What I Did to Stella
This post was written on March 10, 2016
Much of my writing of Vagabond occurred when I was newly pregnant with my second daughter, which was instrumental in my deepening of Stella’s character. I had a very difficult pregnancy, winding up on hospital bedrest at 34 weeks. And though, as the mother of a two-year-old, I’d occasionally fantasized about required bedrest and all the amazingly productive things I’d be able to do if I were medically mandated to not parent, the reality did not live up to the fantasy, and I spent my days missing my kid, plowing through young-adult epics, and watching TV shows on my laptop. I had the luxury of boredom: my hospital stay was required out of an abundance of caution more than anything, and my baby was never in danger. All day, her healthy movements kept me company as I looked out at midtown Manhattan from my window, tracking the entire month of October from my bed.
On the other side of the curtain in my shared hospital room on the high-risk antepartum floor, however, a steady stream of women were suffering unimaginable torment. Losing blood, losing pregnancies, losing babies. I didn’t see these women, but I heard them, heard their anguish. Heard their sheets being changed, their belongings collected, when their wrenching stories had ended. Your baby is fine, your baby is fine, a nurse reassured me after one particularly horrendous episode left me shaken on my side of the room. It was hard to keep believing my good fortune.
How you go on. How you shape your world to accommodate your grief. I didn’t know the answers to these questions first-hand, but I was starting to imagine enough to create Stella.
When my baby was born, I slept fitfully like most new mothers, obsessively checking to make sure she was breathing and forcing down unthinkable thoughts about harm coming to her in some way. Stella’s grief over losing her child became visceral to me, aligned with my own worst fears.
And it was strange, to say the least, to write scenes about Stella while my newborn slept on my chest in a baby carrier. My child was warm and living, her head close enough to rest my chin on, and I’d sit there in my favorite Brooklyn cafe, writing about a woman close to losing her mind from grief. For me, that very specific confluence of events—writing about a woman who lost a newborn, while holding my own sleeping newborn—gives Stella’s storyline an extra chill of dread and sadness. I had to entertain my own nightmares to write hers. How would she go on, day after day, having no idea where her child was or even if she was still alive? Sometimes, my daughter would wake from her nap and look up, her tiny eyes darting around the cafe, which put an end to my writing for the day but also stirred in me a cold and eerie wash of relief.
As the scenes took shape, I almost couldn’t bear what I was doing to my poor character. One particular scene--when she travels to another state to retrieve a blanket linked to her baby--broke my heart. During this time, I slapped on an epilogue in which Stella got her child back. I’d been with Stella ten years at that point, and I hated that I was making her suffer. It made me happy to wield my authorial power this way and undo what I’d done. Exultation! Miracles!
Of course, this epilogue never made it to publication. For better or worse, the story I’d written had its own power now.