Guest post written by author Joanne Harris
Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French author, whose books include fourteen novels, two cookbooks and many short stories, including A Narrow Door, also available from Pegasus Books. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology and fantasy. In 2000, her 1999 novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and in 2013 was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II. Joanne Harris’s Broken Light releases on May 9th.
Lockdown for me was a time of bewildering disconnection. Friends I usually saw every week were suddenly out of reach. Contact with my son was reduced to FaceTime and the occasional walk in the park. To add to the discomfort, I was diagnosed with breast cancer during the second year, and the treatments – strange and frightening – were conducted in isolation, without the support of family or friends. I turned to social media for the sense of connection I craved. I also turned to re-reading favourite books, and thus re-acquainted myself with a novel that had fascinated me in my twenties: Stephen King’s Carrie.
The broad, enduring appeal of Carrie, I think, is twofold. One is the public’s fascination with strange phenomena. The second is the narrative that takes a misfit like Carrie White – abused, bullied, powerless – and gives them power. What happens? In Carrie’s case, her rage, her horror and self-loathing at the changes in her body combine with her teenage hormones in a process that culminates in an act of auto-immolation that also consumes everyone around her.
How could it be otherwise? Let’s face it, our teenage years are a mess. Raging hormones, incomprehensible physical changes, a sense of alienation, both from childhood and from approaching adulthood, plus the pressures of school, exams, peer pressure and the overwhelming need to belong. Plus, for girls especially, there’s the kind of visibility that comes with maturing sexuality; a visibility that can be dangerously empowering for those who conform to societal norms of beauty, and which, for the rest, for the misfits, can appear as a source of increased self-hatred. These feelings of teenage alienation, body hatred and despair are well-documented in literature of all genres, but especially in the world of fantasy, YA and horror, where The Babe With the Power has become such a trope that we barely notice it any more. From Buffy Summers, to Jessica Jones, to The Girl With All the Gifts, the power that comes at puberty serves as a metaphor for growing up, for the sense of freakdom and alienation shared by so many teenagers (yes, even the popular ones), and serves to empower young people, to encourage them to understand and embrace the process of transitioning from child to adult, and to negotiate the stormy waters of late adolescence, hopefully without bloodshed.
But what we hear less of is the fact that for some of us, those feelings never go away. Being a misfit doesn’t end with high school. Nor are the changes that come with puberty the only ones a female body generally has to deal with. Menopause, with its hot flushes, exhaustion, hair loss, loss of libido, night sweats, joint pains, insomnia, migraines and many other symptoms, is equally confusing, as well as coming with its own unwanted superpower: the gift of invisibility that comes with being past middle age.
In books, in films, in music, a woman’s youth is everything. That’s why we try to stay young for as long as we can: we dye our hair, we moisturize, we take hormones. The message is clear: older is bad. Older must be hidden away. The self-hatred fed to us at puberty, impressing upon us that our changing bodies are shameful, kicks in all the more strongly when menopause begins. We are no longer sexually viable: subtext: we are no longer of value to men and the patriarchy. Like all horror’s scariest monsters, The Change (always capitalized, like The Hulk, or The Thing) often remains unnamed, unacknowledged. It isolates us from others. It hides us, even from ourselves. In a society in which youth equates popularity, menopause makes misfits of all of us.
I wrote Broken Light with two thoughts in mind: first, that we never really outgrow the traumas of our childhood: and two, that coming into power doesn’t have to start in high school. My protagonist, Bernie Moon, is a British version of Carrie White: considered a bit of a freak at school (though unlike Carrie, not actively victimized), she has survived adolescence, married her high school sweetheart, become a mother, homemaker, wife and only comes into her paranormal powers (if that’s what they are) at menopause. The onset of her physical symptoms bring on unexpected mental connections – hot flashes of insight – and more, the power to reach inside someone’s mind, share their experiences, and ultimately, affect their behaviour. It’s rather less dramatic power than Carrie’s, although it is potentially just as harmful: and the story, though written with a nod to Stephen King, is much more about the consequences and responsibilities of power than its pyrotechnics. But menopause triggers Bernie’s powers just as puberty triggers Carrie’s: both are a metaphor for rage, though Carrie’s rage is reactive, directed against the bullies at school, her mother and ultimately herself, whilst Bernie’s rage, though quieter, is both feminist and political; the rage of a woman forced to endure forty years of gaslighting from a patriarchy that insists that women’s experience doesn’t count; that we are somehow in a minority.
But the #MeToo movement taught us this: that victims of male violence are not alone. Sharing is power, and that includes sharing fears and vulnerabilities. Naming the monster reduces its power. Shining a spotlight on trauma may sometimes exorcize the shame. One of the discoveries Bernie Moon makes is that her perception of female friendships, shaped by her experiences at school, are largely based on the fear of rejection. As she comes into her power, she learns to reassess this belief; to trust in other women again. The teenage world is often dominated by binary thinking: with greater life experience we (hopefully) start to understand that the binaries we might have once taken for granted (good, evil; male, female; enemy, friend; ugly, beautiful; visible, invisible; abuser, victim) are actually part of a far more complex reality. The shift from stigma to superpower is all about perception. And for those women like Bernie, raised on a distorted world picture in which they are seen only in terms of their value to men, perception – of others, of self, of their power – lies at the heart of everything.
