Rick Goldsmith

 

If you’re anything like me you’ll be wondering how long the whole enterprise of writing a novel and getting it published might take. Aside from the pretentious but not entirely untrue answer that it took me my whole life, the novel actually started three months after my mother died back in 2010. Some 12 years ago. This is important in a number of ways as mum always wanted to write a novel herself (though she never completed more than a few pages) while encouraging the creative side of her first-born son, myself. While I have managed to live a creative life (the ‘art life’ as David Lynch calls it) I needed to bear these factors in mind whenever things got tough with the novel-writing and when I found myself questioning my motivation i.e. “Am I doing all this in order to get validation from a person who’d been dead a decade and who I miss and wish she’d had the chance to do what I’m doing?” Everyone who tries to bring something creative into the world and who puts themselves ‘out there’ has to deal with their own issues.

The initial draft of the novel was written on various pads and scraps of paper, always with a pencil: don’t you love the sound, the quietness, the independence of working this way. The core idea was based on a character using a new form of tech to digitally resuscitate a dead person – in this case their mother – so they could tell this ultra-realistic avatar all the things they’d wanted to say to their loved one before they were gone forever.

My mother’s death was traumatic and confusing and painful and at the end, very swift. Her power of speech was trashed as the cancer moved up from her throat and into her brain, leaving her stuttering so badly she was incoherent. And this was someone whose verbal dexterity and caustic wit were her prime characteristics. Doctors were vague about how long she might have to live and and her death was no Hollywood-style swooning end of life in which she had time for individual heart-to-hearts with her family and closest friends. So you might understand my motivation to address this in art.

To make that which was imperfect somehow perfect.