(Click here for Part I and Part II)
I returned to Italy nine years after my first visit. I was in Europe for the second time in my life, this time accompanying my husband who was teaching at a conference in Switzerland. I was well into writing Renaissance by this time, nearly done my first draft. When we first began planning our trip, I had thought I would explore Geneva while he worked, but there was nothing there I really wanted to do. On a whim, I looked at the cost of flights to Florence: $30 each way convinced me.
So, while my husband was working, I hopped on a regional flight with the smallest of carry-on bags, stayed at a less pleasant convent filled with mosquitos and cranky nuns (the Sisters of Stability and Charity had sold their convent and it had become a resort), and spent twenty-four hours in the city, clocking many kilometres on foot and leaving behind a great deal of sweat as it was July and humid.
The city had changed in the intervening years, a victim of hypertourism especially during peak tourist season.
I was not as brave as my character Liz who went for fifty days on her own – I went for two days and a night. I had some wild adventures, not a man dying before my eyes in a water fountain as happened to Lucy Honeychurch, but it was a water fountain incident nonetheless, one that left me feeling like death for an hour or so. (I wrote about that adventure here.)
But, like my first visit to Florence, this was a joyful trip (hypertourism and fountain incident notwithstanding). I wasn’t there because I needed to escape my life. Instead like Lucy Honeychurch, I was closer to finding my life while there.
Around the time of this second trip and in the intervening years, the grief I had anticipated was coming true: my kids were leaving home. They left and returned (the pandemic gave us an unexpected victory lap) and left again and returned again. I cry when they leave usually but it rarely lasts more than a few minutes.
It makes me think of what Indigenous poet Paula Gunn Allen says about the changing roles of women as we spiral through the phases of life. “We begin our lives…walking the Way of the Daughter. This is the time for learning, for gathering experiences in the shelter of our parents. We move next to self-reliance, when the necessary task of the age is to learn who you are in the world.” (The A Room with A View stage, you might say). “The path brings us next to the Way of the Mother.” But then as those children move toward self-reliance, Gunn Allen says “our strengths turn now to a circle wider than our own children, to the well-being of the community” and eventually move to a wider sphere “beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth.” (Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 96-7)
Just yesterday a friend asked me how much of Renaissance was autobiographical. Of all the novels I’ve written, this one feels the closest to me, and yet it certainly still is fiction. It reflects my own emotional journey of sending my kids out into the world, but it doesn’t mirror it let alone actually represent it. I’ve written novels about places I’ve never been, but this isn’t one of them. This is a place I wanted to write about after visiting there. (There are some key locations in the novel, however, where I have never been even though they are real and even though I tried to get there.)
It’s a tricky concept to explain how a writer’s experience becomes fodder for a story. Maybe think of it this way: we’ve all had the experience of having a dream where we’re back in high school, only it isn’t our high school but maybe an ampitheatre with an open roof and then we realize there are stairs that lead to a room we didn’t know was there, and within that room is a couch from childhood and there’s a man sitting on it, a man we saw yesterday in real life on the bus, and in the dream we know he is our high school math teacher and he says something to us and we wake up and think, yes, that’s exactly what we need to hear. That’s what writing fiction is like, a dream-like pastiche of memory and invention, of emotional truth and exploration.
Susan Fish 