Introduction
Recently I had the painful pleasure of reading two exceptionally fine novels that examine the effects of mentally unstable people on their families. In Jody Hesler’s Without You Here, a niece is haunted by her favorite aunt’s suicide, while Pat Spears’s Hotel Impala delivers a devastating portrait of two children confronting the chaos and danger of homelessness because of their mother’s mental decline.
The problems described in these stories are not fictional. The National Institute of Health (NIH) reports that nearly sixty million adults live with some form of mental illness. After a long, steady decline in national suicide rates, those numbers began steadily ticking up in the late 1990s and have generally risen ever since, with nearly fifty thousand people in the U.S. taking their own lives in 2022, up three percent from the previous year.
I have not had the pleasure of meeting Jody Hesler, but I count Pat Spears as a friend. I met her through the vibrant writing community in Tallahassee. Both women are talented authors.
Interview
Donna Meredith: First, I would like to know if any specific experience led you to the writing of your novel.
Jody Hobbs Hesler: I like to say that every story is a true story, but not the way you might expect. Noreen and Nonie’s lives borrow from fragments of my own experience—I’ve lost some dear friends and a non-immediate family member to suicide; my parents’ marriage was precarious like Noreen’s; a good friend stayed too long in a dangerous marriage for fear that her mental health history would cost her the custody of her kids. These experiences, and the breadth of emotions they encompass, certainly influenced this novel, but the resulting story belongs to Noreen and Nonie most of all.
Pat Spears
Pat Spears: Decades ago, when I was graduate student and teaching assistant at Florida State University, I drove away from the Strozier library one night in February – I remember because my birthday was approaching – thinking about dinner and getting warm. As I approached the intersection of Woodward and Tennessee Streets, I caught sight of a man and woman, my age or slightly older, and a child, maybe three or four, huddled together. The boy sat slumped on what appeared to be a cardboard suitcase, and I imagined him both cold and hungry. He leaned against the woman I took to be his mother. The light changed, and I drove away. Though I felt I should have stopped, at the time I had no idea what I might have done. But the image of the boy has stayed with me. Years later, when I began to hear the voices of Grace, her younger sister, Zoey, and their mom, Leah, who led me to write Hotel Impala, I believe it was an echo of that little boy to whom I failed to respond. I want to believe that a random encounter, decades earlier, had planted a story seed; an emotional memory that has remained. Perhaps it is true that our hearts hold memories, waiting for our conscious minds to catch up.
DM: So both of you had a personal experience that spurred you to write these novels. It is also interesting that both of your stories present these mentally unstable characters as having some admirable qualities. Jody, you write this: “As it is, Noreen’s Nonie never has to exist as anything but that magical, whimsical person who loved her best in the world. Even if she also hurt her the most. The space she’d filled had been so vast, Noreen’s never managed to fill it back up.” Jody, please share a few examples of the ways Nonie brings magic into Noreen’s life.
Jody Hobbs Hesler
JHH: Nonie and Noreen are both outliers in their fairly ordinary family. They have the same unruly hair, the same distinctive eyes, and the same tendency toward flights of whimsy and despair. Most of the time when Nonie’s around, she plays with Noreen, imagining shapes in the clouds with her, daydreaming about a magical future, chasing butterflies, reading books. Meanwhile, at school Noreen is painfully shy and reads instead of interacting with her classmates. Her best friend is secretly brutish and cruel, which means Noreen is punished when she socializes the way everyone insists she should. And her mother worries about her, about her reading, about her very small social circle, about the possibility that she’ll turn out like Nonie too, with the same troubles and the same resistance to fitting into a stable adult life. Nonie doesn’t worry. She seems to understand Noreen better than anyone else, and she makes Noreen feel special and loved and free to be herself.
DM: I found Nonie to be a lovable character and I’m sure others will too. Pat, your character Leah also has whimsical traits. Could you share a few instances when she is the kind of playful mother children would adore?
PS: When Leah is faithful to her regimen of drugs to manage her illness, she can be fun and engaging. In one scene she prepares an elaborate family breakfast that includes smiley-face pancakes for Zoey, who is five years old. She served Tupelo honey with a theatrical flourish, believing it was Daniel’s favorite, though he secretly disliked honey.
Grace’s favorite moment with her mom came one evening as Leah and the girls were driving home with the radio blaring. When Leah hears a song she loves, she screams with excitement and stops the Impala astride a public sidewalk. She gets out of the car and begins to dance, inviting Grace and Zoey to join her. When Grace hesitates, she declares, “Yes, my darling girl. Life’s most precious gifts are lived in the sweetness of the unexpected. Joy must never be cautious.” As they danced, it was as though she, Zoey, and Mom were the only three voices on the planet, and she finds herself howling with joy.
DM: She dances with abandon like no one is watching. That was a great scene! If only Leah would stay on her meds–and doesn’t every family dealing with a mentally unstable member worry about that? Now, despite having good qualities, both Nonie and Leah have serious problems. Jody, how would you describe Nonie’s issues?
JHH: Nonie experiences marked emotional highs and lows and, since childhood, has suffered panic attacks that wrack her mercilessly. She’s also impulsive—in the best and worst ways. Her spontaneity can make her great fun to be around or land her in a situation that quickly snowballs out of her control.
Today Nonie would likely be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. In her day, it would have been called manic depressive disorder. She also suffered from panic disorder, a designation which made its first appearance in the DSM the year of Nonie’s treatment. I wanted her symptoms to be as authentic and fully developed as the rest of her personality, so I interviewed specialists and friends and acquaintances with similar issues; read several books (from memoirs to more academic volumes); watched YouTube vlogs from people with similar diagnoses, as well as Australian-government-issued mental health documentaries; and more.
Regardless of diagnoses, Nonie was someone who struggled daily to feel comfortable inside her own skin. She tried as hard as she could.
Donna Meredith
DM: I think that’s one reason I could relate to Nonie. There are times most of us feel uncomfortable in our own skin. Jody, your novel looks at intergenerational effects of mental illness. Tell us a little about that.
JHH: Mental health patterns exist in many families, and so do stigma and shame. I wanted to show all of that without casting anyone as a typical bad guy. Nonie’s uncle apparently suffered the same kind of mental health struggles she did, so when Nonie’s mother is impatient and cruel with her, we glimpse through her gruff exterior to a complicated past and the open wound of her grief. When Noreen arrives on the scene, displaying similar patterns, we understand why several generations of fear, stigma, and shame attach to her. We also feel how the weight of that angst pressures Noreen to question herself throughout her life and to keep her own mental health secret.
DM: It must be very frightening to know that a tendency toward suicide might run in your family. Pat, Leah has some similarities to Nonie, but also some differences. How does Leah’s illness affect her life?
PS: Leah is intelligent and ambitious. She believes her daughter’s futures depend upon her alone, which results in a fixation on her work performance. The side effects of her medications make her feel sluggish and unfocused, so she repeatedly reduces the doses of her medications, or stops taking them altogether, in an effort to increase her productivity at work. Over time, her failure to manage her illness leads to not only losing her job but also her ability to effectively parent her children.
In one early scene, Grace is counting on her mother to take her and a friend to a concert they’re dying to see. Leah leaves work early for that purpose, but her illness takes over. Through a series of delusional side trips, she ends up in a cemetery, talking to her dead father. As she drives away from the cemetery, she sees a brilliant light and drives a glittering pathway cut between two universes; where gravity is but a tether to be broken, and beyond is the gift of silence and its deliverance. Still driving, she closes her eyes, and surrenders herself to an angel of mercy.
This incident puts Leah in the hospital for a time, but that provides only a short-term fix.
DM: Because Grace and Zoey live with their mother day-to-day, they are affected more directly by her illness than Noreen is by her Aunt Nonie. Tell us a little about what her children experience.
PS: For Grace and Zoey, coping with their mother’s illness begins with denial. Early on, we learn that the family mantra is: Our Mom is fine. It’s just that she sometimes lives inside her head.
As Leah’s illness progresses, the girls experience acute anxiety, fear, uncertainty, shame, and abandonment. The younger sister, Zoey, goes from being a frightened five-year-old, trying to understand her mother’s sporadic and unpredictable withdrawals, to an angry and cynical pre-teen who doesn’t trust either of her parents.
The older sister, Grace, becomes hyper-vigilant, believing she must take care of both her sister and her mother. When bad things inevitably happen, Grace’s feelings of guilt manifest as self-blame.
Leah’s detachment from reality eventually put everyone in danger. At that point, Grace must choose whether to keep her promise to her mother that she would never leave her mother alone, or to find a way to get herself and Zoey to a place of safety.
DM: Having Grace tell part of the story was a brilliant move. I could really feel her protectiveness toward her younger sister, the way she is forced into the role of the adult though she is only a child. Not only the children, but Leah’s husband is affected by her illness, right? Did you see his problems to be of his own making—or mostly occurring as a result of living with Leah?
PS: Daniel has his own problems, certainly. Clinging to an unrealistic dream of opening his own auto shop, in an effort to maintain a connection with the father who abandoned him, has left him financially strapped and feeling like a failure. His feelings of inadequacy are exacerbated by the fact that Leah’s instability keeps him perpetually off balance. But he is committed to his family and his love for his daughters is unwavering.
Daniel’s lowest moment comes when Leah, in a rage, picks a fight with him and then lies to a judge to get a restraining order against him. Being unable to see his girls and make sure they are safe rocks his world to such an extent that at times he believes Leah’s assessment that he is worthless as a husband and father. Nevertheless, he never gives up on trying to make sure his daughters are okay and that they know that he loves them.
He violates the restraining order multiple times to rescue them from the effects of Leah’s illness. But he finds an unlikely ally in a female police officer who at one point almost arrests him for one of the restraining order violations. Later in the story, this officer, along with her wife, a veterinarian who has her own acquaintance with Leah, helps Daniel set the girls’ lives on an entirely different path.
DM: I thought Daniel was a likeable character, even if he wasn’t always behaving responsibly. His love for his wife and children comes through. Jody, Noreen’s marriage to George is less than ideal—even though he’s not a totally bad man. Tell us a little about that relationship.
JHH: Early drafts cast George as such an ogre that no one would buy that Noreen would choose to be with him at all. I had to learn to temper his control with connection, the very balance that defines many abusive relationships. When Noreen meets George, she doesn’t trust herself. She’s about to graduate college and craves a sense of groundedness to build the rest of her life upon. George is stolid, steadfast, instantly devoted. He seems like the perfect counterbalance against Noreen’s less directed energy. It takes her a long time to understand that his calmness cloaks more nefarious intentions within the relationship.
DM: As a reader, it took me a while to see George’s dark side, so it crept into my consciousness, much the way it did for Noreen. These novels contain scenes that were painful to read. I suspect they were also painful to write. Which scenes caused you the most anguish as you wrote them?
JHH: I’ll be a little vague to avoid spoilers, but the scene where Ted and Ruth go to Nonie’s apartment and realize how out of balance her life has become, along with the next scene, where Nonie drives to her parents’ house in a dissociative haze, with nothing more than a toothbrush and a hairbrush—both of those scenes were gutting to write. In an early draft, that first scene was told from Nonie’s sister’s point of view. Eventually, I dropped that third perspective, and figuring out how to switch that particular scene to Nonie’s point of view underscored how lost she was, which made the writing yet more painful and also proved that Nonie’s was the more powerful point of view to inhabit there.
PS: I put my characters in jeopardy multiple times throughout the book, but the hardest scenes to write were the ones where the danger to the children was emotional rather than physical.
One of the most difficult ones was the scene where Grace has to choose between taking care of her mother – and keeping her promise never to leave her – and getting herself her little sister out of a very dangerous situation that Leah has refused to leave. The anguish that the decision caused Grace was hard to write. But at this point, Grace has a friend who uses anger and sarcasm to mask her own pain, and I allow her to voice some of what that scene felt like with this line: “There are no shortcuts to knowing we can’t save somebody. ’Specially one we keep wanting to love in the face of all the bad shit they do”
SPOILER ALERT! Don’t read past this point if you don’t want to know the ending!
DM: Both of the novels reveal characters to have surprising strength near the end. Could you talk about those strengths?
JHH: It was enormously important for me that this story portray the fullness of Nonie’s personality. A grave effect of stigma is that it reduces people to a single diagnosis or tragedy, as if that’s all they were. As if their love didn’t matter. The takeaway here, I hope, is that love always matters. Nonie loved Noreen so much, and so specifically, that Noreen still felt beloved twenty years later, when she needed it most, when it gave her the power to choose differently and better for herself and her daughter.
PS: I try to make it clear throughout the novel that Leah truly loves her children, despite her inability most of the time to take care of them. Again and again, the loving Mom in Leah struggles to surface, only to be swallowed again and again by her illness. Near the end, during one of her more lucid periods, Leah finds the strength to make a decision that drives the remainer of the story: she accepts the fact that she will never be able to successfully parent her children, so she decides to leave them. What happens to Leah, and to the girls, as a result of that decision I will leave to the reader to discover, but making it was definitely Leah’s strongest and most unselfish moment.
DM: Congratulations to both of you for creating such loving portraits of mentally unstable women and showing how their illnesses affect their families. Thank you both for taking the time to talk to Southern Literary Review about your fine novels. We at SLR wish you every success in your writing careers.
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