Practical Jean’s Parallels
WHEN I BEGAN WRITING Practical Jean, I had no idea that certain momentous events in the novel would presage events in my own life. But sure enough, after I wrote them, they happened.
Parallel number one: Do you remember the scene where Milt drives off in a hurry (it turns out that he’s going to pick strawberries with Louise), and gets into a car accident, rear-ending a truck when his brakes failed? The day I finished the first draft of the novel, I decided to reward myself by going out and buying a new camera—I love photography—and even though it was a misty day and the roads were slick, I drove as if I was in a hurry. Sure enough, I rear-ended somebody when my tires lost traction on the rainy road.
Parallel number two: Jean has marriage trouble, and after she discovers that Milt is carrying on with Louise behind her back, she moves out of the house. This happened in my own life: A few months after I’d finished my first draft of Practical Jean, and while I was in the middle of doing rewrites, my own ten-year marriage ended.
Parallel number three: The most significant and eerie coincidence involves the foundation of the novel itself. The story of Practical Jean grows from the fact that the main character, Jean Horemarsh, has just lost her mother to a devastating abdominal cancer. Jean doesn’t say specifically which organ was afflicted, but by the way she “would move her hand around her middle, a bit off to the side” when she talked about her mother’s illness, it was presumed to be cancer of the liver or pancreas.
About a month after I began writing Practical Jean, with the death of Jean’s mother well established, my own mother, Hilda, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was a blow for her and for our family, but because the cancer had been caught fairly early, I was convinced she would live well into the future. Perhaps I was in denial. But that denial allowed me to continue writing Jean’s story without dwelling on my own mother’s possible fate.
My one real concern was that I assumed my mother would one day read the book, and it didn’t seem to me that a story that discussed aging and painful death—even in the service of comedy—was the sort of thing my mother should have to think about. But I knew she would insist on reading the book, so I eased my fears by reminding myself that my mother had a terrific sense of humor, and by continuing to fool myself about where her illness was headed.
Although my mother survived until after I finished writing the novel, she didn’t live to see or read the published book. Again, like Jean with Marjorie, I was at my mother’s side when she died. Perhaps the most telling and lasting parallel between Practical Jean and my own life is the impact a mother’s death has on her child. I don’t see myself going off the deep end the way Jean does in the book, but I have a greater understanding now of why she did.