“Excuse me — my wife wrote that book.”
That’s me pitching Pamela McGarry’s debut novel, The Unsuitable Bride.
I’m in the bookshop chatting with the owner when I see a shopper eyeballing the exotic ochre cover in its featured display. I approach the customer with my ice-breaker and immediately she brightens as if to say, The writer’s spouse! What a coincidence.
“I’m the professional writer in the family,” I confess, “but it turns out she’s a better writer than I am.”
Self-deprecation goes a long way. In addition to which I’m not dissembling. She picks up a copy of the book to examine it more closely.
“She’s a published poet,” I say, “which explains her way with words.”
The customer’s resistance is visibly evaporating, and what’s left of it vanishes when I add: “The book was just announced as a finalist for the Whistler Independent Book Prize.”
She grips the novel as if she already owned it. Were she not heading to the cashier, I am ready with more testimony in praise of this novel. The repeating motifs, for example, and the rythyms and richness of language. “Words laid down with a jeweler’s touch,” says one early review. Readers speak of being transplanted to another time and place—Calcutta and the tea plantations of Assam at the end of WWII.
Were I pitching this book to a writer, I’d say, “Here’s how to write a novel without taking a creative writing course.”
How to write a novel the natural way
McGarry is what we call a “natural writer”. She reads voraciously, mainly literary fiction, which leans on character more than plot. Yet, the fictional character doesn’t exist who does not embody desire.
French philosopher, Muriel Barbery, points out that we are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have. Savvy readers naturally extrapolate from desire to disaster. That’s why we sometimes say that character is plot.
A natural writer like Pamela McGarry must know it instinctively. Unfulfilled desire naturally establishes a story trajectory.
The Unsuitable Bride begins with a character trapped in a sexually dangerous environment. If that doesn’t promise a compelling plot, what does?
Readers bond immediately with a vulnerable protagonist, and McGarry’s gutsy heroine draws immediate sympathy. The Bride’s journey through a lifetime of crises leaves the reader astonished at the comic-tragedy that is the human condition.
And that’s why you might consider picking up a copy of The Unsuitable Bride.
It’s available here on BC’s Sunshine Coast at Talewind Books and One Flower One Leaf Gallery. Otherwise on Amazon.
Keep writing, keep reading, and stay well, my friends. And, oh, yeah — there’s my wife at her book launch. She wrote that book!
