Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel (44 page)

Q&A with Mary McNear

How did you start writing?

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been making up stories, though I haven’t always put them down on paper. As a child, I used to invent characters and intricate plots and then bully other children—usually my younger sister, younger cousins, or younger neighbors—into listening to them. As I got older, though, I decided that I wasn’t brave enough to be a writer—something I believed it took a special kind of courage to be. So instead, after I graduated from college I went to graduate school and tried not to think about writing anymore. I wasn’t entirely successful, though. For one thing, I kept making up stories—though I didn’t make anyone listen to them anymore—and I was assaulted with frequent and painful reminders of what it was I really wanted to be doing. Bookstores, libraries, airport newsstands—the world was filled with evidence of other people writing the kind of fiction I wanted to write, namely women’s fiction. Not surprisingly, I tried to avoid reading it myself. (I read a lot of mysteries, which I love, but which I’ve never actually wanted to write myself!)

But when I was in my early thirties and completing a PhD program, our son—who was three at the time—was diagnosed with autism. To say that this news was life-changing doesn’t quite begin to cover it. But as I reordered my expectations and priorities, one of them refused to budge. I wanted to write novels. And I figured if our son was brave enough every day to confront a world that often felt incomprehensible and overwhelming, then I sure as hell could be brave enough to put pen to paper. So when I dropped out of graduate school and gave myself over to raising a child with special needs, I did something else, too. I made myself write for an hour a day. This was much harder than it sounds, especially since our daughter was born six months after our son’s diagnosis. But I wrote for that hour even if it came, as it often did, at six o’clock in the morning or at twelve o’clock at night. I’m pretty sure it was that hour every day that kept me sane during those years.

Our son, by the way, graduated from high school this year. He’s a bright, gentle, sweet young man. And the descendant of my first novel, which I started fifteen years ago in the waiting room of the speech therapist’s office, is now being published!

Is
Up at Butternut Lake
your first novel?

It’s my first novel to be published, but it’s not the first novel I’ve written. There were
many
novels before this one, but if I have a strength as a writer I hope that it’s honesty, and I knew the first several novels were not publishable. I didn’t get discouraged because I also knew they were getting better. Writing, of course, is a famously nonlinear undertaking, and yet what surprised me the most about the books I wrote was that every single one of them was better than the one before it. Finally I knew I was getting close—really close. And Kimberly Whalen, who would become my agent, agreed. In fact, she said if I submitted my next novel to her, she’d read it and perhaps we could discuss representation. So I wrote it, she loved it, and the rest . . . well, the rest is this novel,
Up at Butternut Lake.

How long did it take to write?

Up at Butternut Lake
took a year to write and another year to edit. Originally it was twenty-five thousand words longer than it is now, but my agent, Kimberly Whalen, thought it needed to be shorter—and she was right. So I set about the humbling process of cutting supporting characters and subplots that, of course, I was very attached to. The upside, though, was that the editing process made me consider what was absolutely essential to the story I wanted to tell. It was hard, but it made the book much stronger.

What do you feel is the central theme of the novel?

Well, in one way or another, all of the other characters in the novel come face-to-face with their pasts, whether it’s to take responsibility for mistakes they’ve made, grieve for losses they’ve endured, or overcome old fears that are now holding them back. Jax, for instance, has to meet head-on a series of bad decisions she made before her marriage to Jeremy—decisions threatening to tear apart the family she loves. Walker must acknowledge his unresolved feelings of guilt and pain over his marriage to Caitlin and the baby they lost. And Caroline must conquer her fear of taking risks and having a relationship, a fear developed over years of being a single working mother. Even Frankie must carve out a life for himself, despite the years he lost to jail. The death of a loved one, deception, a failed marriage, the darker parts of our past—all of these things can threaten the present and overshadow the future unless we confront them head-on. I wanted to write about how this process unfolds for the different characters in the novel.

In the novel you write about two women, Allie and Caroline, who are single mothers, each with one child. You also explore the friendships between Allie, Jax, and Caroline. Why did you choose to write about these three women?

I was interested in writing about how the friendships between these three women would evolve naturally in a small community. Allie, the one who has only recently returned to Butternut, is the one who brings them together as a group of friends. But they all have a common past in this town, and they all have children. These women understand that parenting—single parenting in particular—can be hard and lonely. Allie has to make big decisions without a partner to consult. Caroline’s daughter has recently left for college, so Caroline has to come to terms with this life change without a partner to ameliorate her sense of loss. And while Jax has a husband, the secrets she has kept mean that in many ways she’s had to navigate the experience of parenting alone. I wanted to write about the challenges of motherhood, but also about how friendships with other women can bring humor and insight to these challenges. Finally, I wanted to consider the role of friendship in our lives more generally. It isn’t just single mothers who rely on friendships to get them through the day—it’s all of us. You need friends who support you and make you laugh, but as Allie, Caroline, and Jax discover, you also want friends who can nudge you gently when you make mistakes or get off track.

In your bio you mention you write your books in a doughnut shop. Why is this a good setting for you?

One of the reasons I write in a doughnut shop is because writing can be lonely, and this way I’m always surrounded by people. But I also write there because I’m a world-class eavesdropper. I’ve actually used some of the dialogue I’ve heard there in my novels!

What made you want to write books with romance in them?

I thought about that recently when our daughter, who’s in high school, invited a group of her girlfriends over to our house to get ready for a dance. None of them has a boyfriend, and all of them, it turned out, spent most of that night dancing with one another. But no matter. This was clearly beside the point. Because the point, as they were discovering that night while they gave one another manicures and wobbled around in unfamiliar high heels, was the sense they shared that
something might happen
at the dance. What it was they didn’t know, but the possibility of it hung in the air that night more palpably than the Nicki Minaj perfume my daughter insisted on spritzing over everyone.

It doesn’t matter what age we are. We remember that emotion. And even better, we still feel it! Not when we’re getting ready for a dance, maybe. But at other moments that sense that something might happen finds and surprises us. I tried to capture that feeling—that jittery, scary, but mostly delicious feeling—when I wrote about Allie’s falling in love with Walker. Because the next best thing to feeling something yourself is reading about someone else feeling it.

Where do you get story ideas?

As I said above, I got the idea for Allie and Wyatt’s story line watching the news. But I look for ideas every summer when I go back to the Midwest. Except for my summers there, I’ve lived in the city all my life, so I have an outsider’s fascination with small-town life. When we go into the town five miles from our cabin, I like hanging out at the little coffee shop or in the tiny public library, which is housed in a converted log cabin. I think about all the things the people who live there know about one another, but I also think about all the things they don’t know about one another. The things they
don’t
know about one another are intriguing, and are often the subjects of my novels!

Discussion Questions

  1. Allie is torn between grieving for her deceased husband, Gregg, and falling in love with Walker. Is there an acceptable amount of time to grieve for a loved one? Must Allie stop grieving in order to move forward in her life?

  2. Allie abruptly ends the relationship with Walker after Caitlin shows up at his house. She tells Walker she needs to protect Wyatt from the uncertainties of their relationship. Does she do the right thing? Is she simply protecting Wyatt? Or is there more to it than that? Is her reaction unreasonable?

  3. After living in the cabin on Butternut Lake for only a couple of months, Wyatt tells Allie it feels like “home.” What makes a place “home”? Does time have anything to do with it?

  4. Why does Allie owe it to Gregg to remember him? How does Allie balance remembering Gregg and enjoying her new life with Walker?

  5. Jax deceives Jeremy twice. First she fails to tell him that Joy is Bobby’s daughter. Later she doesn’t tell him that she’s withdrawn ten thousand dollars to pay off Bobby. Is a lie of omission—especially a big one—just as reprehensible as an outright lie?

  6. Bobby’s appearance in town is an opportunity for Jax to come clean and tell Jeremy the truth. But she doesn’t. Does Jax believe that Jeremy will no longer love her if he knows the truth? How does Jax underestimate Jeremy’s love for her? And how might her own unhappy childhood have compelled her to deceive him?

  7. Jeremy knows from the beginning that Joy is not his daughter. Should he have told Jax when Joy was born that he knew the truth but loved them both anyway? By not doing so, was he complicit in Jax’s deception?

  8. What does Caitlin’s nightgown symbolize for Walker? Is his inability to send the nightgown back to Caitlin or just throw it out a sign that there is unfinished business between them?

  9. When Caitlin tells Walker that she’s pregnant, he admits he’s not really father material. He then remembers his troubled relationship with his own father. To what extent does your relationship with your own parents influence your capacity for parenting?

10. It’s clear that Walker doesn’t love Caitlin when she arrives at the boatyard to tell him she’s pregnant. In fact, he acknowledges to himself that they have very little in common. So does he do the right thing when he asks her to marry him? Is he just postponing the inevitable? And to what extent is Walker responsible for the marriage not working?

11. When Caitlin miscarries, both she and Walker grieve over the loss of their child. How does each express this loss? And how is this loss different than the death of Allie’s husband?

12. Caroline helps to bring Jax and Jeremy back together, she encourages Allie to give Walker a chance, and she hires Frankie when no one else would. What role does she play in the novel?

13. Daisy is aware that her mother is lonely and prods her to join a book club or go on a date. But, as Caroline realizes, she has lost the ability to take risks. Why would being a single working parent make Caroline risk averse?

14. Despite the fact that Frankie killed a man in self-defense, he takes on the role of protector several times. Who are the people he protects in the novel?

COPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

UP AT BUTTERNUT LAKE.
 Copyright © 2014 By Mary McNear. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.