This isn’t a fairy tale.
You are twenty-five years old in the crooked part of Hackney near the park. The month is August, and you have packed up your life in two suitcases, which now stand, zipped and silent, near the door. For the past four months, you have been working as an au pair in a house that has five stories, six children, and twelve newborn kittens. But now it is time to go home, back to America, the country where you were born.
Your London life is not your real life, it is a temporary reality, filled with hand-rolled cigarettes and pints of warm lager and a summer that is more like a haze than a season. It is living on ninety pounds a week, and spending it all on falafel kebabs, the tube, and pints at the pub. It is spending your time sweeping the kitchen of the house; cleaning the counters, the toilets, washing all the clothes, picking the children up from school and making them food. It means throwing yourself a birthday party with your friends from college, a costume party where no one dresses up but you, wearing a little black dress and pink wig the color of lipstick.
You do not know it yet, but you are living the life of the book you have not written.
The physical experience of working as an au pair will later inspire the main character of your experimental novel. The main character of The Flat Woman works as a cleaner for a hotel, except in her case, the hotel is responsible for environmental crimes. The lipstick-pink wig will, years later, serve as inspiration for the cover of the book. Nine years later, your Instagram will be filled with squares of pink, the same magenta shade as your birthday wig, to celebrate the publication of The Flat Woman.
You only know that you do not want to go home, to America, the country where you were born, because you are at sea in the world. And maybe this is a time when you aren’t really sure where home is, if it is anywhere, and besides, the place you are heading toward is not a place you’ve ever been before. Louisiana, Baton Rouge. You are heading to a program, a program that has awarded you and seven strangers a scholarship to learn the craft of writing and begin the career you always dreamed of having.
You spend the days before you leave in an apartment in the crooked part of Hackney. Your friend’s apartment, but he is not there, he is somewhere else. He is a writer too; with one book out and another on the way, and a part of you wishes you were him, at the end of something instead of at the beginning. You sleep in his bed and wash in his shower, his other roommates come and go, the apartment has a very grainy, specific kind of light, washed out and yellow, that filters in through the cheap blinds. The sun is not very strong in London, even in August. The light has a specific feeling, the feeling of being nowhere and somewhere and something a little in between. You wait around and waste time inside and outside of the house. You meet your friends in the park where you drink beers from tall cans and listen to them make plans for a season when you won’t be around.
One day on the tube, a man making his way past you puts his hands on your hips. Lightly, you feel the pressure on the edge of your back, the place where your jeans end. You don’t know him. There is a sudden seizure in your body, muscles shiver as they are wracked by anger. Then, you turn to the empty orange seats of an empty train: the man has gone away, out the doors of the overground, where he has disappeared.
You have no idea that in a few years, you will rewrite this scene from a different perspective. A moment where the main character of your book, a young woman, gets touched by a man behind her at a concert. Turning around, she is unable to identify the hands that violated her:
She spins around. Five men are pressed close to her; the crowd is a mass of limbs and mouths and sounds. In the dark she squints, cheeks flushed. But no one meets her eyes. There is no clear body attached to the hand.
You do not know it, but the lost summer of being both nowhere and somewhere will drive your depiction of the protagonist in your book. It would be reductive and untrue and maybe sexist to say this character is a sublimination of yourself; you and she are different in every vital way. But she is a reflection of some small part of the way you felt that summer, blown up into life-size. A little part of you that you knew had a universal origin. You wrote her because you wanted to understand where you came from in a city so far away from home.
This isn’t a fairy tale, but in some ways, the story of The Flat Woman is like one. In these kinds of stories, the father often commits a horrible sin against his daughter, a fact which is never condemned in the story. His violence as silent as the woman’s pain who receives it. There is something about male violence against women that seems to you at this time in your life incredibly invisible. The Flat Woman also depicts a world where violence against women is embedded into the fabric of society.
Fairy tales, like your story, depict the near-universal experience of female trauma. Your book reads almost nothing like a fairy tale. And yet, for years, you thought about the relationship between fairy tales and your work. The depiction of gender-based violence links your story and those of Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Charles Perrault. These stories have flat female protagonists who have effectively been stamped out by their experience of violence in the world as women. Instead of characters, the reader finds a narrative void where a person should be. Because trauma has wiped their faces and their voices out. As a girl, you were impacted by these representations of femininity in the media you consumed.
Your main character is a reflection of these stories. In your novel, you use flatness consciously, integrating it into a feminist critique.
The Flat Woman reflects this theme — of character as absence — in many ways. But mostly, you feel it in the language and the voice, which is the heartbeat of the book. The voice of effacement is all over the book, but it is especially vivid when describing dead or broken things. In this world, the dead things are usually animals or women. In an early scene, a seagull falls from the sky onto a politician’s head while he is giving a speech. The dead bird is described in the following passage:
On the stage, the seagull lies at his feet…. The gull thumps its wings against the stage twice then stops. The camera zooms closer on the gull’s eyes, glassy and black and dead. The bird doesn’t beat its wings.
Here, the description of the dead bird has a dead, or flat, affect. (It is, after all, titled The Flat Woman). The last three sentences each are the same length, which empties out the voice of the narrative, making the language monotone. Through grammatical parallelism, the flat quality of the language mirrors the narrative absence found in female characters in fairy tales.
Just like the characters in fairy tales, the female protagonist of The Flat Woman is distant and sometimes one dimensional. Our main character is watching this scene on the television, but where is she in this passage? Where are her feelings, her interiority, her psychological development?
Some answers to these questions lie in the following line, which was actually cut from the book just before it went to print:
If her mind is a stem, a voice inside her tells her not to grow.
That line embodies a lot of the themes of the book. In the Flat Woman, the misogyny of the world around her shapes her character. In this sentence, the reader understands the world has socialized the protagonist so that she has learned to hold herself back. Just like the girls in fairy tales, who are seen but rarely heard, thoughtful, small, and quiet, the protagonist of the Flat Woman is estranged from her own thoughts and feelings through the process of her own denial. The world has set her up for the horrors that later unfold.
You will wish you had not cut this line from the book.
But this is not a fairy tale. Sometimes the best lines get chopped out.
You will have only just begun to think about these things — the representation of women in stories and violence against women in real life — from the perspective of a woman, not a girl, when you start to write your book.
In that London bedroom with the grainy light that is something between coming and going, your mind forms as you start to think about your own relationship to your gender. Lying in that London bedroom with grainy light, the girl who will write The Flat Woman begins, there in the crooked part of Hackney, on that bed that is not your bed, in a city that is not your city, in the summer of August 2015 that is not a season but a haze. The book will be a reflection of the questions you had about femininity, violence, and environmental harm when you were twenty-five years old.
In a few weeks, your summer in London will end. You will board a plane. On your flight from New Jersey to New Orleans you will sit next to a twenty-year-old who will ask you about your belief in God. You will take a Greyhound bus from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and arrive terrified around 2am in the bus station surrounded by men with pitted faces. You will take a taxi and arrive at your apartment near 3am, when the air, unimaginably, is still hot enough to scald the inside of your mouth. This will be your first time in the deep south. By the time you arrive, you will feel like you have landed in the absolute wrong place for you. Little will you know you will spend the next decade of your life here.
The next day you will start writing the book. In the process of writing the book, you will come to find your own voice, not in the way of women in fairy tales, but like the person you were always supposed to become.
The main character reminds me of a feeling I had once on an airplane. This was during a year in my life where I lived in the Dominican Republic and England and rarely came home. Once, when the plane was landing at Heathrow, I couldn’t remember where I was: outside the black plane window seemed to wobble, as if unmoored from the sky, before finally I heard the wheels skid against the tarmac. Eventually, I got my bearings, but there was a moment where I felt like I was floating, untethered from any place at all. The point-of-view character in The Flat Woman is an expression of that feeling, and what that means in the context of life in the world as a woman.
Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her hybrid work, fiction, and poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and [PANK] among others. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana State University. She is the author of The Flat Woman from FC2.
