table. I’ve been a survivor of the federal justice system, and I’ve been an advocate for prison reform, criminal justice reform and abolition. In this book, I wanted to take a more multifaceted perspective to critique these systems at play by having the mother of a convicted offender and showing how she’s been disenfranchised by the system, as well as victims and survivors with a lack of recourse. I also wanted to offer a critique of the legislation in Florida for those in the sex offender registry. Fiction is the way to explore these feelings, questions and unanswerables through a polyphonic storytelling technique with many characters and many parts of that story.
What comes first for you, developing the plot or characters?
Characters always come first for me, and with this book, I wanted to step so far outside of my own experience. Some readers may read this and think, “It’s so interesting to see your experience and politics on the page.” I am quick to say that my experience and my politics are not on the page at all. It’s actually being turned and turned into this multifaceted look at the (criminal justice) system.
It’s important for me with fiction to step deeply outside of my experience to understand what drives these characters, what motivates them and what they fear. I want to know every detail of their lives, from which teeth in their mouth are rotting, in the case of Mary-Beth, to their most shameful or embarrassing moments. By pushing complex, dynamic characters together, a plot naturally emerges from those tensions by containing them in the same space.
In seeing a few of Calvin’s survivors as adults, readers can see what trauma might look like after many years. For one character, obsession. For another character, repression. All these characters have different modes of self-harm, compartmentalization or dissociation. Through my deep research, I wanted to show how trauma looks and manifests in many people, myself included, on the page.
Why was it important to you to capture the perspective of Mary-Beth, who’s the parent of an abuser?
My memoir “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls” explored what it means to love parents who have made harmful choices, and love them despite that. In that way, “Whidbey” is parallel to what it means to love a child who has inflicted harm on other people.
With the character of Mary-Beth, I was intrigued by parents and loved ones who continue showing up for the people they love despite the harm that they’ve caused or the violence that they’ve inflicted on others. I’ve seen it firsthand. I wanted to explore the power of denial on the page for all these characters and the way that they lie to themselves and to others to survive, which is hand in hand with the power of unconditional love.
What was your process for rendering the settings in the book, including Seattle and Whidbey Island?
From the banana slugs on Whidbey to the gators in Florida. I hope to pay tribute to the beauty of the natural world in the places I write about. I’ve taken at least a dozen trips to Whidbey Island in the last decade, which I spent talking to locals and people who had moved there more recently and getting to know the trees, land and shoreline.
My brothers have lived in Seattle for most of my life, so I’ve spent a lot of time in Seattle and in Seattle’s bookstores. That said, I never wanted the book and its narration to take up a voice or a space of someone local or native to the Seattle area. I wanted to render Whidbey and Seattle from a tourist perspective for Birdie, who had never been there before.
As you wrote this book, what did it teach you about what healing and forgiveness can look like?
Nothing is linear about grief and the way trauma lives in our bodies, and we live side by side with our suffering. There’s no imaginary threshold where we step across one day and heal. Whether you’re grieving a loved one or an experience, it can come rushing in on some days, and other days you feel OK. I wanted to dismantle that binary in both the carceral system and criminal justice system, and for the families of abusers. I also wanted to explore how trauma lives in the body and how violence can continue to perpetuate through an act of violence. Those are things that I’ve experienced in my life.
What was the most rewarding part of writing this book?
When you make something art, you’re taking experience, memory, and trauma and transforming them into something that looks really different. The transformational principles of art change the way we live in our bodies. It made it more possible for me to live in my own.
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