Truth in Fiction: Author Monica Wood Uses Her Own Truth to Create Captivating Stories

Monica Wood was born in Mexico, Maine to Irish Catholic parents in a family of paper mill workers. She grew up listening to the stories of her father and the ballads of her grandfather. "I am not one of those writers who claim to have been weaned on Proust," Wood explains, "but I did read a lot, a happy habit for a child, I think, no matter what the material."

Woods short stories, her "first love" as she has called them, have appeared in numerous anthologies including The 1999 Pushcart Prize Anthology and Sudden Fiction International, as well as in many magazines, including Glimmer Train. Wood has also published three novels, the latest of which, Any Bitter Thing, was just released May 1.

Her stories are not autobiographical, but the central theme of family does infuse all of her work. I feel it is important, in understanding her work, to understand her notion of family, which she explains quite well in the following quote: "I strive to create characters who seem real, no matter how unusual their circumstances, and to make my readers care what happens to these characters as if they were looking after their own brothers and sisters. If I have any obsession as a writer, it is the notion of the power of our 'first' family, the family into which we were born: that collection of people who accompanied us, for better or worse, through the process of learning how to find our way into the world. Our first family remains with us, in ways both damaging and redeeming, through our entire lives. It is this family that must be alternately escaped from and returned to, over and over, in the family dance."

It is our families that we know best, and it is that which we know best that we can write the most truthfully about. Truth is a core element in any good fiction writing. In a recent interview for a local publication, a journalist asked Wood if fiction was, in fact, a search for some truth. "I think it is." Wood answered, "I think it was Grace Paley who said you write to find out what you know." A line from one of her books says "You can map whole lives by what people choose to forget." Wood said in the interview that she knew this was true, but didn't know it until she wrote it. And she adds that she wouldn't have written it if she hadn't had that particular character in that particular situation. "Moments like that I live for in fiction writing," she says. "Suddenly I'll write something down and think 'Oh that's right,' and I don't know where that came from. It's a wonderful feeling, really."

Our handout, "The Forms of Fiction" states, "…good fiction concerns itself with the real problems and values of men," and Wood's stories follow this trend. In her novel, "My Only Story," the main character, Rita, is faced with real problems - an alcoholic first husband, a sister with her own issues that she tries to help, the desire to be a mother that continually evades her and a love life that never quite works out. But despite all these woeful plots and subplots, we are never left feeling sorry for Rita, nor do we get the impression that she goes through more than any real person goes through in a lifetime. Wood has a truthful way about her stories that makes us cheer the main character on. Rita is as real to us as a close friend. We get the feeling that, while we really hope this time everything's going to work out, something's not quite right, and, like us, there is no rainbow with a pot of gold, or lover standing in the sunset waiting to sweep her off to a romantic destination. The "Forms of Fiction" handout calls this intellectual honesty, as it relates to theme. "From the start," reads the handout, "the story concerns appearance and reality, and the surprise is a natural result of the central character's flaw." Wood's stories have no trick ending or made up themes and her endings are all honest - meaning that she doesn't decide what will happen, but lets her characters dictate, by way of who they are, what will happen to them.

Wood's characters have real emotions, they make real mistakes, they get into real trouble and aren't sure of their decisions. Like Rita, her characters make decisions they know are wrong, but can't help themselves. And like us, suffer the consequences. In My Only Story, Rita's sister kidnaps John's niece and tells Rita to get in the car. Rita hesitates for only a second and then jumps in. She knows she shouldn't, and she knows she will surely lose John by doing it, but she does it anyway.

Wood's characters are not one, two or even three-dimensional. They are motivated by their past experiences and their emotions and have more than just one problem facing them. Her characters are not perfect, and can't be classified as "good guys" or "bad guys". "In good fiction," reads the "Forms of Fiction" handout, "as in most life situations, we find conflicts between partial good and partial evil…". Layton is an alcoholic, but his mother is an alcoholic, and she drinks to forget about the child that died at birth. And Aileen's family is closed off from outsiders, but it is because they have been through such heartache losing their sister. In the handout, Gardner and Dunlap say that a good writer "must not give himself up to stock responses, must not allow himself to pity an orphan because an orphan is, in the abstract, pitiful or to feel contempt for a drunkard because drinking is, in the abstract, wicked." All Wood's characters have virtues and faults, and are blessed with certain qualities while being cursed with others. In short, they are real, honest people with true problems, true issues and concerns, doing their best, like us, to get by. This is, in part, what makes them so likeable, and so real to us as readers.
Wood's books have won numerous awards, including a 1999 Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize is an annual award given to literary anthologies that it believes sets the standard for excellence. Its members pick from thousands of nominations, and each year it presents the most distinguished short stories, essays, and poetry first published by small presses and magazines nationwide. The New York Times Book Review calls the Pushcart Prize "The single best measure of the state of affairs in American literature today." The title story of Wood's anthology, Ernie's Ark, was nominated by Andre Dubus III, who said, ""With luminous and graceful prose, Monica Wood has brilliantly captured the human need to love, the heart's desire to nurture, the soul's urge to sacrifice. I know of no other writer who can take on this subject and make it both funny and moving, entertaining yet utterly transcendent. This is a wise and loving book."

"Ernie's Ark" is the story of a man who is dealing simultaneously with the loss of his job, just weeks before receiving a full pension, and his wife's failing health. The story was first published in Glimmer Train magazine and later won the 1999 Pushcart Prize for short fiction. "Ernie was an angry man," the story begins, "…he was angry at the melon-faced CEO from New York City…at the deadbeats and no-accounts who stood in line with him…at the kids from Broad Street who cut through his yard on their dirt bikes day after day, leaving moats of mud through the flowery back lawn Marie had sprinkled a season ago with Meadow-in-a-Can…with the police department who didn't give a hoot about Marie's wrecked grass…"

Each of the nine stories is connected, telling the individual story of various members of Ernie's family and the community. Wood uses this form, rather than a longer, novel style, to let us feel closer to each of the nine characters that she introduces us to. The stories come together beautifully, but each stand alone as honest accounts of life in a small town plagued by big problems. Wood does a terrific job of letting us feel empathy with each of the characters without feeling sorry for any of them.
Wood's search for human truth comes through in her characters, most specifically, her main characters. In My Only Story, Rita is a very honest person who truly believes that there is good in everyone. She has a knack for getting to the heart of a person with the simplest of language. For example, she describes another character, Callie, in this way: "…the way she kept her eye on those kids, even the big ones, gave me to believe she was a woman who felt she had much to lose." And after meeting a young woman whose baby she was planning to adopt, she says, "It never occurred to me, not once, to sneak a peek into her heart." We come to know Rita's first husband through her thoughts, "Layton, please turn into somebody else now that you're going to be a daddy." And we learn a great deal about their marriage through this single line, "We'd been married nearly six years then, but I believe his helping me up was the first time I felt like a wife." And in her short story, "Disappearing," we learn a great deal about the narrator through her dialogue with herself. "…I want to throw up again and again until my heart flops out wet and writhing on the kitchen floor. Then he would know I have one and it moves." And we understand how deep her sadness goes and how much she wishes to disappear when she says, "…not a blip of water not a ripple not one sound and I was under in that other quiet, so quiet some tears got out…" And in the title story of "Ernie's Ark," Wood shows us Ernie's love for his wife, his anger at the sickness that is taking her life, and his feelings of helplessness and sadness in one sentence: "He had seen his wife in all manner of undress over the years, yet it filed him with shame to observe the yellow hospital sponge applied to her diminishing body by a uniformed kid who was younger than their only grandchild."

Some of Wood's favorite short story writers include Andre Dubus, Ron Carlson, and Antonya Nelson. Like Dubus, she uses the characters' dialogue, both internal and external, to move the story forward. And her writing style - sentence structure, punctuation, etc. - also work to convey a particular tone and emotion. "Disappearing" is a short-short story about an overweight woman who learns how to swim. Her husband is critical of her weight and careless with her emotions. The narrator begins to enjoy swimming for the weightlessness she feels. She begins to lose weight - so much weight in fact, that other men begin looking at her and her husband wants sex more. As she loses fat, though, she gains confidence and realizes she is in control of her body, as well as her mind. She continues to lose weight, not for health or to get noticed (in fact, she does not enjoy the attention), but in order to become like the water - invisible. Wood's style is much like Raymond Carvers in that she makes a point of using no quotation marks and very little punctuation (commas). In "Disappearing," this effect works to show the narrator's thoughts, words and emotions running together, further enforcing the image of water. Carver uses it in his short-short, "Fat," to show the narrator's emotional connection to this man she waits on who won't eat while she is watching.

Wood takes the very deep, serious topic of the narrator's innermost hurts and emotions and, in just three pages, is able to convey her thoughts so clearly through her use of concise language. She is a writer who knows how to "cut through the clutter" and get right to the point - the heart - of the story. And isn't that what good writing is all about?