Claire Conger

I tried hard to read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Mermaid Chair and I just couldn’t do it. I got through 30 or so pages of the paperback and gave up, then I got through two discs on the sound recording and gave up. Why could I not read this book?

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft has the answer: Too Much Backstory!

Yes, a large percentage of The Mermaid Chair goes into what happened before what’s happening now. I simply got tired and lost trying to put it together.

For the purpose of educating myself on how to write, I listened to a recording of Stephen King’s Carrie. It’s read by Sissy Spacek, who played the title role in the movie. I wanted to see how King works backstory.

I am so not into horror, but this story didn’t put me off, and it was primarily because of the way King plays the backstory. King tells Carrie through the testimony of the survivors. The testimony is the current story. The main story is the backstory—the event that happened in the past, which characters are trying to explain.

King makes it readable for me by starting in the present with those remaining alive. (I don’t like horror because I find it too intense, so starting with survivors helps, as does Ms. Spacek’s voice. Her gentle Southern lilt is both apt and soothing.)

King uses back-backstory, details about Carrie’s childhood for example, explicitly so characters can understand what happened in the main story. As you read, there is no wondering how everything fits together.

I suppose Ms Kidd at some point ties her backstory into her main story, but I would have to get through the book to figure that out!