by Spencer Hyde
But isn’t that true of everybody, on some level?
“I’ll wait,” I said.
He sighed and slouched. “You say that now, and I appreciate it, but c’mon, Addie. It’s a year, and you’ll be in school and then off to college. So will everyone else my age.”
“You understand what waiting is, right? I do. I figured out Morris’s question.” I gave him a smug look and leaned in on my elbows.
He paused and looked at me for a moment. Then he grinned, back to his old self, shuffling off the pain of his recent experiences and the reality of being released from the hospital in just over ten months. “So, Addie Foster, what’s the answer? Why did those characters sit around and wait with nothing to show for it?”
“Because they had everything to wait for. They had everything to show for it, as soon as that thing showed up,” I said.
“Nothing shows up in the play. I mean, nobody shows. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Not in the play. But life is just a series of absurd rituals until something or someone comes along to give it all meaning, right? They were waiting for that thing. For that person.”
Fitz stared at me and breathed in deeply, thinking intently.
“Sometimes it doesn’t show up,” I said. “We’re lucky if it does. But if it does, then we have something to live for. We don’t always need to wait, but when we do . . . Well, it’s worth waiting your entire life for that thing, that person, to come along. It’s what gives life meaning.”
He took off his bandana and turned it in his hands. I took off my scarf and placed it over our hands so nobody would notice us touching.
“So what are you waiting for?” he asked quietly, hesitantly. “What’s your thing?”
“You are my thing,” I said. “Turns out I’ve been waiting for you, Fitzgerald Whitman IV. Even if your name is pretentious and I’m way funnier and smarter.”
“Addie Foster,” he said in wonder, his handsome gap standing out in his ear-to-ear grin.
“It’s true. You’re my person,” I said. “And I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
“But I can’t ask you to wait, Addie. That wouldn’t be fair.” He tried to pull his hand away, but I wouldn’t let go. He stared at me with those amazing eyes. “So we’re a comedy? That means you probably need to be funnier. Or are we a tragedy? Do I need to be more tragic? Do I need more flaws? I can maybe work on some flaws with Doc.”
“We’re in the space between,” I said. “ An OCD patient fell in love with a mess. It was a tragedy, if you will. And you will,” I said, smiling.
“Or a comedy,” he said.
“Yes. Or a comedy.”
“I’ve heard it both ways,” said Fitz.
“And that’s why,” I said, smiling.
“Why what?”
“Why I have to wait. We’re the characters who are not just compatible because of wit, but condemned to compatibility because of it. We can’t escape it. I don’t want to escape it.”
“So we’ll write our own story,” said Fitz.
“And wear whatever masks we want,” I said.
“And you’ll wait for me.”
“And I’ll wait for you.”
Acknowledgments
First, I’d like to thank the doctors at Johns Hopkins for taking on an ostensibly hopeless case and their tireless dedication to my health. I’d like to thank my parents for loving me without condition amid my indefatigable tics, rituals, and consuming thoughts.
Thanks to Brittany, my wife, for continuing this wonderful journey with me and making me laugh at every turn. (And opening doors for me, so I don’t have to wash my hands as much!) I threw Brittany all the complexities, all the unformed matter in my life, and she gave me a galaxy in return. Thanks also to my family and my in-laws for their continued support and constant wit.
Chris Schoebinger and Heidi Taylor are the true “Dynamic Duo.” I can’t ever properly thank them for their indomitable encouragement and their continued investment in my writing. Thanks to Lisa Mangum for her sharp critiques, her insightful edits, and her meticulous care. Thanks also to the entire team at Shadow Mountain.
Thank you, Julie Gwinn—the best (and happiest, kindest, and strongest) agent an author could hope for. Thanks to Samuel Beckett for his play Waiting for Godot and to Tom Stoppard for his plays The Real Thing and Arcadia. With these plays in mind, any reference to the ideas therein are treated fictitiously. If something doesn’t fit with your experience of hopelessly waiting, of feeling damaged, of recreating memory, of finding love and keeping it, the fault rests solely with me.
And thank you for reading. Each character in the psych ward really deserves their own book, their own story of love and hope, their own moment of triumph.
Finally, thanks to the ten-year-old boy, who, slouching on his bed that first day in the hospital, let me sit by his side and wonder, in tandem, what in the name of Lewis Carroll the universe had thrown our way. Because of you, I set out to find answers.
If you would like more information about mental illness or how to find help, please visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness (nami.org/Find-Support/NAMI-HelpLine).
An Interview with the Author
1. What was the genesis for this story? When did you start writing it? Who or what was the inspiration for the characters?
It’s hard to pinpoint a genesis for this story because it feels like it has been a part of me for so long. When studying in college, I read a lot of Tom Stoppard’s works and was entranced by the way he addressed weighty issues while maintaining a witty, comedic tone. I’ve strived to maintain that balance ever since. (Plus, I’ve always had a penchant for the absurd.)
I remember being totally floored after my first reading of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. He hit a perfect note, one line after another. I also often draw inspiration from the movement of poetry. I remember the moment I first encountered the prosody of Frost and the meter of Tennyson. Look at the first lines of “The Splendor Falls” by Tennyson, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Inspired by his poetic rhythm, I wrote the line “Whitewashed walls and medical halls, and memory as told in story,” and immediately I was back in the psych ward and building a world from those words.
In that sense, I started writing this book years ago, though I didn’t know it at the time. I wondered at the origins of character and their background and motivation after reading Samuel Beckett’s plays and Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. I started thinking of how to rearrange a universe after reading Hamlet followed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I considered the importance of the first sentence after reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. My understanding of a work’s final moment was forever altered when I encountered the last paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. My focus on dialogue was shaped by playwrights like Sarah Ruhl and novelists like Ali Smith, and I was greatly schooled in characterization by the likes of Annie Proulx.
The inspiration for the characters is a different story. I started with people in my own life and added dimensions until they rounded out into fictional characters that, I hope, carry a lot of weight. Didi (a nod to Samuel Beckett and his character Vladimir “Didi” in Waiting for Godot) is an amalgamation of people I’ve met in life. In particular, a coworker of mine from years ago that carried the name of the consummate “One Upper.” He could make a stubbed toe a tragedy and a commonplace a triumph. If you ever had a story, his was better, and not just by a little. If you took on a black bear on Vancouver Island in hand-to-hand combat, this guy took on a great white shark while treading water in Drake Passage after having his hands tied behind his back and one eye bruised shut by a roundhouse from a Sasquatch. He did it all with his feet, of course, and his shark weighed at least a thousand pounds more than your bear.
All the characters, in that sense, emerged from various conglomera
tes. Leah came from a good friend in Texas who has a great wit and a passion for language. I combined parts of her personality with a small boy I saw on my first day in Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was sitting on his bed, head bowed in depression, looking as if his heart might fall right through his body. I couldn’t handle that image, and it has never left me. In a sense, I have created Leah to deal with that quaking memory.
And I set the novel in Seattle after visiting my cousin who was attending Puget Sound University because the splendor of that place has never left me, and the landscape and feel of it seemed to lend itself to this kind of story.
2. Why did you choose to write the story from Addie’s point of view instead of Fitz’s? Was it difficult, as a male author, to write from a female perspective?
I thought about this the moment Addie’s voice came to me. I was sitting in bed and had my phone next to me (ideas often hit me late at night, and I like to take notes on my phone), and I heard one line: “It’s not that you need to hear it or anything—just that I need to say it.” I often start stories with voice and build everything else around it, and this line gave me an ember of Addie’s character. Then, I set the billows to work on that ember, and I spent the next several months chasing that personality.
When I heard her voice, I knew the only way to tell this story was through Addie Foster.
I think telling this story through Addie allowed me to navigate the OCD aspects of the narrative. A male lead with OCD would fly too close to my own experience, and I didn’t want the wings to burn off before the story got going. I didn’t want to spiral into my own thoughts and memories, or for Fitz to merge with my past and change the tilt of the first-person narration.
3. You have personal experience with OCD. Can you share some of your insights into the issues of mental health?
It’s not talked about enough, for starters. And for finishers. And for everyone in between. It’s just not discussed enough. Mental health is so idiosyncratically integrated into our personal lives, so it makes it difficult to dissect and label and distill. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying.
I remember being in the car when I was five years old. The radio was burbling as the windshield wipers ticked back and forth, swiping away the slicks of water. An advertisement was playing, like one of those late-night infomercials I’m fond of joking about: “Tired of counting everything? Do you often find yourself thinking of numbers instead of people? Germs instead of friends?” It was not in those exact words, of course, but it turned out to be an ad for a local research study on OCD. I remember, in that moment, wondering why they would be researching something that was so normal. That’s where the idiosyncratic part of the mental health world kicks in—we all take a different journey, even within the same disease. I was at a loss, wondering why anyone would want to study people who counted things and washed their hands a lot. But then I thought, Wait—is my counting a bad thing?
As I matured, so did my OCD, until it really became a monster. I was completely consumed by it, barely able to come up for air. I find that people often hesitate to ask me about my OCD, about my experience in the hospital psychiatric ward or my many years of therapy, but it’s in that moment of hesitation that a lot of our current issues reside. Let’s talk about it. Let’s have all of the conversations—all of them—and be open about mental health. Only then can story do what it is supposed to do, and sublimate the human experience.
Fiction reminds us that we are all on our own hero’s journey and that things don’t always turn out like we’d expect. And that’s a good thing. Perhaps if I’d encountered the right book at an earlier age, I would be able to grapple with OCD and how I felt after hearing that radio advertisement. Maybe I’d be better prepared for what came next.
Fiction allows us to practice empathy. Fiction reminds us what it is to be human. And I can say without hesitation that without fiction, without essays, without poems, without plays (and yes, a lot of other “drama”), I could not have overcome my OCD to the degree I have.
4. The symbolism of the blue whale and the Kirtland’s warbler are woven throughout the story. Why did you choose these two animals?
I have always been fascinated by things I don’t—or can’t—understand. I think part of being human is that hunger for comprehending what we can’t grasp. That’s why I am so fascinated by the great blue whale. How much do we really know about whales? Surprisingly, not very much. Ditto for the warblers. Think of how many scientists each year tag birds and whales (and numerous other animals) and wait on data, or take boats out to study and dive and collect. How much information do they return with? Again, not much.
A Smithsonian researcher said whales are hard to learn about because they live too far out at sea and they dive too deep. I love that. But that doesn’t stop scientists from researching or diving or writing about whalefalls; a single whale carcass on the ocean floor can provide life to other animals for more than one hundred years. Just because the topic is hard to study doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Stoppard said all art is a projection of our own predilections, and I agree. If something fascinates me or confuses me, I chase after it. I love dealing with uncertainties and seeing what I can make of it in a narrative. I am interested in what I can observe in the natural world, and how I might connect that back to character. For example, the light particle experiment Addie brings up with Doc was something I read about in National Geographic years ago and it fascinated me. From that point on, I became interested in how that might work as a metaphor for the human experience.
5. Addie and Fitz share a similar sense of humor as well as a similar taste in books and movies. What are some of your favorite books and movies?
My “favorite” books and movies change every year, and if I start down that rabbit hole, I may never return. What was once Samuel Beckett’s Molloy or Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is now Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series. As Annie Proulx says, if you want to be a writer, you first need to be a great reader.
So I’ll start with Proulx and her short stories. I have always loved the way she can animate the landscape and history of a place. I’m a big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s immersive novels, the ideas of Jorge Luis Borges, and the intellect and voice of Marilynne Robinson. Anything by those authors leaves me wanting more.
George Saunders and Karen Russell write worlds I could never create, and use forms that surprise and delight. Alice Munro and Anthony Doerr stories have a way of staying with me for days, following me around, teaching me more and more. I’ve also enjoyed reading all of Jesmyn Ward’s work in the last few months—she is an incredible writer.
Lately, I have been reading Tom Stoppard plays as well as essays by Eula Biss, poems by Brian Turner, and stories by William Trevor. It may seem a bit all over the place, but that is how I learn and that is how I read. I like discovering the ideas that percolate up through that process. I also enjoy Frankensteins of verse that just can’t be categorized easily, like Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter.
I’m not much of a movie buff, but I enjoyed A Man Called Ove based on the novel by Fredrik Backman. I love reading the translation while I watch foreign films. Might sound odd, but I’m odd, so it works.
6. What are some of the things you have waited for in your life?
I’m always waiting for that next thing—for that next idea or book or moment that will lead me to a greater understanding of what it means to lead a good life and appreciate the human experience. But that’s now.
Years ago, when I was stuck in the throes of mental illness, it was nearly impossible—if not wholly impossible—to think clearly enough to comprehend what I might be waiting for. I was stuck, like Wolf, always striving but never fully understanding how to get to a place where I could get that “horse.” My rituals were a way of repeating the phrase over and over, and they kept me stuck at the entrance of the hospital, just like Wolf. I was attempting to exist in a worl
d that would not accommodate me because my thoughts could not allow such movement, such understanding, such light.
When I arrived at Johns Hopkins, I worked with a psychiatrist who tried everything until he found the answer that balanced my world. Once he did, it was like someone turned on the lights. Before the hospital and that specific doctor, it was like my neurons had been trying to swim through the world’s most intricate and impassible gill net.
Aeolus, keeper of the winds, gave Odysseus winds in a bag, but they did not carry Odysseus home. Language can be the winds in our sailboat, but sometimes it can’t take us where we need to go; some winds take us everywhere but where we really need to go.
Language may move you as it did me, but there is a next step: you need to act. For all those suffering from mental illness, never stop hoping. You are not alone. You are loved. You are needed. There is hope. Don’t give up. There is a wind that will carry you home. You can find it with a doctor’s help. Remember that you are more than your schizophrenia, you are more than your depression, you are more than your OCD. You may feel you can’t go on, but go on.
Discussion Questions
1. Fitz and Addie spend a few intimate moments in the bones of a blue whale and discuss relative heart size. Has there been a time in your life where learning something fascinating about the natural world changed your outlook on religion, on culture, or on love?
2. Dr. Morris sends Addie information about Joseph Campbell’s structure of the Hero’s Journey. What fictional characters or “heroes” have influenced your own journey?
3. The majority of the characters in this novel suffer from some type of mental illness. What social and cultural stigmas still surround discussions about mental health? How can we change the narrative of mental illness?
4. At one point in the story, Addie is struggling to stay optimistic, yet finds hope and excitement when her request to watch the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is approved. What movie (or other narrative) might you choose in a similar situation? What stories bring you the most hope?
