Growing Up Girl, Book I
Fiction
Date Published: September 10, 2024
In Growing Up Girl: Book One, a young Bernadette Aller floats through her
life - job to job, lover to lover, place to place. She is an untethered
spirit trying to find her way in a world that's not been too kind.
Now, as she barrels toward her seventies, she wants to tell her story, not
because it's hers alone, but because it's a surprisingly common story. It's
a story much of which happens behind doors that display the word
unspeakable. Bernadette hires Scully Trippe to ghost write, translating
Bernadette's personal experience into the third person, in what might (or
might not) be a misguided attempt to extend the story's reach.
The time frame is malleable, with the storytelling moving back and forth
through several stages of Bernadette's life.
In this first book of the Growing Up Girl trilogy, BernadetteWorld is
populated with Patience, her housekeeper; Maddie, a former lover and now a
ghost; and Lucinda, a time traveler who drops in and out.
It's a quirky group.
Cover artist is Matt Smith. The image of the five-year-old on the cover is
Matt's mother whom he never met. In his own words, "Although I have no
memory of her, I treasure the stories of Lynn's strength, stubbornness, and
ferocious loyalty. My hope is to bring her from the muted mysterious shadows
into the light with love."
Interview
Introduce yourself and tell me about what you do.
I am Caroline Fairless, from Wilmot (small village) New Hampshire, where I’ve lived with my husband for 17 years. I’m a retired minister who has been writing since I was ten, and have 7 books in the public realm—most of them still in print. Two are timeless books for children and (I’ve always hoped) carry an appeal across generations. Four are focused on the many ways in which the institution of the church continues to shut down spiritual modalities not its own. That hasn’t made me a particularly welcome addition to the institution, but it has served me well, in that my writing was my pathway beyond the walls of the church.
I have turned to blog writing and fiction since my retirement and am having more surprising and enlightening experiences than I ever discovered in my congregational life. The writing of Growing Up Girl: Book One, with the subtitle Untethered, has filled me with surprise and joy, and I am grateful.
Tell me more about your journey as an author, including the writing processes.
As a writer following my 30 years of ministry in the church, I understood my work as that of pushing back against the 17th century philosophers such as Rene Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, and Thomas Hobbes. My writing during that time formed the ground of my rebellion against the primacy of humans, and the dualistic framework of disconnection (mind/body. human/nature).
I’ve never considered myself an academic writer, rather one who writes from the wisdom of interconnectedness. The books I wrote during my “church life” tend to the anecdotal and experiential.
My two children’s books establish the interconnectedness of all things, even long before I had the language to describe what I knew as a child. The health of our world hangs on the understanding of interdependence.
Considering process, my writing always begins in the experiential, no matter what genre, and my retirement has offered me time and opportunity to deepen the experiential connection without turning to memoir. Instead, I have moved into the genre of adult fiction.
Tell me about your Book
Growing Up Girl ~ Untethered (book one of three) narrates the arc of a life that is grounded in childhood trauma and neglect. In a literary sense, it’s a small part of the story. In the way of character development, it’s illuminating.
This first volume of the Growing Up Girl trilogy, follows Bernadette Aller as she hires a ghostwriter to help tell her story. An eccentric, nearly seventy-year-old woman steeped in offbeat habits and fanciful thoughts, Bernadette’s understanding of her life doesn’t always align with what’s considered normal. As ghostwriter Scully Trippe (goes by Trippe) tries to make sense of Bernadette’s unconventional behavior and unpredictable stories, a clear image of her idiosyncratic employer begins to emerge.
Written with vividly descriptive language and a tone that embodies Bernadette’s unusual personality and perspective, the novel immediately draws readers into a rich character study, revealing truths about the protagonist’s past through the eyes of her ghostwriter. Trippe soon comes to understand that her job includes preventing Bernadette from going off the rails, not an easy task for someone who insists she is connected to a ghost and a time traveler.
Any message for our readers
I write so that a reader might understand her/his own takeaway. So that’s a tricky question for me. The takeaway is that our stories are what give voice to the meaning of our lives. The stories we tell about the lives of our characters – as true of ourselves as well - may or may not be factual in terms of the dualistic nature (fact or fiction, for example - of how we continue to navigate our world. The stories we tell are the ones that give meaning to our lives. My message for readers is “how you tell your stories is what gives meaning to your life”.
About the Author
Caroline Fairless is a writer and a ceramic sculptor. She is a retreat
facilitator with a focus on the interdependence and connectedness of every
being, visible or not. She served several congregations as an ordained
pastor for twenty-five years, publishing several books during that time. Now
in her retirement, Caroline is writing fiction and learning new art
forms.
Over the past twenty years, Caroline and her partner Jim have been
fortunate to stitch back together three land parcels that once were one. One
of them borders on one of New Hampshire’s many small ponds. The other
two border a marsh that hosts otters, beaver, herons, turtles, geese, ducks,
and an occasional loon passing through.
In the New Hampshire summers, Caroline gardens and walks the dogs she and
Jim have rescued. New Hampshire winters will find her at her computer, still
walking dogs, and camping in front of the wood stove.
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