Curio of Wondrous Delights

I overthink emotions, as one might predict, and I have an idiosyncratic theory about what they’re for. Several years ago, two things happened in close succession that formed the core of my understanding.

The first was that I had a terrible fight with one of my sisters, which ended with her calling me a bitch. This was not a normal occurrence, by any means—we usually get along quite well—but that’s what made it so memorable. I was hurt. The word bitch was burned indelibly into my brain. We made up later, but she didn’t apologize for calling me that.

I finally confronted her about it. While she apologized for hurting me, she also insisted that she would never have used the word bitch—she considers it misogynistic, and it’s just not part of her vocabulary. Maybe she called me something else?

I was shocked and appalled. Here was this vivid, vibrant, flame-etched memory, and she had the gall to tell me I was mistaken? I looked to other witnesses for confirmation. My husband backed me up, but my other sister couldn’t remember the specific word. She only remembered feeling scared that we were so angry. My father couldn’t remember either; he only remembered feeling embarrassed that we were fighting in front of our new stepmother-to-be.

A smidgen of doubt began to creep in. If she could remember incorrectly (giving her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t simply lying), then it was within the realm of possibility that I could also be wrong. In the absence of a recording, all I could really be certain of was that whatever she’d said had hurt me. It had felt just like bitch.

Around the same time, my mother told me an anecdote about my grandmother, who was suffering from vascular dementia. Apparently grandma couldn’t remember the name of her own husband, the father of her children, the man she was married to for more than fifty years before he died. "But she sure remembers how she felt about him,” said mom, “and boy is she bitter and resentful of old what’s-his-name."

Grandma remembered how she felt. Everything else may fall away--epithets, spouses’ names—but we remember how we felt.

Emotions serve a lot of purposes, of course, but this connection to memory particularly intrigues me. Feelings are like push-pins in the maps of or our lives, marking specific events. The inked roads, cities, and inscriptions may fade over time, but the bright hard nubs of emotion remain as bumps that we can run our fingers over. They help us trace the paths we’ve taken and remember where we’ve been, however imperfectly.

.........

It occurred to me then that I could make maps of other experiences. I could talk about deeply personal things, the hardest things I had ever been through in my life, without actually talking about myself at all. If the emotions underpinning the story were real, if the map was honest and complete, it followed that the story would feel true. This would be emotional autobiography: all the feels, none of the reals.

.........

I had already done this on a small scale (no pun intended) in Seraphina. Seraphina’s dragon scales had begun as a little joke with myself, a way to talk obliquely about a private shame without anyone knowing what I really meant.

Here’s the punchline of that particular joke: I have a patch of eczema on my ankle. It flares up; I scratch it; it gets ugly; I feel ashamed. Yes, I know having eczema is not a moral failing, even if I sometimes make it scabby. If I were to write a memoir about this specific shame, I suspect that only the small subset of eczema sufferers who feel ashamed of it would find the book remotely relatable. Everyone else would be like, Huh. Poor you?

I didn’t want to talk about eczema, though. I wanted to talk about shame. Dragon scales were a mythological metaphor, not for my specific skin condition but for the feelings it gave me.

I even included a scene where Seraphina is so disgusted with herself that she pries up one of her scales and makes herself bleed. It’s a very personal scene, very close to the bone for me. I have lived that moment, if not literally. Making it about dragon scales gave me enough distance that I could be absolutely honest about the feeling.

Readers bring their own emotional maps to books, of course. Seraphina’s scales represent as many different secret shames as there are readers, and I think that’s one reason the book is particularly relatable.

.....................

Even fantasy-world identities, like being half-dragon, come with baggage. It’s good to be cognizant of that. I wasn’t, entirely. That is, I knew enough to insist that my UK publisher remove an honest-to-god slur from the jacket copy (ye gods, I’m so glad they sent me that for approval; they don’t always). And I knew enough to include other human races and LGBTQ+ folks so that readers wouldn’t assume the dragons were merely a stand-in for race, sexuality, or gender.

Still, we bring ourselves to books, and it was inevitable that some readers would see half-dragons as a metaphor for being biracial. I didn’t intend that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. The responses have varied widely; some readers found my depiction not just wrong but laughably, ham-fistedly wrong; others thought I magically got it right. I say “magically” because I can’t take credit for something I did by accident.

I was writing about shame. If shame wasn’t part of an individual reader’s emotional map, then my book wouldn’t fit at all. I can see feeling insulted by the implication that shame could or should be part of that experience, if it wasn’t in real life.

We’re taught to look for “universality” in books, that texts are authoritative and prescriptive, but how can they be? There is always more than one way to feel about any given circumstance. No map—even the Hero’s Journey, which has quite a lot of wiggle-room—is going to fit everyone’s lived experience.

Y'all, Rachel Hartman covers so freaking much! in this article, from writing identities even in second-world fantasy with the cogniscence of understanding they don't exist somehow separate and uninfluenced by real-world events, to reclaiming sexist myths. What I've quoted is a patchwork cause I didn't wanna just dump 2k on you, but damn it's all so good and worth a read! And this idea of emotional autobiography, of creating tales with emotionally true maps at their core even if the experiences don't graft onto yours holy shit. I've probably seen the idea other places, but the particular phrasing and contextualization is making my writer brain utterly explode with possibility and this is a thought-provoking enough piece I'm hurling it at everyone on every platform.