It’s important to recognize anger and trauma and find a way to soothe those maladies into something useful and understandable. This is especially true when the trauma is part of your novel. So, the moment New Year’s Day arrived I felt the urgency and need to read through my novel and get it in the best shape possible increase. Along with that urgency, I found myself wondering why I always get to a certain point in the novel and begin to stall. I love the novel and enjoy reading it but there is a point, the same point, where it becomes difficult to read.

I have not lived in Detroit in about 15 years but the remnants of the years I spent there haunt my soul. To be honest, it’s really just the last 5 or so years I lived there that were remarkably horrible. Before that I was shielded from Detroit and I had no idea what evil lurked there. Lives Lived begins in the present but when the past comes back to haunt the main characters, they are forced to remember the past and extract usefulness from what remains. When they remember the past, they start at the beginning and trace along the fault lines of their lives. My protagonist, like myself, attends Catholic school as a child and is thrust into the abyss of the Detroit Public School system once she enters high school. This untimely entrance into a world she has no knowledge of leads her down the darkest paths she will ever know. As a teenager she is traumatized by these experiences. The level of disregard Detroit deals her is so damaging she is unable to articulate the bruises coherently. She hollows herself out so she can’t feel anything and the events that take place become small. Bits and pieces of the occurrences leave marks on her unconscious but for the most part, the reality of life is too tragic for her to touch.

To make it out of Detroit alive is a miracle. To make it out of Detroit alive, drug free and without numerous children coming from broken homes, is beyond miraculous. To keep yourself buried, underneath people you had to be to make it through whatever situation you happened upon, is not the ideal way to live. Once it’s all over and you dare to come back into the world, you never want to venture back into that place void of feeling. Why is the first part of my novel polished? Because it speaks of rebirth and rising above the past to live life as one’s self, whomever that self may be. I live that every day and I champion all those who know themselves and understand the construction of their core. However, when the story calls for Gabrielle to revisit the past, I find myself avoiding the narrative. Why? Because I don’t want to remember what it was like to pull out those useful but crippling defense mechanisms that leave you numb.

Today I was reading the Detroit News. Bodies burned in a car trunk. A kid accidentally shot himself in the head on New Year’s Day because shooting is how some folks in Michigan bring in the New Year. Detroit’s homicide rate is expected to rise by 15% for 2011. It was already one of the highest in the nation for 2010. Detroit is on the verge of a financial crisis…the stories just go on and on. I can only read so much before I feel that old frustration and pain return. Something is wrong. The haunting tales of my home leave a chill in my soul. What does it feel like to live in the city of Detroit? Why is the city so filled with hate? It’s not a nice story to tell but I think it deserves to be told. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I was there. I know far more than I would like to about cold-blooded murder, rape, drugs, hate and feeling like a bug trapped inside of a bottle. The legacy of Detroit’s red-hot bitterness lays dormant at the base of my brain but believe me, I remember.

I think I’m ready to go back into the narrative. I had to take a break from the streets of Detroit but I have to return there and read through what I’ve written. It’s difficult to read slivers from my subconscious articulated and given like a gift, full of malice to my protagonist, but it is necessary. It’s 4:36 in the evening. Plenty of time to finish another read through and do some minor editing.