Reading novels I admire often sparks ideas for my next novel. For The Light of the Bartender’s Daughter, the spark was Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky.
Language is usually where my inspiration lies–something beautiful or unusual or engrossing, and Poor Deer contains all three.
I finished Poor Deer on or before June 9, 2024, according to my Goodreads book list, but my journal brainstorming for LBD begins on July 7, 2025, more than a year later. One of my journal scratchings says, “Make Buffalo magical (see pg. 4 of Poor Deer).” Just now, I opened Poor Deer to head to page four and was met with magic on page one. The font, like those of children’s novels of yesteryear (Poor Deer is not a child’s novel, nor is mine), the little leafy line-drawings, and the soft, cream-colored paper–before even reading a word–call me–come closer–and tell me I am home. And finally, the arresting language, and with all of it, I am startled and held captive:
It is a novel I want to read again, rich in story, character and language. I never like to give a story away, so I will just say that the main character, Margaret Murphy, is a young girl, and her best friend dies suddenly and horrifically. The mothers deal with this horror in different ways (I am reminded how Margaret’s mother was scolded by a doctor and how cathartic that was for me), and I will mention that Margaret is wracked with guilt. She makes her way as we root for her on her journey. Strangeness fills the pages, not just in the tale but in how it is told–an intoxicating recipe.
My mother died in January 2025, and as I look at my writing timeline, I see that six months passed from then to the day I started brainstorming for this novel. I had already been clinging to her memory, even before she left the world. I had written letters to her in 2024, letters with large, typed font so she could see the print, imploring letters, apologizing for all that was lost between us during the twenty-plus years I have lived on the other side of the country, not to mention years before that, a lifetime of lost moments, of no memories made. My mother didn’t get my letters, I am sure. I am sure that my family member, in his vindictive way, took them before she could read them because that is what he would do–try to keep me from her. I would call her, but the phone connection was terrible, no matter what I did, no matter what brand new phone I sent her, no matter what I researched about her local phone carrier and internet companies. I believe that the poor connection was his doing: his successful attempt to isolate her because that is what certain men do–but that is another story.
Early on in the writing of LBD, it became clear to me that the mother in the novel, whose character is based on my mother, had to be lovable, despite her mistakes. The young daughter had to forgive. I was not going to write another bad-mother story into the world.
Clearly, my mother’s death was the second and more significant inspiration for this novel, yet all the while my copy of Poor Deer lay next to me on my bed, which is the place I write these days (if not on the bus or the ferry).
How many daughters have sad stories to tell? And how many daughters have stories where inciting incidents in our lives caused our mothers to briefly glow with the fierce love that only mothers possess? And shouldn’t we daughters cling to those memories just as passionately as we do the sad tales lest we forget that the reason we walk the Earth is because our mothers took the time–determined and brutal and exhausting time–to make us live another day?