Taking a cue from Sylvia Plath, who said writing was “a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience,” I’ve supplemented certain parts of the novel with fictionalized recreations of my own vaguely remembered romantic youth, clicking away at the keyboard late at night in cathartic scotch fueled stream of consciousness fugues set to shoegaze music. Many famous novelists have woven their own experiences into the fabric of a fictional plot, based characters on real people. Would Melville have penned Moby Dick if he had never gone on a whaling voyage? Would Hemingway have written For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms if he had never seen war? It’s doubtless there would be a Great Gatsby without Scott having fallen madly, irrationally in love with Ginevra King. Hell, Kerouac’s in the FICTION section and all he did was change the names. Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish: Aristotle.
My protagonist is fifty-year-old writer and jaded romantic Addison Halifax. Although “Addie” is not a direct reflection of the person who authored him, he may be a reflection of a reflection, like when you stand between two opposing mirrors and see your image echoed to infinity. At once a coming-of-age story and a coming-of-middle-age story, The Pretty Follies illustrates the cruel dichotomy between love’s inescapable gravity and the incurable affliction of time. It reads like a collection of forlorn love letters discovered in a chest of drawers inside a creepy old abandoned house, a house where it is said something sad and tragic once occurred. The novel chronicles the long-term psychological effects of repressed formative trauma. It also delves into the spooky subatomic strangeness of quantum mechanics. On more than one occasion I thought I caught a glimpse of the unsettling specter of Schrödinger’s cat prowling in the candlelit shadows of my living room.