DareDeLano, Abilene – what it means to love and to lose?

 

The novel Abilene is set in a small town of Texas. Three strong southern women, a  twelve-year-old Len, her mother Cora, and her Aunt Jean toss with emotions of love and loss in this incredibly written novel. Leni is comitted to find her own father who abandoned her, and she goes on a journey of finding him. But, who knows what will happen on the way?!The story is told through the perspective of three splendid women, and - most importantly – this amazing book will leave you pleasently surprised!

Down below you can read my Q&A with the author of Abilene DareDeLano. It was my pleasure interviewing our amazing author. Hope you enjoy reading it!

 

1.     Books by Lana: What inspired you to write Abilene?

 

Dare DeLano: For Abilene, the character of Len came to me first, and I had actually written a story about her, but then put it away for a while I worked on some other things, because it didn’t really have enough of a plot. It had characters I loved, and a setting I really wanted to write about, but I just didn’t have a sense of the rest of the story outside of Len as a character who was longing to find her father. I was really struggling with it.

Then, one night I went to a Tim McGraw concert. I don’t typically listen to country music to be honest, so it was a little outside of what I would usually do, but I went with a friend – and it turned out to be a great show, he is really an incredible performer. I was watching Tim McGraw put on this amazing show, and watching the fans go crazy, and all of a sudden, I just had this thought – what if Len’s father was someone like this? And once I had that character of Len’s father in my head I was able to flesh out her mother Cora’s story of long lost love as well, and the novel really fell into place at that point.

For me, every idea for a novel has come about in a similar way -- two completely separate things come together in an unexpected way in my head. It’s like a crash of lightning where I then have this story idea that I get really excited about.

2. Books by Lana: Is the novel Abilene based on real-life events?

 

DareDeLano: No – it is entirely fiction. But that said, I do feel like there is maybe a little bit of me in each of my main characters.

 

Len is a precocious twelve-year-old, who has a bit of a gift. She has blackouts that cause visions, and she can sometimes sense things before they happen. But probably her standout trait is that she is stubborn. She gets it in her head that the country music singer she saw interviewed on a TV program is her father, she sets her mind on meeting him, and nothing can dissuade her. I don't have visions, so I don't have personal experience there, but I might have a little of her stubbornness in me!

Cora is an idealist at heart, and her story is really one of lost love. Len’s father, the love of her life, left her before she even knew she was pregnant, and she never knew why. There is a secret that is revealed at the end of the novel – I’m not going to give it away here – but the lead up to revealing that secret was really important to me. I wanted to do that in a way that had an emotional impact. And to get that impact I had to really channel those feelings of first love – all the nostalgia, and the pain of that first heartbreak. Cora feels all those things throughout her search for Edison, and I needed the reader to come along with her in that journey so that the final chapters of the novel would have the emotional impact I wanted.

 

Jean’s main traits are strength and perseverance. By the time the story starts, she has completely lost her sense of who she is and lost all faith in herself. She’s in jail for shooting her husband Roger after finding him in bed with another woman, and in thinking about how she got to this point in her life, she has to reassess everything she’s been through. She has to pick herself up from the absolute lowest point she can imagine, and find the strength to move forward from it.

 

3.     Books by Lana: What is the moral of the story in the novel Abilene, in your opinion?

 

DareDeLano: First and foremost, when I write fiction, my main goal is just to tell a story. If I ever get swept up in trying too hard to bring a theme or a moral into something I’m writing, or teach the reader a lesson, that is when I ultimately feel the fiction doesn’t work – it can come out as too didactic and that is not what I want to do as a writer.

But I think as humans, the way we make sense of our world is through story. And hearing someone else’s story can teach us things about our own lives, and about big themes like love, loss, and family.

So my other goal in writing fiction is always to move the reader emotionally – I want the reader to feel something. I want them to be invested in the characters.

In Abilene, one thing I really wanted to do was to write Jean’s story so that anyone who has ever been in an emotionally abusive relationship could see themselves in her story. And perhaps those who haven’t been in that type of relationship could recognize patterns and warning signs they might not have been aware of otherwise.

To write Jean’s story, from her point of view, I did a lot of research. I read books on emotional abuse, I visited online communities and read a number of first-hand accounts from women who were in emotionally abusive relationships. And I thought about and explored my own experiences in relationships. So many women who had been in emotionally abusive relationships talked about feeling like they were going crazy and feeling like they just couldn’t trust their own perspective or judgement anymore. The controlling, narcissistic abuser will do that in a relationship – they will invalidate your experience and your opinions. They are very good at manipulation and will turn everything around on you until you believe that you are the one who is argumentative and controlling and forgetful and lazy and selfish, until you don’t even trust your own perspective anymore. It is a very slow creeping – the relationship doesn’t start out with those behaviours of course; it creeps in over time.

That slow creeping is actually quite difficult to show in fiction. But that was what I really wanted to show. In the beginning of the novel Jean doesn’t have a name for what she has been experiencing. She thinks that she’s lost her mind a bit – she thinks she is going crazy. Her journey is this sort of slow building to a realization that she has actually been manipulated and gaslit and subject to narcissistic abuse. It can be so difficult to recover from that because that type of abuse chips away at your sense of self – so Jean feels as if she doesn’t even know herself anymore. She’s lost in many ways. And throughout the novel her story is really about her finding herself again after this really traumatic marriage.

And I think for each of the three characters there is that theme of finding oneself. For Jean is it after an abusive marriage. For Cora, it is about remembering who she was before she became a mother. And for Len, there is a sense that finding her father will help her fill that gap in her life.