Sylvia Kuzman

This opening scene of my memoir, which comes after a Preface, introduces the protagonist (me), a secondary character (my mother), the setting, a major antagonistic force (unexpected medical events) and a secondary one (my mother’s trauma-based fear). It is the inciting incident. 

The Girl, The Physicist and The Beauty of Reality

Chapter One 

I’m floating through a vast darkness. Light gradually breaks through, like early dawn through heavy fog. Thought and form precipitate. 

My senses compete to be the first to let me know where I am. Bright fluorescent lights. Staccato beeping. A nauseating smell—like disinfectant mixed with cafeteria. The feeling of having been hit by a truck. 

Wait. HAVE I been hit by a truck? 

My tiny, tanned, barely teenage body is swollen and in pain so profound I need another word. I know not to move. Ethereal tiny lights spark like fireflies above my bed and I wonder if they are angels. Morphine-heavy eyelids drift closed. Memories blow in from a safe, hazy distance. 

     blinding lights piercing a farmer’s black night

     metal-on-metal screeches rattling bones, organs, and soul 

     we’re cutting you out as fast as we can

     someone screaming 

It takes a few seconds before I realize that was me. 

Fourteen hours earlier, on September 8, 1978, a lovely, clear and surprisingly cool  central Virginia evening provided perfect weather for Albemarle High School Football’s first Friday night away-game of the season.  A few weeks earlier my best friend Terry, a junior, recruited me, a freshman, to join the Football Trainer Program. Our gameday responsibilities included checking and packing the medical kit, filling coolers with ice, hauling everything from the bus to the sidelines, and tending to players’ minor injuries field-side. We watched the game together, arms crossed, standing next to the visiting players’ bench. Terry flashed me a broad, beautiful smile. 

I’d been uncertain about joining the Football Trainer Program. “Trust me,” Terry  said, and I did. Because of her, I sacrificed two weeks of my summer vacation to attend mandatory pre-season practices. Sweating for hours each day on a treeless field under a brutal August sun watching boys practice a game whose rules I did not yet understand made me seriously question my extracurricular choice for freshman fall. But, as an only child, I’d always fantasized about having a protective big brother. On the football team heaps of sweet boy-men treated me like a baby sister from day one. 

I appreciated the players' ability to anticipate each other's needs using only glances and gestures. They picked each other up, literally and figuratively. Older players took new teammates—scrawny, uncertain freshmen—under their confident, padded shoulders. Authoritative coaches set the tone with certainty, charisma and fairness. It felt so good to be a small part of it. That, plus my friendship with Terry, got me through those first long hot days. 

Less than a month later, on that cool September night, standing on the field under Friday Night Lights in front of a thunderous crowd, it suddenly seemed gloriously worth it. I loved belonging to something so real. Belonging was the opposite of how I had often felt during the previous five years, ever since my immigrant family first moved south to Charlottesville. A hard transition meant fitting in at school took a long time. But that night represented everything I’d fantasized high school could be. Like TV. Glittery and dramatic.

In our neighborhood, though, I felt at home. Terry and I were part of a friend group, bonded together by years of shared experiences and stupid inside jokes. Living in a safe, suburban neighborhood gave us freedom and a lot of hours together because our parents only expected us to be home or call by dinner. 

At the game, no one from the friend group sat together. We spanned three grades and had separate lives and separate school friends, like siblings who behaved one way at school and another at home. After the game we planned to play cards, drink beer, and camp under the stars in the musty-scented, cricketed, late-summer woods that abutted our neighborhood. 

We told our parents we were spending the night at each other's houses. One of the friend group guys, Doug, a sophomore, enlisted his already-graduated older brother—a less good-looking David Cassidy—to buy beer and drive us back to our neighborhood after the game. I told my mom a parent was driving because driving with teenagers was forbidden.

Game over, eight of us piled into Doug’s dad’s Brady Bunch-era, wood-paneled station wagon. Doug called shotgun. Terry and I sat in the trunk, the way-back, with Scott, a tall, cocky, handsome junior Terry’s age. We were holding a case of Michelob steady back there. In ten minutes, sitting cross-legged to make room for the beer would save my legs from amputation at the knees.

A van with a bumper sticker declaring proud support for our rivals pulled up alongside us. Baby faces in the van shouted directly into our driver’s open window: “FUCK YOU Albemarle!” They pumped their middle fingers up and down, laughing. “What the…?” said Jane, the only other girl in the friend group, in her signature comedic voice. She made just those two words (what, the) seem funny. Three years later, she would deservedly be voted AHS Class of 1981’s Class Clown. 

The car accelerated wildly. “What are you DOING?” Terry yelled at David Cassidy, scared. “Relax,” Doug begged when his brother floored it. The van of rivals swerved at our station wagon. Doug’s brother swerved back. 

And then. The universe switched gears, into slow motion. We gut-screamed, and, with crazy centrifugal force, hurtled into a big, black unknown.

 

My mom walked into my hospital room from a hallway conference with tall men in white coats. Five feet tall, fine-featured and pretty, the harrowing night showed. When things were tough, she was too. But during the relative calm of ordinary life, unreasonable fears of creatively imagined disasters lurked in every innocent corner, the result of a traumatic childhood in post-WWII Austria. Sometimes, they consumed her. That night provided a lifetime's justification for her constant worry.

When she saw my open eyes, she did an involuntary little hop.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said softly. “Your dad will be right back; he went to the cafeteria.”

“Okay.” Pause. “I’m sorry, mom.” Tears rolled down the side of my face. I didn’t wipe them because my arms refused to move. 

MEMOIR - The Girl, The Physicist and The Beauty of Reality

(1) STORY STATEMENT 

(Memoir) A NASA physicist with paranormal powers steps in when the teenage daughter of neighbors barely survives a car accident and teaches her how to live--in more than one dimension. (Q: Should this be in first person for Memoir?)

(2) THE ANTAGONISTIC FORCE

At a plot/surface level, the antagonist is played by a collective of arrogant healthcare-provider villains who I gave pet names (Dr. Propofol, Dr. Clicky Pen, Dr. Big, etc.). Their often shocking behavior provides opportunities for readers to root for me and openly consider my reflections. A drumbeat of unrelated and unexpected medical events over decades underscores this antagonistic force. 

At the thematic level, the antagonist is the widespread, outdated belief in an objective, Newtonian, deterministic reality—akin to when we believed the earth was flat, because that was how we experienced it. I explore the unnecessary tension between science and the inexplicable, tapping into a growing awareness that those two may not have to tussle with each other anymore. A century of quantum physics research demonstrates that two things can be true at once. 

(3) CREATE A BREAKOUT TITLE

The Girl, The Physicist and The Beauty of Reality - a quantum memoir

Remarkable Happens Everywhere - a story of love, quantum physics—and everything else

(4) COMPARABLES

This is likely too long. I’m ready for feedback.

I think of my literary memoir as most comparable to Stephanie Foo’s hybrid memoir, What My Bones Know. In both, a more academic understanding of something complicated unfolds for the reader through the narrator's dramatic story (Foo-complex trauma, mine-the subjective nature of reality). 

However, the mood in mine is more like Robert M Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance due to its  reflective exploration of universal truths, but it’s a more plot-driven, female-narrated version for the quantum/AI era. A real-life story for fans of the movies The Matrix and Inception.

And, although firmly a scene-driven memoir, underneath, it reveals a theory that unifies quantum phyics, metaphysics, philosopy and AI theory, incorporating ideas similar to those found in Deepak Chopra’s You are the Universe (metaphysical), Michio Kaku's The God Equation (quantum physics), Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth (philosophy) and Rizwan Virk's The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics, and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are in a Video Game.

If comparables are about assessing the market, there is another element at play for my memoir. 

What AI, consciousness, and quantum physics might mean for our reality and how we see ourselves is a concept catching fire, and my supporting character—Physicist Tom Campbell—is in the thick of it. A sought-after guest on popular podcasts (The Joe Rogan Experience, The Bialik Breakdown and The Telepathy Tapes, amongst others), the audiobook of his 2003, 900-page trilogy My Big Theory of Everything is currently listed on Amazon as Number 1 in Physics. I am scheduled to interview Tom on his YouTube channel in June. I am not sure how to treat this connection to someone else’s rising star. He is an 81-year-old physicist—I did not expect him to be trending when I started to write.

(5) WRITE YOUR LOGLINE WITH PRIMARY CONFLICT AND CORE WOUND

When I was horribly injured and almost died in a brutal car accident as a teenager, a NASA physicist neighbor with paranormal abilities showed me how quantum physics and his Theory of Everything held the key to surviving and thriving through that trauma—and later, what it meant for becoming fearless.

(6) INNER CONFLICT AND SECONDARY CONFLICT

Sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction.

FEAR: When I first moved from Queens, NY to the South as a child, I was rejected by my schoolmates as a “Yankee.” As a teenager, I was physically traumatized by a terrible car accident and a long, brutal recovery. My loving mother suffered undiagnosed anxiety which caused her to paint vivid disaster scenarios for me and tell me she would kill herself if anything else ever happened to me. A shy girl with a naturally carefree spirit, I became afraid.

This sets up the conditions for my bedridden self to find power and peace in the philosophies that the supporting character in the story—physicist Tom Campbell—shares with me as a teenager. Further “fear tests” (a near-death car accident, the death of a friend, a difficult childbirth, a scary diagnosis for my child, erroneous fatal diagnosis, aborted surgery, another near-death and, finally, in the last chapter, the removal of the last shard of glass remaining from the decades-earlier accident) force me to cultivate a mindset that transcends fear.

Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it?

CONFLICTED SENSE OF REALITY: As an adult with a Harvard MBA under my belt, I landed the Big Job at one of the most prestigious consulting companies on the planet—a place where my understanding of a larger reality would be considered crazy or, worse, “not academic.” Even though a dogmatic attachment to a disproven Newtonian reality seemed less intellectual or academic than the skeptical curiosity that has always driven science to ask, “What is next?”, this prevailing attitude caused me to keep my ideas to myself. 

A core conflict arises when my son gets diagnosed with physical ailments and learning differences but the most prestigious hospitals in Boston failed to suggest satisfactory solutions, and I had to consider: Would I risk exposing him to a world where healing happens in a more unconventional way? The answer was YES. I decided that if a philosophical approach was going to be a core tool for me and my family, then I had to understand better. This inspired me to reconnect more deeply with Tom and pursue a quest to come to terms with what is real.

(7) SETTING

Given this memoir spans decades, settings are varied.

ONE - CHILDHOOD in Charlottesville, Virginia

• Childhood backdrops in the 1970s—a football game, two schools, a neighborhood
• University of Virginia Teaching Hospital—during my extended stay, protocols, personalities, other patients and the daily physical humiliation of being a bedridden patient build a vivid world

TWO  - TOM/CONSCIOUSNESS

• Whistlefield Farm, 1970s—the estate of Bob Monroe (author of Journeys Out of the Body) where his privately-funded experiments design to test the possibilities of  consciousness took place in a purpose-built lab.
• The Monroe Institute in the 2010s—a leading global center for exploring expanded states of consciousness built on a mountain near Whistlefield farm. Their immersive programs help thousands of participants from around the world experience the benefits of meditation and learn how to travel out-of-body.
• The King of the Mountain Cabin in Tennessee, the site of a retreat with Tom Campbell where he tries to teach others how to access alternate states of consciousness

THREE - ADULTHOOD

• Harvard Business School in the early 1990s
• Central London in the late 1990s--Home, and a hospital 
• Boston in the 2000s--Home, and a hospital
• Maine- Home, and a hospital in the 2010s. The home in Maine appears in the final scene, and plays a role in the denouement.