Burning Bras & Cutting Ties

Why my principal character behaves the way she does.

I've almost finished the first draft of my first novel - currently stacked up to ~120,000 words. A minor celebration might be justified, but it's just one milestone on a longer journey. 'Those who know' advise nascent authors to let any initial draft mulch for a bit, to allow the freshness of its writing to vacate your head. That way, when you return to it a few weeks later to apply the editor's scissors and glue to your precious words, there should be a fresh pair of eyes looking at it. Ones that hunt down with merciless candour the errors you were blind to before, applying the experience you've learnt since. Or you could just hire someone else to do it for you....

To help seal this initial package, before I strap it to a homing tortoise's back and parachute it into a neighbouring field, I've written ~1000 words of what might be termed an 'expository prologue'. That sounds a lot grander than what it is and, to reassure those who care more about selling books than writing them, I don't plan for these words to appear in the final draft in the form they're written here. My intention is to provide some background on why my principal character behaves the way she does. Because she's a bit of an oddball, a loner, with every reason to be angry. At least, that's what I think...

As with my previous post, improving the chances of success - indeed, her success - should be a worthy goal for any creative writer. So here I am: exposing something that I hope will hook an audience, asking you to confirm (or not) if that's the case. So I can then adapt, improve or even reject my creation. My merciless editor alter-ego is waiting in the wings, sharpening their scalpel.

Speaking of which...

---

My parents cut off my breasts when I was fourteen. They weren’t holding the knife, as that would have been barbaric. They instead employed a surgeon, backed by a factional-bound geneticist, as prompted by our family doctor.

“An abundance of caution,” they all said, almost in unison. “The facts support our decision. It’s for the best.”

I still hate that last one the most. I imagined a pair of orderlies carrying them out of the operating room, each raising aloft a nipple-topped mound of excised flesh on a silver salver. They burst into a rhyming accompaniment: ‘Wibble, wobble. Wibble, wobble. Jelly on a plate!’ The surgeon and anaesthetist follow behind, chiming in with gusto, as the doors swing shut on my still unconscious, cauterised body.

I kept my resentment burning after my prophylactic encounter with a scalpel. As soon as they brought me home, I scooped up all my bras from their drawer, some barely out of their packets, and took them into the garden. Without pausing, I piled them onto the rusty, redundant clam-shell barbecue and set fire to them with my father’s lighter. I felt an undoubted juvenile satisfaction in watching the remnants of my nascent womanhood drift over an indifferent neighbourhood. I fantasised those illegal trails of airborne carbon were mingling overhead with their former contents; my earlier incinerated organic remains surreptitiously emitted from a now dormant hospital chimney. Like the exhalations of the famous or the urine of the less so, everyone could now inhale or sip a molecule or two of me. My mother interrupted my dark, rage-filled reverie by joining me on the patio. She took in the scene and started sobbing again, a maternal hand on my shoulder accompanying her tears. I shrugged it off. It wasn’t me needing emotional comfort. I had no guilt hiding within an ethically warped conscience.

The teasing started almost immediately. Gender was the biggest determiner of my classmates’ reactions. The fractures of phactioning and viral-driven sexual apartheid had yet to surface. The girls expressed horror - both moral and visceral; others fascination; some even showed concern. The middling unsure admired the bravery I never felt and wished it was theirs. But, as I had dreaded, the boys’ torments were the hardest to endure. From their adolescent viewpoint, one wholly biased in favour of the physical, they’d had something taken away from them, even if it had been part of me. For most of them, women were the reason for wanting to be men. I had instinctively, even precociously, known that, even as teenagers, their sensitivities dangled on the outside, but all their pains and insecurities remained locked on the inside. I took advantage of the former and preyed on or ignored the latter. They learnt the hard way I wasn’t a trophy for warped desires. Building a protective shell for my emotions and projecting that hardness onto any social interaction was how I protected myself. How I still do.

The trauma didn’t end there. Genes apparently don’t care about organs, or feelings. Two years later, my dogmatic therapist judged he’d doused the fractious embers of my rebellion, helped by sanctioned hormonal suppressants, and I was fit to re-join their common cause. My parents and erstwhile protectors took his vapid pronouncements as a cue for their next task: the disposal of my condemned ovaries. I was now decades wiser, tutored in their conniving arts, and dug a rage-filled moat around my body in response. They laid siege, constructing weapons from rigid phactional assumptions, dipped in the rank poison of hypocrisy: ‘We can freeze your eggs!’, ‘Your children could be fine!’ My self-enforced neutral demeanour masked a secret conviction that both their opinionated peers and prescriptive elders were subtly pressing for my abandonment, rather than any so-called cure. Having scientists for parents proved to be no defence against societal dogma.

It was also plain my frustrated keepers’ continuing altruistic plans for extending my longevity were about to bankrupt them. There was both the price of my excisions and the mounting cost of curtailing my waywardness to account for. Medical insurance again confirmed itself as a deceptive instrument of reassurance and its burden forced us to move home; but not far enough to leave my outer demons behind.

So we limped through the lingering vestiges of my childhood. I moved from school to college, accompanied by familiar, chiding faces; all the while growing a carapace around my developing stigma, as my female peers’ bodies and sexual interests blossomed around me. Knowing, but not showing became a useful tactic, only grabbing at temporary comfort when I was weak and in need of self-reassurance.

Meanwhile, cellular snipping became a premature wave of consumerised, flawed Darwinism. Ages-old vanity and desire, pumped by click-baited headlines, trumped the poorly communicated and dense science. So the DNA snake oil flowed abundantly from pristine clinics, their walls filled with displays of rotating blue helices. Do you want to be taller, cleverer, an influencer or just a closet narcissist? Beautiful naturally cost more than handsome, despite an increasingly blurred divide. But even those who could afford to still balked at biting the dangling cherries of similar fixes for their emotional traits. Irresponsible marketing found itself countered by the very characteristics the oil sellers were preying on; ones they had even recognised in themselves. Breed to succeed had worked for aeons, with superficially attractive additions to the gene pool still retaining their cachet. Wealth and arrogance didn’t need genetic artifice to fulfil their secret, eugenically driven dreams. Just a sufficient supply of those happy to be human handbags, giving up their gametes for money and attention. ‘Leave it all behind, there’s space for everyone,’ they had declared towards the end; these last lies called down from atop their ascending, money-burning, fiery tails.

The world then changed quicker than all of them and their insignificant mutations. I had already learnt to adapt whilst the rich and their lackeys left the gullible behind. So when a man-loving virus and raging seas cascaded in on families and homes, I survived and endured, along with my burden of enforced parental guilt. Substituting deviant outcast for fortunate castaway, it became mine to nurture, whilst remaining an ironic revelation to me that such luck could also afflict my genes. But being bitter and fortunate was a combination I could handle. Cutting ties was so much easier than burning bras.