Much Ado about.... Prequels?

I remember thinking it was really really weird when Star Wars introduced sequels that pre-dated the movie we'd known and loved. Surely we could have remained satisfied meeting Luke and Chewie the way we meet our partners - whole, and part-way through life, toting a lot of history we don’t want to talk about. Personal histories shed light the way a car behind you on the road does - through a dirty back window. Even if you turn around, you can’t see who’s driving back there, on account of the annoying glare. No sense trying. Except, the surprise was that the prequel made Star Wars so much better. Deeper. We watched and said, "Oh, so that's why... right!"

We understood, finally, that we hadn’t known those characters before. Not really. After the prequels, we became insiders, because we understood that we knew those characters better than they knew themselves. We had been given a backstage pass into the writer’s mind, and everything suddenly made sense.

In school, writers are reminded that they need to know a whole lot more about their characters than they put on paper. (There's a fun questionnaire out there that asks what your character's favorite ice cream flavor is, and how she would respond to finding out that her bicycle had a flat tire). No matter that your character begins the story as an old lady learning to paddle. The writer needs to know her to the core, and that means, from childhood, because no one begins their own story half-way through life. *

And yet. Here we are in Toronto, in mid-life, starting our story from the very beginning - She as Writer, He as Photographer, they, as a family of City Dwellers. We meet people here who know us by these titles. They think (how far-fetched - how comical!) that these roles must come naturally to us. They seem unable to tell that our costumes still have tags jutting out the back, and the fabric itches our arms. Some, rather remarkably, had met my books before they met me. Surely under such circumstances it can come as no surprise that I am considered a writer....

Are they meant to be able to tell that I am actually... or at least, I was... before I was...and would I want them to?

I can't help but think of my friend M, who will soon be called "Momma" by a child who will, by the time she can speak, recognize M as mama. Just Mama. Full-on Mama. Because M will have served that role, imperfectly, gloriously, lovingly, for that baby's entire sweet life. M will play the role. She will have to. She will want to. It will be thrust upon her. Does it matter that M has never imagined herself a mother? That she feels hopelessly incompetent and terrified? Not in the least. First, because she is wrong about herself. Second, because she will have changed so many diapers and stayed up so many nights and cried so many tears of everything from joy to outright hopeless fatigue that she will know to answer to that name.

Already, M is wearing a fat suit. People touch her stomach. They think they know all they need to know about her. They cloy. They babble. They pry. They drive her batty. But M is wearing a costume she wouldn’t take off for the world.

Thing is, so am I. I am a writer. I’ve worked my whole life to feel entitled to write those words. But here, in this town, I am a writer without context. Nah. I’m a human without context. That’s it.

When we moved from Maine I lamented that my children were leaving the people who had seen them come home from the hospital, and who had fed us when they had to go back in. I grieved not only the loss of connection, but also the loss of context: in our small town, their teen foibles - from short-sheeting pranks to modest fires, would be seen as aberrations - tiny blips on a softly lit screen.

There is no such elasticity for a new-comer of a certain age. Let’s say, for example, a mouthy, inappropriate writer who stumbles through a bad night - or maybe week - of saying the wrong thing to people she really, actually, had hoped would become her friends...

Wait. Is this what this whole thing is about? One night of blurt? Three days of icky stumbles? One social septimana horribilis and we head right to Star Wars and pregnant friends and ripping kids away from their childhood home?

Um. Pretty much. We are living a life with a narrow depth of field at the moment. We are making friends with people who must - what choice do they have? - take us at face value. This face? Now? This hair? And Did I say that? I just wish I had more than one chance, that’s all.

I wish they could see the prequel and say, “Oh...now I understand. She’s done this before.” Even if they follow up with, “It wasn’t funny then, either.”



*(Okay, well, except for Brad Pitt in that new movie he lives backward, but that's really a red herring).