Me, Myself, and My Characters

My thirteen-year-old niece recently read my book for a school assignment and sent me an adorable note about it. Her mother, my sister-in-law, told me that when Nina was reading, she was “hearing” me through my first person narrator. Then my sister-in-law confessed that she’d had the same response when she read it.

When my mother read my very first novel, a romantic comedy with a first person narrator, she persisted in believing that my narrator—a thirtyish redhead given to snappy repartee—was really her daughter in disguise. At a certain point in her reading, she turned to my father in triumph. “Hah!” she said, “She’s killed you off and given me a rich boyfriend.” No matter that my narrator’s mom is in fact my own age—young enough to be my mother’s daughter. 

When my sons read my work, they tell me it takes a good fifty pages before they stop hearing my voice and start hearing the voice of my narrator. But it’s more than the voice. It’s the character’s quirks they recognize, too. Springsteen fan? Check.  A fondness for beach glass, anisette, old movies, and a good Bolognese sauce? Check, check, check, and check.

“You’re on every page,” Son #3 told me. “There’s no escaping you.”

Why this belief that our characters are really their creators in another form?  With first person narration, I suppose it’s a natural assumption from the people who know us best because they spot the clues—a joke they’ve heard us make shows up in dialogue. Or a preference we have for a given food or a certain romantic type appears in the narrative. All this has gotten me thinking about the qualities with which we invest our characters, and how much of their personalities are our own.

In my current series, my main character, like me, is a mystery writer who loves the Jersey shore. And like me, she’s afraid of boardwalk rides, loves rustic Italian food, and has a weakness for tall guys with dark hair. Though she is also young, single, famous, and any number of things I am not, we certainly share some personality traits.

So I ask myself: is imbuing my character with pieces of myself a form of vanity? Laziness?  An unconscious part of the process of creation? Or perhaps all of the above? And sometimes the voice of doubt tells me that I’m not yet the writer I should be, that a real writer would create characters from whole cloth, instead of from a patchwork of traits.

In any case, I now have a stock answer for when friends and family members ask the inevitable question—Is the character of Victoria really you? 

“No,” I always tell them. “She has much better legs than I do.”

A Jersey girl born and bred, Rosie Genova left her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her new series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, was released October 1. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She lives fifty miles from the nearest ocean  in central New Jersey, with her husband and two younger sons.