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Posted by Athena Scalzi

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The future is what we make of it, but what if our past isn’t as solid as we thought? Author Lorna Graham explores the idea that maybe the past isn’t always how we remember it, and how to reconcile with our past selves. Follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Where You Once Belonged, to see what your past has in store for you.

LORNA GRAHAM:

Where do our foundational ideas come from?

And what if they’re wrong?

It all started with a scene from a movie, a scene that made the top of my head tingle in the darkened theater. 

The movie, 1998’s Living Out Loud, stars Holly Hunter as Judith Moore, a Manhattan woman whose husband has just left her for a younger model. Judith has few friends and zero confidence. She is so lonely that she regularly daydreams about the strangers around her. In a restaurant, a woman sits down at a nearby table with a friend. The women notice Judith and beckon her. Judith smiles but when she blinks we see the world as it really is: the two women, happily chatting, paying her no mind. Judith returns to her book, dejected.

But, being played by Holly Hunter, we know there’s spunk in Judith somewhere. 

Indeed, there are other daydreams, ones that hint that she was once quite the bad-ass. In these dreams, we see Judith as a teenager with a tattoo on her hip, pulling a hot guy into a make-out session in an alley with gusto.

Back to the present, and Judith becomes friendly with Liz Bailey, a singer played by Queen Latifah. One night, Liz gives Judith a pill, presumably ecstasy, and takes her to an underground club in the Meatpacking District. As Judith wanders the dance floor, the lights change, and she’s plunged into another daydream, one in which the women around her begin to dance in unison, as if in a Broadway musical. Judith feeds off of their energy, moving to the forefront and dancing in a way that hints at her long-buried daring and sexuality. 

She feels a tap on her shoulder. Slowly she turns and sees her teenaged self, tattoo and all. Judith gazes at her young doppelganger, her eyes full of emotion. The two embrace and begin a tender slow dance. The camera pulls back and they slowly disappear into the sea of dancers. The next morning, Judith starts taking charge of her life again.

When the lights came up, I knew I’d found the idea for my next novel.

Commonly, when we imagine an adult encountering his or her younger self, it’s assumed the point of the encounter is that the elder will counsel the younger. The fantasy is that we, with all our worldly experience, can advise the youthful ones on how to deal with their difficulties and insecurities; we can hug them and provide assurance that everything will be alright. What struck me about the scene from Living Out Loud was that this idea had been turned on its head. Here it is the teenager who has the lesson to impart to her grownup self. In fact, her teenaged self is the only one who could truly remind Judith that she used to be adventurous and bold. Thanks to her, Judith reconnects with something fundamental in herself: the exact thing she’ll need to move forward.

As I began to play with this idea as the basis for a book, a character came to me: a woman who had traveled so far from the idealistic teenager she had been—a woman who had, in fact, become such a cynic and a sell-out—that only a face-to-face encounter with her young self could possibly reveal to her the many errors of her ways and, just maybe, set her back on the right path.

I knew my protagonist would be a newswoman. As a network news writer, broadcast journalism is a world that I know. I also happen to think there isn’t quite enough workplace fiction out there, considering work is where we spend about a third of our lives.

But more than that, I thought the world of journalism was the perfect backdrop for a battle royale between idealism and cynicism. My character, Everleigh Page, is a 42-year old executive producer of an award-winning magazine show. While she loves her work, she’s covered the world long enough to have witnessed terrible deeds done by corporations to consumers, husbands to wives, governments to their people, and religious leaders to their flocks. Her personal motto might as well be, “Expect the worst. Always.”

In truth, it’s not only decades in the news business that have turned her dark. A seed was planted long before. Her mother died when she was a child and, as soon as she graduated from high school, her father moved to Europe and started a new family. Everleigh’s understandable takeaway: People will desert you. They cannot be trusted. These are words that echo so regularly in her mind, it is almost as if she fetishizes her own cynicism. 

There is, however, a brief, shining moment when Everleigh is unplagued by these thoughts. In college, she is lucky enough to fall in with an exceptionally kind group of friends. She has a best friend, Dilly, who urges her to work at the school paper, where she flourishes. And she’s invited to join an off-campus house, where she gains eleven “sisters” who quickly become the family she no longer has. With their wind at her back, she writes hard-charging articles for the paper, challenging the powerful and exposing dark doings at their upstate bucolic campus. She basks in her friends’ support, and for the first time since her mother’s death, feels as if she is precisely where she belongs.

But at the first sign of trouble within the group, Everleigh is flooded with doubts and misgivings. She turns against her friends, sure that they’ve betrayed her. She leaves school abruptly, and enters the wider world a guarded, solitary soul determined to become so successful, she’ll never need to rely on anyone again.

Indeed, she rises high within her network, largely because she produces good journalism, but also in part by doing the not-so-honorable bidding of her boss, Gareth: killing an important story that an advertiser won’t like and laying off a pair of talented staffers. Everleigh’s reward comes when Gareth announces he’s tapping her to become President of the News Division, her dream come true. 

But when her 20th college reunion takes a magical twist, everything starts to look very different. A portal into the past reveals that her memories of her college days are faulty. The stories she’s told herself—over and over again until they’ve formed a kind of mental crust—about her friends from back then, are inaccurate. The betrayal she’s always believed she endured at their hands was but a figment based on a misunderstanding. A realization dawns: She’s been mistaken about so much, what else might she be wrong about?

I had always planned to explore how time and emotion affect memory in my novel. But as I wrote, I realized I’d stumbled onto something else: the notion that sometimes our beliefs about our selves, our lives, and the world, are rooted in something less than solid ground.

We might all want to look in the mirror on this one. Start small. How many of us bear grudges, whether against family, friends, or colleagues, whose beginnings are murky, lost to the passage of time? So many of us have a side of the family we don’t speak to, sometimes going back generations. When we ask our parents where it all started, what the trouble was all about, we receive defensiveness, or a garbled answer. They don’t remember. Or what about fallings-out with friends? Even if you think you memorized the conversation that ended it all, are you sure you recall it accurately? It’s easy to remember the transgressions against us; harder to remember those we have ourselves committed. Anyone who’s ever had a relationship-ending spat that wasn’t yesterday might want to re-examine what generated it, with some humility around our ability to remember accurately.

But this isn’t just about relationships. It’s also about cognition, even bedrock beliefs that guide us and our principles. Why? Because emotions can significantly affect how we form and hold beliefs, influencing our judgments and decisions. They can underpin beliefs, creating certainty that overrides doubt. Even moods can influence beliefs, as they can act as “retrieval cues” that make it easier to access memories and information that align with our feelings, which can, in turn, reinforce certain beliefs. 

An online search reveals hundreds of psychology resources that offer help in uncovering one’s core beliefs and peeling them back to their origins. Most offer this guidance as a way to understand and potentially escape negative patterns in thoughts and behaviors. Advice ranges from looking for recurring themes in our thinking to reflecting on our childhood experiences and significant events to identify potential origins of our bedrock beliefs. Once that is done, we are able to challenge their validity and attempt to replace them with more true, more helpful ones.

This suggests that, unsurprisingly, a good many of us are battling troublesome ideas within ourselves whose power is strong precisely because their origins are murky. Most of us won’t get to travel back in time to determine where any misconceptions began in order to begin the process of unwinding them. But I hope the story of one fictional woman who does, albeit with the help of magic, inspires others to try.

Where You Once Belonged: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author Socials: Website|Facebook|Twitter| 

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Posted by John Scalzi

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Animation nerds, today’s a big day for you: Volume 4 of Love, Death + Robots, Netflix’s acclaimed animated anthology series, is out and available for streaming, with ten new episodes, including two, “The Other Large Thing” and “Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners,” that I wrote both the stories and scripts for. Both are also directed by Patrick Osborne, who won an Oscar for animation, so that’s pretty cool, too. Although Love Death + Robots is animation, I will remind folks that the animation is aimed at an adult audience, so don’t be surprised to see, you know, blood and sex and claymation vibrators (I am responsible for that last one).

The two episodes in this collection mean that I have seven episodes of work stretched out across four seasons of the series. I’ve talked before about how working on the series has been an enjoyable process, and this season was no exception to that; for me, at least, working on this season has been another example of “best case scenario” television collaboration. The folks at Blur (the animation studio making LD+R for Netflix) continue to be the best at what they do, and also — this is no great guarantee in film and TV — respectful and appreciative of the writers whose work they engage with.

Some notes on this season’s episodes from me:

“The Other Large Thing” is based on a story of mine I wrote back in 2011, back when Twitter was still fun and I was about to reach 20,000 followers over there. To celebrate 20K, I decided to write a short story where each sentence was 140 characters or less, that being the max length of a tweet at the time. I did not post the story one tweet at a time (I did it as a long-form post using Tweet.ly), but I could have, and that was the most important thing. Then, of course, I posted it here, because this is where I post most of my very short stories.

There was a fair amount of adaptation required for the script version of the story, not in changing the overall arc of the story, but in getting into it faster; in the original I did a certain amount of scene setting that wasn’t required by animation (because you can see things on screen), and let the cat’s basic nature arrive to the reader more slowly than it does in the animated short, in which who the cat is and what its plans are are right up front. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; it’s just the nature of both media and how you structure story for both of them.

I am delighted that Chris Parnell, who you may know voiced the cats in both of the “Three Robot” episodes of LD+R, is on cat duty here. He does an excellent ego monster of a feline and I believe there is a real future for him in these roles, if he chooses to pursue them. I am equally delighted that we managed to get John Oliver as the robot. He brings a delicious polite British mania to his domestic android.

“Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners” is based on my short story “Your Smart Appliances Talk About You Behind Your Back” which I wrote to read while I was on book tour, and also for my Miniatures short story collection. The premise was simple: your smart appliances know everything about you, and when prompted, they spill the beans to an interviewer, because frankly, you have problems. This short story was very episodic, which lent itself well to animation.

Lovers of animation will note a certain similarity between this episode and the classic Aardman animated short “Creature Comforts,” and those similarities are intentional, and a fond tribute. Mind you, that short had jaguars and polar bears, and our short has a toilet and a toothbrush. There’s enough variation, I assure you. Also, this short features what I expect is the largest number of celebrity voices per capita of any of this season’s episodes, which is nice.

Oh, and watch the credits of “Smart Appliances” for a particularly amusing easter egg.

With both “Other Large Thing” and “Smart Appliances” I provided the words, but it’s Patrick Osborne as director who built the rest of the structure around them, along with his production teams, and the actors. It’s all very much a collaboration. My words were the starting point, but Patrick and his people brought everything to the finish line.

Likewise, my episodes are only two of ten; there are eight others in Volume 4 with their own fantastic writers, directors, actors and production teams. Check them all out; they’ll be worth your time.

— JS

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