In my Part 1 post about my award-winning novel, I mentioned that the main character Grace was meant to be a stronger, younger “version” of myself.
But as I wrote the climax scene of the book, I realized that there was a lot more of me in the story than just having Grace’s personality and voice based on mine.
So if Grace is a “younger” me…
And the location for the final confrontation between Grace and the villain is the place where I was abused…
Who does that make the villain in the book?
You guessed it… my grandfather!
The villain (my grandfather) is quite evil.
He is focused only on his wants and desires. He kidnaps homeless girls who don’t have anyone to protect them from him and is killing them after keeping them for some time.
Grace (me) must be the one to stop him.
You can guess that awful things happen to the girls before they die!
(Ok, maybe you can’t, because this villain does not sexually abuse his victims but does other things to them that are just as horrific. I guess putting sexual abuse into my book was just too much for my subconscious to handle, even though it made me write a cathartic book that metaphorically was about my abuse.)
So this story recasts the abuser in my life as the villain, and what the villain does to the girls represents the abuse that happened to me. The killing of the girls is the symbolic “killing” of my childhood at the hands of my grandfather.
But in the book, I (Grace) am not the one who is the victim. The villain tries to turn Grace into a victim, stalking her, threatening her friends, trying to psychologically intimidate her. Even decides to try to kill her in the end.
But Grace is stronger than the villain. She is strong enough to protect the friends he threatens. She is strong enough to rescue the girl the villain has recently kidnapped, and she is strong enough to defeat him in the end.
Side note about the girls the villain kidnapped and killed.
Grace has paranormal ability to see ghosts, so she is able to communicate with them and find out exactly what happened to the girls. Eventually, she is able to help the girls find closure.
When I wrote the scenes with Grace and the girls, the girls needed names. Once I had realized what the book was really about, I gave serious thought to naming the girls after the other woman in the family that my grandfather had abused. But I decided against that as it felt like I would be “outing” these women without their permission. So I chose to give them unrelated names. But to me, all the girls the villain hurt were all the women in my family, their friends, and the unnamed girls that my grandfather abused.
My grandfather died when I was a freshman in high school. Prostate cancer…karma is a bitch Jack Rogers!
That is when my mind allowed me to start remembering what had happened to me. But it was too late to confront my grandfather in any way or for him to be punished for what he did to me.
So my novel Glamorous was a way for me to confront my grandfather and to destroy what power he had over me.
The novel told the story of how I broke free of the chains of my abuse.
And started living a life of Joy!
