growing up writing

It reads like a bad Catherine Cookson novel:

You are one of the most unpleasant persons I have ever met. Your behaviours…demonstrate someone who is vindictive, vengeful, oppositional, a bully, abusive, immature, foul mouthed, selfish, destructive, vicious, pathetic, weak, manipulative, malicious, greedy and someone who totally lacks any sort of ownership for their actions or behaviours.

And so begins my memoir of my divorce. The quote is from my ex and he doesn’t like me anymore. It is part of a two page email listing my sins, with evidence, and he signs it with ‘regards’.

My question is, does the truth have any place in fiction? I’ve tried my hand at romance writing, three Mills & Boon rejections twenty years ago, with the final rejection boasting a single pencilled word in the margin, ‘almost!’. I still have the editor’s name and I will track her down one day and send her an excerpt from my newest work,’ The Timber Cutter’s Daughter’, set on the Atherton Tablelands of Far North Queensland in the early 19oos, not a romance so much as a saga.

I have another novel, written as part of my Phd in Creative Arts & Communications, called of all things, ‘Bringing Down The Moon’, which I’ve now changed to ‘The Miner’s Wife’ (did I mention my ex was a miner?). My novel, a literary tome of a thing, is about the slow descent into craziness of Glory, wife, mother, lover and woman living out her revenge in a town on the Nullabor.

She stands out at first, blond, pretty and fresh, setting out from the city, full of hope, wanderlust, and adventure. She paints her name on a rock at the Dundas in capitals then opts for two kids and a good pay-packet in Norseman. Welcome to Norseman, middle of nowhere. It could have been anywhere. A good wife will have the children bathed and sitting quietly when daddy gets home. Greet him with a smile. A shift-work smile. Norseman, a good place to bring up the kids. It’s taken a generation but now she’s a local. Safe, if you don’t count the border hoppers, east to west, west to east, keeping the coppers busy. No cappuccinos though, except at the Rainbow. Sans ambience, the Rainbow, but it no longer matters.

Now her dress is a washed out blue to match her eyes. She, who had once had an inner glow, is as faded as her dress, like the trucks covered in a fine white layer of mullock dust.

Life does that to a woman in a mining town.

The truth, as we know, is stranger than fiction, but do we really want to read about it? I’m not sure I even want to write about it. Maybe I’ll stick with romance novels…