Story Statement:
A woman discovers uncanny patterns of secrets and betrayal in the lives of her mother, her daughter, and herself: the story of how we are so conditioned to be nice and trusting of others that we forget to trust our own judgment or bodies when faced with trauma and disease.
Antagonist/Antagonistic Force:
Priests, doctors, casually predatory bosses or professors, and nice boys who turn out to not be so nice. What do they have in common? The assumption that whatever they do to others, there are systems, mores and money in place that will protect them. Their shared goal: protect their authority and image so that the larger system survives respected, unblemished and unquestioned.
If the Church or our medical systems damages penitents or patients, it is in service to their higher calling. The rest may lack a lofty mission, but they are protected as well – because this is the way of the world, the way it has been for centuries.
The main antagonists:
Fr. Panton: priest who grooms young women and sexually assaults them;
Dr. Jody: Pediatrician who relies on her charm and reputation to cover her mistakes;
The Episcopal Diocese: Religious organization that denies/covers up the harm done by its priests.
There is another, unseen antagonist that shadows the protagonist’s entire journey: the narratives and conditioning that women, in particular, absorb to be… “nice.” Generous, deferential, careful not to offend. Whatever their instincts tell them, they must be mistaken.
Breakout Title:
The Price of Nice:
How We Pay in Trauma and Disease, In Life and in the Medical System
Comparables:
The Price of Nice (working title) is narrative non-fiction, to add facts and credibility; but also part memoir, to show what those facts actually look like in the lives of three women from the protagonist’s POV. I have chosen comparables in both narrative nonfiction and memoir.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk -- the gold standard for reporting the impact of traumatic stress on the body and on society, but does not focus on trangenerational trauma or how we are re-traumatized in the medical system.
An Elegant Defense: The New Science of the Immune System/A Tale in Four Lives, by Matt Richtel -- NYT science reporter Richtel faces the death by cancer of his childhood friend, and explores how the science and pharmacology around the immune system has changed, by profiling four lives.
(note: I am one of the four lives presented in that book)
Memoir:
Untamed, by Glennon Doyle -- Thematically similar to The Price of Nice, Doyle explores her rise to become a best-selling author based on a life that had become a lie because she was "tamed" -- and shows how breaking free from that lie made her feel finally alive
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Elizabeth Gottlieb -- a psychiatrist's journey with her own psychiatrist, studded with insights from the psychiatric field;
Logline with Core Wound:
The true story of a woman who bears betrayals, secrets and illness alone – until she uncovers the same patterns in the lives of herself, her mother and daughter. We follow her through a maze of trauma, secrets, betrayal and illness that could have been avoided but wasn’t, passed down through generations as surely as DNA.
Conditions for Inner Conflict/Societal Conflict:
Sick herself, given a host of questionable medications, and hiding a major secret that set her apart from her peers and changed her life forever (groomed and assaulted by a trusted priest, but ignored by the Church that protected him instead of her), the protagonist sees her daughter, unconscious on a gurney in the ER after trying to kill herself. The daughter was recently raped – at the same age as the protagonist had been; the daughter’s pediatrician had prescribed medication rather than therapy, saying it would “help her anxiety.”
The protagonist thinks of herself as an empowered woman, despite her illness. Yet even when her instincts warn her that something is wrong, that what she is being told doesn’t add up to what she knows to be true, she tends to default to niceness: ignoring those instincts rather than speaking up, she silences herself, deferential and generous – allowing that the mistake might be hers – rather than offend them.
That was also her mother’s example, Plus, the stories she was raised on – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty – have reinforced the lesson to bear wrongs done to you silently and alone, and one day you will be rescued. But those were stories. There was no ER or medical system in Cinderella.
Though she doesn’t quite realize it consciously yet, she registers the coincidence …and just for a moment wonders if she has somehow taught her daughter to be the same way. But that can’t be true. She has raised her daughter to know that she can “do anything she sets her mind to.” That is also what she has been taught.
But seeing her daughter inert on a gurney, as still as Sleeping Beauty but adorned with tubes and monitors instead of roses and thorns, she realizes that silencing herself –irrevocably – is exactly what her daughter has tried to do.
She doesn’t know how they got here, and she doesn’t know how to fix it.
***
As the story unfolds the protagonist finds eerie coincidences between herself, her daughter, and her own mother: sexual assault, secrets, disease, and sins of omission or comission by doctors. It is too late to help her mother, but seeing her daughter in so much pain that she no longer wants to live, she begins to consider that all the niceness she can summon, has ever summoned, will not be enough to save her daughter. It doesn’t yet register that there must be millions of others who have faced the same thing.
SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT: The story takes place in an odd moment of liminality: women and people of color are finally told that they control their lives and bodies; but at the same time, they are warned to trust authority lest it turn on them. Be nice. Keep it secret – no one will believe you anyway. So up until #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, assaults were told privately if at all, and publicly went unreported and unpunished.
The social environment changes over the course of the book, since it covers three generations. The priest who assaults the protagonist is the first brown-skinned clergy hired for a white congregation that prides itself on being progressive in the Civil Rights era; and the protagonist’s parens are also civil rights activists, invested and involved in the church’s work. The women’s equality movement is happening around the same time, and the protagonist grows up surrounded by theoretical feminism; but faced with the choice to heed a white girl’s story about being sexually assaulted or fire the priest of whom they are so proud to have hired, the church does nothing. (The larger Church will circle its wagons; but that priest will eventually do it again, several times. Forty years later the protagonist will learn he has moved out of the country to avoid extradition after being banned from the priesthood in three U.S. states).
There is another factor in the social environment: absolute trust for authority, whether parental , employment, or – importantly – doctors and the larger medical system. Doctors do no harm. In the 60s, 70s, and on until the 2000s, faith in modern medicine is unquestioned, and Incident Reports (of malpractice, adverse reactions, or death) are private and sealed.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was initially focused on veterans (shell shock; combat fatigue) and did not officially enter the broader psychiatric lexicon until 1980. Medications for the symptoms of PTSD have been judged “ineffective,” yet are still widely prescribed. Today, modern pharmaceuticals employ sophisticated marketing techniques to reach both consumers and their doctors. The top-selling drug in the U.S. is currently Humira, an immunosuppressant used both on-label and off-label to treat autoimmune conditions. This will also become a factor, as the protagonist begins to question whether the expensive and toxic medications she takes – which have known, potentially deadly side effects – are even helping her.
But the protagonist’s family keeps its own secrets (do I share those in this assignment?) – which I could spell out, but the point is really that there is a cycle of trauma, secrets and betrayals – in life and in the medical system – that repeat themselves in uncanny ways across three generations of women. And potentially, in the lives of millions of others.
SETTING:
I am not quite sure how to answer this. Stay tuned!
