Diversity in literature matters: How so?
Stories, fiction or non-fiction need to reflect the entirety of human experience. Sure, reading about non-conforming relationships, or the way people from different religious, ethnic or racial backgrounds live and think may make some folks uncomfortable. Likewise, depictions of violence, be it war or interpersonal violations—murder, rape, incest, etc—naturally stir up discordant emotions. That’s is the point art—to prod people into opening themselves to wider world views that reflect real experience of the human condition.
Some of you who know me know that my mother, Megan McClard, who died last year at the age of ninety-six was bi-sexual, or lesbian (depending on the day)—she didn’t much like labels. She said, “I love people for who they are, and then the rest follows.”
My mother was an amazing person who survived against all odds, and it is for this reason that I wish to encourage you to read and buy her book if you have not already done so. In an effort to get it out there beyond my “known circle,” I am participating in an online group sales promotion. The promotion includes both her book, Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child, and my newly released novel, Margaux and the Vicious Circle.
Diversity in Literature Matters: About Leavings
Megan McClard did not write the stories contained in Leavings to be a memoir. She wrote them as individual stories as her part in a weekly writing group that spanned years—a group of several trusted women friends. Only later, when she was ninety-three, did we convince her to organize the stories into a memoir of sorts, because they naturally formed a late-in-life coming of age story.
Part of her coming of age story involves her sexual orientation, although I would argue the bigger story is about overcoming the circumstances of her early life as a foster child in Los Angeles, and in her married life to my father. For her, her sexual orientation was ancillary—a part of who she always was. Throughout the stories she tells, the women in her life take front and center—they made her who she became, especially the woman she loved the most dearly. I hope you will purchase and enjoy reading her story. It is a love story you won’t forget.
Diversity in Literature Matters: About MARGAUX AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
Margaux and the Vicious Circle is a novel within a novel. In it, Margaux Andrews is a young writer living in Manhattan who has penned a semi-autobiographical novel about traumatic events that took place in her early childhood in the mid-nineteen-sixties. In Margaux and the Vicious Circle, Margaux’s mother is a lesbian, borrowing from my own life experience, but that fact is not the focal point of the story.
Margaux’s thematic elements relate to “the dangerous world.” A conversation I had with my mother in her last year of life inspired the book. She worried about her grandchildren and great-grandchildren because the world had become such a dangerous place. She said it was more dangerous than the world in which she or I grew up in. I disagreed. Her childhood was more dangerous than mine or my children’s. I gave her countless examples. In the end, we agreed that living is dangerous—today’s dangers are different than the dangers that each of us faced in our respective childhoods.
Margaux and the Vicious Circle is about overcoming adversity using the power of imagination and in magical thinking—two gifts that my mother bestowed on her family. She had an amazing imagination and creative drive that elevated the lives of her children, no matter how tough the going got. Bad things happen, but they don’t have to define us.
