The Mirror of Our Discontent (Lynn Kerstan)

Most of us live many lives. The one we have, of course, however much we dislike it. And all the lives we want to have, experienced only in our imaginations.

We escape into stories. We fantasize. Some of us even project our own deepest wishes onto other people, especially our children. We try to spare them what we suffered. Give them all the good things we never had.

But I don’t have kids. Only a cat. And there’s not much way I can project myself into his life, which is pretty much tied up with sleeping, lounging in comfortable places, eating, playing, letting others clean up his messes, and being admired. Come to think of it, that might just be the perfect life. Well, except for the neutering.

So I guess my fantasies get loaded onto the characters in my books. They are all quite different, of course, those men and women. When I bid farewell to a hero, I make sure the hero of the next book is nothing like the one I left behind. Same for the heroines. But after creating 19 pairs of published lovers and more than a few that never saw print, I can see patterns emerging.

Their similarities to me aren’t many, but most of them share, in one form or another, my deepest-held, immutable values. Those are few and unsurprising. What I notice, though, is how often my characters have minor-league qualities I always wanted but utterly lack.

Such as perfect white teeth. Not very likely in Regency England, where my previous books were set, back when there were no braces, crowns, caps, or Crest White Strips. But surely there were people with exceptional teeth–stands to reason–and it happens that my characters were among them. In the same way they take frequent baths and almost never have bad breath. I hasten to add that I personally bathe and hair-wash and floss obsessively. Am clean, thank you very much. But the perfect teeth? Never had ‘em, never will.

Same goes for flawless skin. Except for the heroic scars, or the occasional heroine zit to be played for comedy, my protagonists are blessed with superb complexions. Sigh of envy.

I’m sounding pretty shallow here. But there was real, if temporary, pain involved. As I completed college and graduate school, my great dream was to attend Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and serve my country in the diplomatic corps. Travel! Glamor! Excitement! Challenge! Maybe save the world.

OK, never thought that would happen. But the rest of it seemed possible. Except that I lack the ability to learn any language that isn’t English. Yes, I could cram well enough to get good grades in school, but once the test was over, everything I’d retained for a few weeks hotfooted it out of my brain. Permanently. So unless the State Departed assigned me to the Court of St. James for life, my dream career could never be. And it wasn’t.

Which helps explain why so many of my characters have a remarkable facility with languages. Current heroine-in-progress Katia speaks six of them fluently and is studying Japanese. It’s relevant to the story, her language proficiency, but I could as easily have given her another skill set. I just keep projecting my own inadequacies onto my characters . . . up to the point they rebel and start acting out.

In that, they are like children, demanding to become their own selves in spite of my need to sculpt each one of them into an idealized, fictional Me. And they always win. They invariably wind up being more interesting and complex and proactive than my own projections of unrealized fantasies. It’s a good thing, too. I’m not good hero material. In my wildest dreams, I’d never scratch up their courage, their tenacity, or their energy.

And never, ever, could I work my way out of the trouble I throw at them!