The Debut: Laura Harrington, Alice Bliss

Angela Carstensen June 15, 2011

The title character of Alice Bliss is a girl who could be found in any small town high school in America. She does well in her classes, runs track, is close to her family, and she’s best friends with the boy next door. But in Laura Harrington’s novel, Alice’s idyllic life is interrupted when her father’s army reserve unit is called up for active duty in Iraq. Although Harrington is a first-time novelist, she’s previously written for the stage, and her play Alice Unwrapped features 15-year-old Alice Bliss, whose father is missing in action.

Alice is a wonderfully vibrant, realistic character. How did you go about creating her?

First of all, thank you. Your compliment—that Alice is vibrant and realistic—means the world to me.

The “how” of creating her is a difficult question to answer, however, in part, because the process of creation is quite mysterious. Perhaps in hindsight I can say, I did this or that. But in the moment of creation, it’s as though I’m following a trail, following a girl, watching her, listening to her, learning about her as I see her in new situations.

I can say this: my method was one of listening, watching, and following. And then, pretty deep into the book, I took a week and interviewed all of my characters, asking them a million questions and answering in their voices. I learned so much about them. All intuitive, of course, all made up. But it was a wonderful way of deepening the characters.

Alice Bliss is your first novel after writing extensively for the stage. How did Alice Unwrapped transform itself into this novel?

Alice Unwrapped did not actually transform into the novel. I found that I had to let go of the musical in order to write the novel. In the musical, Alice and her family live in NYC. Before shipping out, Dad works at the Genius Bar in Soho, Ellie goes to “genius school” downtown, and Mom is the organist and singer at the Church of our Redeemer in New Jersey. Once Dad ships out, Mom loses it, refusing to come out of her bedroom, and Alice is trying desperately to hold her family together, all while wearing a homemade haz-mat suit made out of scraps and duct tape. She believes that as long as she wears something resembling her dad’s body armor, she’ll somehow be able to keep him safe.

Did the character of Alice herself change substantially?

Yes, she did. Moving the family from NYC to upstate New York gave me a very different canvas to play with. The haz-mat suit transformed into wearing Matt’s blue shirt. Alice is a bit of an outsider in the novel, but not the total nut-ball/ outcast she is in the musical. Mom is managing to carry on, though she’s far from perfect, and the family is truly part of a town. There’s a completely different feeling—from a smart-aleck, tough-talking New Yorker, to a girl from a small town who joins the track team and plants her father’s garden.

There are moments in the story that are so painful, I literally had to put the book down for a couple days.

Several people have said this to me.

I sense that the characters, setting, and situation are very personal for you.

You’re absolutely right. Early on, I had a voice inside me saying, don’t be afraid to bring this story in close, really close.

What inspired you to write this story?

My father was a navigator/ bombardier in WWII, flying missions into Germany from his air base just north of Paris. Both my brothers enlisted in the Air Force in 1966. So, while I don’t have a family member serving in the current war, my family has been deeply impacted by war. My father suffered from what they called battle fatigue (now known as PTSD) following the war, a time he would never talk about directly. Nor would he talk about the experiences during the war that had so devastated him. The silence surrounding my father’s war experiences has probably been the single greatest mystery and inspiration in my life. I believe that my fascination with war grows out of my need to understand these experiences and to bear witness to this silent suffering.

Alice Bliss makes a powerful antiwar statement, while being entirely supportive of the families who are personally involved in the war.

I was really hoping to strike that balance. Thank you for noticing!

Was it your goal to increase awareness of the plight of military families?

Absolutely. And, in particular, to increase awareness of the children who are left behind. Especially the children of reservists who often feel that not only does no one know their story, no one even knows they exist.

Alice lives an idyllic, sweet, small-town American life, which includes the boy-next-door, Henry. Alice depends on Henry more and more as the novel progresses, and their relationship changes substantially. Why does Alice turn to Henry rather than to family members when she needs support?

There are a few reasons for that. Alice would never want to burden her little sister Ellie with her worries. She has a complicated relationship with her mother, and she’s aware that Angie is coping with more than she can really handle. She has always turned to her dad in the past, and he’s not there. Uncle Eddie is great for some things, but not others and Gram is warm and nurturing and someone she probably could talk to, but Alice doesn’t realize that.

Henry understands Alice in ways that transcend age and words. There is a deep, deep knowing/recognition/awareness between the two of them. He is the person who “gets” her and what she’s going through on a gut level. With Henry, she doesn’t have to explain.

Computers and smartphones are not present in Alice Bliss. There is a lovely moment when Alice wishes that she and Henry still had walkie-talkies so they could talk in the middle of the night like they did as kids. Today, teens would text. Soldiers email and Skype. Did you make a conscious decision to leave technology out of the story?

Yes, I did. I made sure to set the novel in 2006 before soldiers were allowed unlimited access to computers, Skype, etc. Plus, Matt is on patrol for much of his deployment before his capture, so does not have access to those things.

I was also careful to create a family who did not have computers in the home or cell phones. I wanted Alice and Henry and Ellie to have a childhood unmitigated by devices. And I love Matt’s old-fashioned love of real letters. I knew they would have a much greater emotional impact in the book than a text or an email.

Visit the Adult Books 4 Teens blog for Angela Carstensen’s review of Alice Bliss (Pamela Dorman Books. 2011. Tr $25.95. ISBN 978-0670022786).