When I was fifteen my family moved from Charleston, South Carolina to an Illinois town like Palmyra. The roads in central Illinois are all laid out on a grid, straight, and the cornfields too, and the fields of soybean, all perfectly straight. They’re laid out on top of a prairie and if you’ve ever seen a prairie you know there s a subtle beauty to it, to the slope of the land, the little creeks that run through it, the different grasses that grow there. You can see a remnant of that wild prairie even today, if you look carefully. The people have an order imposed on them too, narrow perimeters, straight lines, control — but just like the land, there’s a wildness that wants to assert itself. What happens when someone in a place like this lets herself go a little wild? What happens when she stops caring about the things that hold normal people in check?
My story is about Lucy Fooshee, a small town beauty queen. When the novel begins, she has just married into one of the richest farming families in the county, the second richest after the Winklejohns to be exact, and her life is set to go just like everybody always said it should. Within the narrow scope of Palmyra, Lucy has done pretty good for herself.
When I first started writing the book, Lucy Fooshee was a minor character — she was someone’s niece who came by to visit in the first chapter — but I got so interested in her and enjoyed her voice so much that my novel became her story.
I’ve always been interested in character and the relationship between character and place. Lucy’s nature is completely at odds with the place she’s from. What happens to someone who, like Lucy, is born into the wrong family or the wrong town? What happens to a character who finds herself in a place that suppresses her imagination and passion? Lucy Fooshee is narcissistic, egocentric and, until the arrival of a stranger, completely self-satisfied. She is an unreliable witness to her own life and she is often mean. The gap between who she is and who she imagines herself to be is huge. Nonetheless, Lucy has a quirky appeal and you root for her.
| The roads in central Illinois are all laid out on a grid, straight, and the cornfields too, and the fields of soybean, all perfectly straight. |
I’m interested in what changes us. What wakes us up? For Lucy Fooshee, it’s love that wakes her up to the world around her. It’s love that makes her pay attention to something other than herself. And it’s sexuality that for her is the beginning of love.
One of Lucy’s neighbors, Howard Pinshaw, has lost his arm in a farming accident, but he can still feel that arm. It feels burnt sometimes from being out in the sun and sometimes it itches but Howard can’t scratch it. Howard Pinshaw’s phantom arm, people call it. Howard is a small part of my story. A fast reader might not even notice him. But for me much of the story is about missing things, or things that are only partially present but continue to assert themselves.
My story is about character and place. It’s about families and about what people want or think they want. It’s about bigotry and small towns, and it’s about finding out what matters.
— Alison Clement, 2001
Alison Clement 