Fig (41 page)

At the time I first began to flesh out the story, my daughter was still a little girl, and many of my friends were busy having babies. As someone who is still considering becoming a certified doula, I believe women are entitled to certain rights when they give birth. First and foremost, I believe a woman should be able to give birth wherever she is most comfortable doing so, whether that's at home, a hospital, or a birthing center. While birth is not a medical emergency, I also understand that sometimes birth doesn't go the way we'd like it to go; “Meconium happens” (old midwife joke).

I was fortunate to have had an ecstatic homebirth with my daughter Story. I gave birth to her in a shotgun shack with no running water on top of a mountain in Tennessee in the winter with the assistance of my midwife; my husband; my bonus daughter, Kaya; two close friends; a cat named Snowball, and the dog, No Name. While my labor lasted a very long twenty-one hours, there were no complications, and from the experience, I learned I was a superhero. The experience was empowering, and afterward, I found I was capable of anything. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Sometimes medical emergencies do arise and women must be transported from home to hospital or from delivery room to the operating table. Sometimes women don't have the option to give birth at home, and sometimes doctors don't respect a woman's birth plan. Sometimes women don't even know they have the right to write a birth plan in the first place, and so they don't. Sometimes women are forced to give birth in traumatic situations, and instead of feeling empowered, they are belittled. Sometimes C-sections are absolutely necessary, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes C-sections are performed for insurance purposes only, or because a doctor wants to go home, or because there was too much intervention in the early stages of labor.

In Greek mythology, Zeus is the male god who gives birth through his forehead to his daughter, Athena, and the act represents a shift from a matriarchal society into a patriarchal one as Zeus literally steals pregnancy and birth from the female. Sometimes women feel their doctors are stealing their pregnancies and birth when their babies are cut out of them. I knew that Mama's mental illness was complex, conditioned by both nature and nurture, and I also knew I was rewriting the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” Therefore, the emergency C-section echoes the woodsmen and his axe.

Personally, I have never known anyone with schizophrenia, and I wanted to make sure that I got the disease right. I relied heavily on the following texts for my research:
Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients, and Providers,
fifth edition, by E. Fuller Torrey, MD, and
Schizophrenia for Dummies
by Jerome Levine, MD and Irene S. Levine, PhD. (The particular copy I own of the latter was ordered used from the Internet and bears the mark of a lighter; I like to imagine someone like Mama trying to set it on fire.) In order to get a more personal understanding of the disease, and specifically, what it would be like to grow up around it, I read the following memoirs:
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls,
The Memory Palace
by Mira Bartók, and finally, but perhaps most helpful of all,
My Mother's Keeper: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in the Shadow of Schizophrenia
by Tara Elgin Holley with Joe Holley. I also talked to friends who know schizophrenia firsthand and I took a writing workshop on “madness” from the author Brian Evenson.

As for creating Fig, I read the book
Forever Marked: A Dermatillomania Diary
by Angela Hartlin, and I perused the website
skinpick.com
, reading the articles posted as well as the forums. Obsessive-compulsive disorder manifests in so many different ways, and dermatillomania (also known as compulsive skin picking) is just one of them. As I was developing the character of Fig, I learned the term for something I did as a child, and continue to do: magical thinking. Magical thinking is considered a disorder after the age of seven, and when and if it presents in an adult, it can be considered a possible symptom of schizophrenia (with the exception of religious experiences).

I truly believe there is a fine line between sanity and insanity. What I often joke about as being traits of my own OCD are not really OCD, because rather than causing me harm, the habits serve me. However, while the rituals of a habit can be supportive (like meditating for fifteen minutes every day), they can get out of hand and become destructive (perhaps the meditation practice morphs into agoraphobia and you never leave your house). What I refer to as my magical thinking is really the practice of visualization: I see myself succeed at whatever I am trying to accomplish. I also know when I'm being superstitious; for example, I know that knocking on wood won't really keep something bad from happening, but it doesn't hurt to do it as long as I know there are some things in life I cannot control.

I suppose I planted the seed for Mama's death when I had her reading stacks of books by Virginia Woolf toward the beginning of the story. I like themes to come full circle whenever possible, and to return to Woolf, I had Mama weave lines from Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard, into her own speech when she talks to Fig on page 310. While Woolf's letter is widely available online, I specifically used the copy as provided by The Virginia Woolf Blog. While I used the following lines from her note: “You have given me the greatest possible happiness” and “You have been in every way all that anyone could ever be,” I created a variation of: “You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good” for Mama to say. I believe Mama would have identified with both Woolf, and her last letter, and like Mama I wanted to honor this important literary figure. By quoting Virginia Woolf, Mama's words take on an agenda, becoming her official farewell.

Fig's OCD manifests in both healthy and unhealthy ways, and part of her journey is learning how to tell the difference. Fig's skin picking gets out of control and is a form of self-harm, yet her obsession with looking words up in the dictionary helps her to better understand the world. The dictionary Fig uses in this book was created by me, but to inform the definitions I wrote for Fig, I referenced actual dictionaries and dictionary/etymology websites such as
American Heritage Dictionary,
third ed.;
dictionary.com
;
etymonline.com
; and
merriam-webster.com
. As for the flower meanings, I employed the following websites:
victorianbazaar.com/meanings.html
and
send-great-flowers.com/meaning-of-flowers.html
. And then I had to go and read the exquisite novel
The Language of Flowers
by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.

One of my old writing teachers, Junior Burke, talks about the emotional truths that come up in our writing, the little bits of yourself that end up in works of even the purest fiction, and in the end, I think both Fig and Mama are woven from numerous strands of my own DNA. At the same time, they are also one hundred percent who
they
are and who they were born to be when I first birthed them from my mind. When a writer gets a character right, it's because that character holds up to the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious, and I hope you, dear reader, find Fig, Mama, Daddy, Gran, Uncle Billy, Sissy Baxter, the Flower Lady, and even Candace Sherman to be as real as both you and me.

MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Jacket photograph copyright © 2015 by Kevin Best

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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ARGARET
K. M
C
E
LDERRY
B
OOKS
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The text for this book is set in Incognito.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schantz, Sarah Elizabeth.

Fig / Sarah Elizabeth Schantz.

p. cm.

Summary: In 1994, Fig looks back on her life and relates her experiences, from age six to nineteen, as she desperately tries to save her mother from schizophrenia while her own mental health and relationships deteriorate.

ISBN 978-1-4814-2358-8 (hardcover)

SBN 978-1-4814-2360-1 (eBook)

[1. Schizophrenia—Fiction. 2. Mental illness—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Self-destructive behavior—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Family life—Kansas—Fiction. 7. Farm life—Kansas—Fiction. 8. Kansas—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.1.S336Fig 2015

[Fic]—dc23 2014025394