- Publisher: Keylight Books (June 13, 2023)
- Hardcover 352 pages
- ISBN: 9781684429547
It’s June 2012. The magical and slightly cultish River Run swim club is alive with the spirit of fun competition when a perfect storm brews between team moms and best friends, Gillian Cloud and Kristy Weinstein. The ghost of family addiction has turned up, looming over their carefully planned pasta parties, tie-dye nights, and pep rallies, forcing them to face their unresolved childhood trauma.
Gillian responds by trying to control everyone around her, while Kristy relapses into her dangerous addiction to love. Real sparks fly on the night of the derecho—a freak land hurricane—which sweeps through Northern Virginia, knocking out power for days. The storm ignites a tinder box of secrets, leaving Gillian and Kristy alone in the hot dark—their shame their only company.
At times humorous and devastating, Swimming with Ghosts is a hauntingly dark, yet uniquely tender story of the various entrapments of addiction and lingering trauma, and what it takes to overcome our hidden legacies of disgrace and discover a once unimaginable freedom made possible by confronting life’s greatest storms with the people closest to us.
Q:
Why did you write this book?
A: I’m not sure that I could NOT have written this book. For fourteen years, my family and I devoted ourselves to the wondrous, all-consuming cocoon of our county’s summer swim league. Both of my kids swam and later coached; my husband announced the Saturday morning competitions, and I repped the team which meant running the meets and getting too involved in the hiring and managing of coaches. It’s a year-round gig. No buffer exists between parents and swimmers because volunteers operate the meets. Within this tight community of hard-working adults, I watched more than a few moms and dads periodically lose their sense of equanimity.
And guess what? I had a few less than stellar moments during my tenure as a swim mom. Yikes! Full disclosure, once my daughter caught me looking up the times of a swimmer who was trash talking my son. We had a good laugh, but I had to ask myself what was pulling me into the dark corners of my psyche? What of my own stuff was I bringing to the pool? Who were my ghosts? My novels typically begin with such an uncomfy reckoning.
Back
to your question, though, the specific pathway into Swimming with Ghosts
materialized in the aftermath of the 2012 derecho, a fast and furious
Washington D.C. area land hurricane that downed massive trees and left the city
and suburbs without power for almost a full week. All the ghosts came out to
play.
Q:
Talk more about why you chose to feature the derecho in the novel?
A: First, the derecho, like other epic weather events which are sadly growing more frequent, was so dramatic for the D.C. area that most folks can tell you exactly where they were the night the storm hit. We tell stories about how we hunted down ice and batteries and camped out in our cars to charge our phones and/or blast the A/C for a glorious reprieve from the stultifying heat. At times, we lost our manners, our filters, and sometimes, our secrets. I got the idea to leverage the derecho while my family was living in our basement and my daughter was polishing my husband’s toenails periwinkle blue.
I’d already started reading tons of books
about addiction during my research for the novel, and it struck me that
relapse, like the derecho, is a perfect storm incited by a very specific set of
circumstances. I mapped out the whole plot out to a friend who was kind enough
to let me use her washing machine during the latter part of the power outage
when we were all running out of clean unmentionables. I told her that the characters in Swimming
with Ghosts hear the siren’s call of their old ways and feel defenseless
against their compulsions, as powerful and surprising as a derecho. The storm would also
serve as the perfect means to conjure a psychic ghost. Enter the destructive,
beautiful, charismatic, and hopelessly addicted Sebastian Norton.
Q:
Can you talk about the specific damage the ghost of Sebastian Norton spawns?
A: Oh, he wreaks
havoc on the lives of the main characters. He causes a friend breakup of enormous
proportions. It hurt my soul to write this because I’ve experienced more than
one friend breakup in my life, and my God have they hurt. The two main
characters, best friends Gillian Cloud and Kristy Weinstein, shred each other’s
hearts in Swimming with Ghosts because
they are both responding to the lasting effects of Sebastian Norton’s
addiction. They share a surprising bond with Sebastian, whose alcoholic cruelty, absence, and erratic behavior has
crippled them in different ways. Social researcher and author, Brene Brown,
claims that “. . . addiction, like violence, poverty, and inequality is one of
the greatest societal challenges we face today.” While I was revising the
novel, I kept noticing how the theme of addiction was embedded in numerous
popular films and television shows— This is Us, Grey’s Anatomy, The West Wing, and Breaking Bad
just to name a few—and maybe this small story about a community pool could
contribute to the conversation about a larger social ill. When it came to the
actual writing, though, I had to tuck away such grandiose thoughts as well as
my research and focus on the specific nature of my characters’ trouble.
Otherwise, the book risked coming off as preachy, which I did NOT want to
happen.
Q:
Tell me more about the research you did conduct on the topic of addiction. Also,
why did you focus on love addiction?
A:
I read a ton, likely more than 50 books. I powered through How Al-Anon Works
for Families and Friends of Alcoholics the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book,
and myriad memoirs about addiction like: Bill Clegg’s Ninety Days,
Leslie Jamison’s, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath as well
as Susan Burton’s Empty an excellent narrative that delves into the intersection
between food addiction and competitive swimming. That’s the easy answer,
though. The more difficult answer is that addiction runs on my mom’s side of the family, and I learned
how my own family history has informed how I live, love, parent, write, breathe.
And in so doing, I listened hard to many, many people tell their stories about
addiction, relapse, and recovery. I’m still listening.
I picked love addiction because I
thought it would be fascinating to look at a lesser known and perhaps
misunderstood form of the disease. Whereas sex addicts get high from sex, love
addicts rely on romance, fantasy, or intrigue for their dopamine hits. But when
all is said and done, addiction, no matter what form—sex, shopping, alcohol,
food—is a destructive force for addicts and the people who touch their lives.
In Swimming with Ghosts, Kristy, is an addict in repose, meaning she’s
not “using” but she’s not in recovery either, and I thought that was an
incredibly electric juncture to place her character, and of course, her family
too, because according to Al-Anon, addiction is a family disease.
Q:
So does this pertain to the term “no-fault fiction” you’ve talked about in your
essays and interviews.
A: Exactly. I try to
think about my characters in the context of a larger system which is why I
often turn to the Bowen family systems theory as a guide for figuring out their
broader emotional landscapes. I spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of
crisis shall befall my peeps and how each one will respond to these “derechos.”
In Swimming with Ghosts, Gillian over-functions, her best friend, Kristy,
starts “using” again, and Gillian’s child, Justin, wears himself down trying to
avert impending disaster. And Gillian’s husband, Charlie, can’t forget him,
makes some really bad judgment calls as he alternately gains and loses his
sense of self. If I’m doing my job right, the reader will feel compassion for the
entire cast of characters even when they are up to no good.
Q:
Talk about the humor and hope in this novel.
A: I do entertain
myself while I’m writing, but I didn’t actually think the novel was that funny
until I was reading the proofs. I think the humor comes from slightly
exaggerating how ferociously these parents invest in the traditions of the
summer team (catered versus potluck pasta pep rally nights, band versus a D.J.
at the big luau, etc.) I chuckled and cringed at some of my own ridiculousness
and inflexibility when I was a swim rep, and um, now as a human.
Regarding
hope, the author Margaret Meyers, one of my mentors, wrote a blurb for my first
novel that I keep taped to my computer. She generously said, “Brafman offers a
fresh, vital narrative about . . .the necessity of wrestling with the dark
angel of a painful family legacy until it blesses you.” I do believe that these
fictitious River Run parents, and my loved ones too, can ascend the multi-generational
challenges they think they are doomed to repeat, and maybe transform these
legacies into blessings to boot. One moment at a time. And one more thing about
hope, my wish for this book is to convey this very notion to a wide swath of readers
and of course to provide an entertaining read they can pop in their summer totes.
Thanks for posting the Q&A. I was a swimmer growing-up, and my mom was very involved! We would both probably enjoy reading this one.
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