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BOOKS
What Karma Knows
THE LIFE LUCY KNEW AUTHOR KARMA BROWN SHARES HER THOUGHTS ON MEMORY AND WRITING.
BY RODERICK THEDORFF
OF ALL THE THINGS YOU THINK
YOU CAN TRUST IN YOUR LIFE, your
memory is probably somewhere near the top of the list. What if it wasn’t something you can,
or should, trust though? Canadian journalist turned author Karma Brown explores that very question in her latest novel The Life Lucy Knew.
In the novel we meet Lucy as she opens her eyes in a hospital room, with no knowledge
of how she got there, or how much time
she has spent in a coma. That’s not her only shock though. She quickly discovers that her husband Daniel isn’t really her husband — they had broken up several years earlier before they even got married — and that her co- worker Matt is her long-time boyfriend. Her mind is playing tricks on her, creating false memories to fill in the gaps that appeared after she slipped, fell and hit her head. Lucy spends the rest of the novel trying to discover the truth about her life.
Although it makes for good fiction, Brown didn’t just make up the syndrome Lucy suffers from. “Someone had mentioned me in a
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Twitter post saying this sounds like a Karma
Brown book,” Brown says. “So I clicked
the link and it was to this article about this guy who had this lost
memory syndrome.” The whole idea of the
book came from just that one article, which
is pretty common for Brown. “Someone will
tell me a story about something fantastical
they’ve heard or that had
happened to them and sometimes it sits with me and I need to decide
if it has legs. And if it just won’t let me go and I can start to see a character or a setting, then I take it to the next step.”
In Lucy’s case, though, it was more complicated than others, considering half of the character’s memories weren’t real.
“What was most difficult for me was trying to hold back what needed to be held back because Lucy didn’t know what she didn’t know,” Brown says. “It was challenging to try to give bursts of memory or insight about what she is going through while not revealing it all to the reader.”
Still as close as she got to her character, Brown reveals that even she got surprised at times.
“I find that you can want to push them [the characters] in a certain direction and if they don’t want to go there they just won’t,” Brown says. “Eventually I have to listen to what they want. They really do become real.
PHOTO, JENNA DAVIS