This time’s topic is a question from Fee. Which of your characters, if any, do you resonate with most?
I suppose the easiest way to fudge this is to say well there’s something of myself in all my characters and be all highbrow about it. However, there are definitely characters I resonate with more than others. It tends to be the people who are lost that I find I chime with most, or the people who are unhappy with themselves. What does that say about me? I don’t know*. None of my characters are me, but a few of them have quite a few elements of me in them…so, I’m going to pick two. Laurie from Taking Stock and Walter from The Quid Pro Quo.
Laurie from Taking Stock
Laurie is in his mid-thirties and has had a stroke, which means he can’t work his own farm any more. Yeah, okay, I wrote this just after my Mama had her stroke, but actually Laurie’s emotions and feelings of powerlessness are right out of the Ally Lester Playbook. My own chronic disability is a seizure disorder paired with fibromyalgia and I loathe not being able to drive, or even go shopping alone in case I keel over. I hate not being able to have animals any more—I use to run the egg stall at the local farmers market and teach poultry-keeping courses and generally heave bags of animal feed and animals and animal housing around and I am now dependent on Mr AL and Talking Child to even take care of the handful of hens we keep ourselves. I put a lot of that frustration into Laurie—his feeling of losing his livelihood and his anger at the universe and I think it comes through. Bits of him were very therapeutic to write and bits of him were very upsetting.
Walter from The Quid Pro Quo
The same with Walter. Walter’s happy enough. He’s got his friends and his work and his travelogues. But he’s hiding his big secret from the world and no-one but his very closest friends know it. So he keeps that bit of distance from everyone else to protect himself. I am not out as non-binary or pan to the little village I live in. Some people know—I don’t make a secret of it exactly, but it’s not something that comes up in the village jubilee committee meetings. I present as a short, round, grumpy, middle-aged, straight married lady. And so I feel quite a bit of kinship with Walter. He’s short, soft around the middle and a bit grumpy…and he hides his gender and sexuality. It’s not the same. But there’s elements of me in there and that resonates.
The fact I was able to give both characters happy endings means a lot to me. A lot of what I write is about people finding a home in other people—found family as well as a romantic happy ending—and I guess that’s what I desire for myself. I do have a large and supportive family of choice, so I draw from that in the real world and hope my characters can have that too. But these characters also carry the sense of dislocation I still sometimes feel when the world gets out of whack and that also makes them close to my heart.
Thank you, Fee, for asking the question and making me think about it!
*Dear Reader, ALLY DOES KNOW