More About the Novel
My novel is an emotionally layered story about family, memory, and the invisible fractures that shape our lives. When a glittering seventieth-birthday celebration gathers Mark and Hannah's blended family under one roof, long-buried tensions begin to surface. As Hannah struggles with the quiet unraveling of Alzheimers, the people around her are forced to confront old divorces, step family woulds, addition, resentment and the aching need to belong. Told through multiple voices across generations, the story reveals how love can both break and bind a family. Mark, a therapist who spends his life helping others navigate pain, must face the fault lines running through his own heart. Around him, children and stepchildren carry their own histories of loss, loyalty, and longing. I think you'll find this an engaging portrait of marriage, motherhood, memory, and the complicated beauty of staying connected when life threatens to pull everything apart
Writing the Novel
People have been asking me, how long did it take you to write your novel? The answer is around five years. And over those five years it changed and changed, trying to figure out what it wanted to be. I started out with the idea that I wanted to write about a psychotherapist, Mark—about his family, his loves, and his work. I started falling in love with my characters and then added new characters, ones that were harder to love. I added therapy sessions, because I wanted to know how Mark's ideas about love and loss were informed by his clients. My writing group encouraged me to keep writing, that what I was writing was interesting. After writing scores of episodes, I felt like it was something, but I wasn't sure how all these lives and stories fit together. My husband encouraged me when I told him that I needed some uninterrupted time to piece it all together. I went away and spent 10-hour days putting the pieces together and shaping a coherent narrative. My writing group and my writer-daughter read my draft and made suggestions. I needed some additions. The sons' voices were missing. Six months later, I needed another retreat to re-view the full story and did another revision integrating new perspectives. It landed. I refined and copy-edited with my husband's help. And it became Fault Lines: The Geography of Love.
Reviews
The Biblio File
Dan Barnett
Chico Enterprise Record
Susan Tchudi, retired English professor and co-host of KZFR’s Ecotopia, lives in Yankee Hill.
A keen curiosity about the dynamics of blended families led to her multigenerational novel about Mark and Hannah Abbott, tracing their early years and then the lives of their children as both Mark and Hannah turn 70 in 2015.
In “Fault Lines: The Geography Of Love” ($15.99 in paperback from TurkeyTail Media Farm; also for Amazon Kindle), family members narrate their own chapters as the decades go by, though Mark’s chapters are conveyed by third-person narration since, Tchudi writes me, “it’s Mark’s growth and change we come to understand/focus on.”
Hannah says in 1997, age 52, “Honestly, it’s not been that easy, being married to Mark. It’s gotten easier. But he came into this marriage so fragile. I think in some ways, that’s what attracted me to him. … But that vulnerability was accompanied by huge insecurity, neediness, a hole in his heart that couldn’t be filled.”
Mark had become a psychotherapist in Sacramento. Hannah was a renowned artist. By 2015, “Mark and Hannah had been married for over thirty years and had come into the marriage with two teenagers each — Isla was his; Sarah was hers. … Richie was Hannah’s oldest child, one who had gradually, over time, come back into the fold.” Then there was Marcus, “Mark’s son, the drug addict.”
Isla, age 42, puts it this way in 2011: “Sometimes I think our family is coming together and sometimes I think it’s falling apart. And I guess that at different times it’s both of those things.”
Hannah is the moral center of the family — calm in the face of family chaos — but will face devastating news. Mark must come to terms with a family secret hiding from him in plain sight.
In her immersive story, Tchudi treats the triumphs and heartbreaks of family life with honesty and compassion.
The public is invited to the book launch party on Sunday, June 7 from 4-7 p.m. at TurkeyTail Farm. In addition to readings from the book light refreshments (and wood-fired pizza) will be provided as well as music from the Blue Oaks Saxophone Quartet. Write susantchudi@gmail.com for directions.
Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Send review requests to dbarnett99@me.com. Columns archived at https://barnetto.substack.com