The Ghost Daughter (What I Was Thinking About)

Two years ago I stood in the check out line at the grocery story, Casey Anthony staring at me from the cover of the People magazine. I don’t follow crime stories usually, but this one followed me. I couldn’t help it. I was fascinated. Do you remember this thing? A young woman claims her little kid went missing a full month after anyone has seen her. The authorities find the thoroughly decomposed body of the child months later in a pile of duct tape.

But the prosecution is inadequate to the task of conviction and the judge lets her go. Everyone thinks she did it. But free she goes.

I looked at that magazine cover and I thought, huh. Well, what if the little girl was never found? What if she disappears and then pops up eighteen years later as a grown woman looking for that terrible mother?

The archetype of the terrible mother is fascinating. There’s nothing scarier than your own mother having it in for you. At first I wrote the mother character as a sociopath. I did tons of research on sociopathy in preparation but then I found out in the writing that sociopaths are boring.  They’re narcissistic one-hit wonders. Writing pages and pages from the point of view of a sociopath was like eating a gourmet meal with a stuffy nose.  Nothing tasted like anything without empathy, desire, concern, and love.

So I scrapped the 25k words I started with and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. I don’t know Casey Anthony and the story wasn’t about her anyway.  The story is about the terrible mother inside all of us, and about the life-giving earth mother beside her. It is about sociopaths, but about how people cope and survive in the wake of true evil, and about how survival is the ultimate revenge.

The Ghost Daughter is about the staying power of true love, even when it comes at too young of an age to bear it with justice and respect. It’s about trying to have power over others as a way of forgetting when you were powerless. It’s about being homeless in one way or another your whole entire life and then finally arriving at a doorstep that you can call your own.

It’s about religion and loneliness and music and the desert. It’s about mothers and daughters and babies that are lost but still haunt you forever and forgive you for being terrible before you knew how to be good.

So I sent out queries and partials and one whole and I hope for the best for this baby that is The Ghost Daughter. Once more into the breach, my friends. Wish me luck.

Kali, goddess of time, change and death.  Pretty much the most unmotherly person ever.