How "The Fiennes" Evolved

I started the first version of The Fiennes in my senior year of high school, inspired by my rabbi's description of serving a very small congregation that met in a YMCA. The small town setting of the first version (and the current one) was primarily based on my parents' hometown in central PA. In both versions, Helen is the epitome of the fiery, rebellious teenager, rarely shy about voicing her feelings.

In Version One, Reuben was a widowed rabbi who had a habit of sermonizing in the grocery store, especially about the ideas perpetuated about femininity by women's magazines, while Helen happily read Seventeen and Cosmo. Through Reuben, and the (tiny) Jewish community in Zion, I showed the challenge, as best as possible, of maintaining one's Jewishness in the context of a non-Jewish society. Meanwhile, Helen and her friends (Lydia and Cassie) showed the everyday challenges of adolescence and young womanhood. I had started writing about how an unexpected diagnosis with chronic leukemia changed both Reuben and Helen's lives towards the end of my senior year of high school.

Throughout my college years, I wrote small story fragments designed to go with Version One, but did not take the time to integrate them into the larger whole. As I drifted further and further from the big picture, though, I took more and more time away from the story.

But Helen and Reuben lingered in my imagination. The summer before my junior year of college, I started doodling comics about Helen as a college student. Reuben was no longer a rabbi, but a cook. I decided that Helen's hometown was too small to believably support a synagogue, even though I really liked the image of Reuben as a rabbi who lead prayer services at the Y.

During my "gap" year between college and nursing school, I wanted to revisit the storyline of Helen taking care of her father while he has leukemia. After skimming the hundreds (I hate to think how many) pages of old drafts and story fragments, I ended up starting from scratch. It was a little strange to see how much some characters had changed, but even more so to see how much Helen had stayed the same. She is still talking back to her peers and adults, and sometimes getting into trouble for it, but her honesty and loyalty still pull her through. I hope that after I finish this novel (whenever that happens) that I can keep telling her story.