“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”

I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,¹ from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.

That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share’s opening line.²

In 1998 (I think) my mom, brother, and I set out on a road trip to Salt Lake. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why. I stayed in Provo with an internet friend, who was getting divorced from her asshole ex-husband, and her two single-digit kids. She was broke, her soon-to-be-ex wasn’t paying child support, and she didn’t have a job so she was on assistance. We had a couple of late-night heart-to-hearts. She had re-dedicated her life to Jesus, in non-Mormon evangelical Christian parlance. She was going to church, paying tithing (on her meager income), and had just gone to the temple to take out her endowment (fornication and adultery are verboten). She was wearing her garments appropriately and faithfully. She was focused, determined, locked in.

Fast forward a year or so. We were in a Mormon singles chatroom, and we were in DMs, chatting about her life. She was still broke. Ex still wasn’t paying child support. She was doing well with church and she was dripping with new zealotry.³

I had noticed that in the general chat, she was flirting with this guy from a state somewhere far northeast of Utah.⁴ I remembered his deets,⁵ and as far as I could tell, he was a very nice, decent, hard-working, spiritually upright fellow who loved his kids. Said his ex cheated.⁶ There were no warning bells as to his person. However, there were some warning bells as to how life with him would be:

• divorced
• paying a shit-ton of child support
• lived in a broken-down mobile home in a broken-down mobile home park in a broken-down small town (bonus points for honesty!)
• didn’t have a job
• didn’t have a trade, marketable skill, or defining occupation

Keep in mind: You don’t go to any chat room looking for a sugar daddy. Men with money aren’t there, they don’t want women over thirty and/or divorcées with eight kids, and moneyed Mormon men aren’t single anyway.⁷ I didn’t care what anybody else’s motives were, but mine was to find a nice, decent guy to marry and have children with.⁸

So she was chatting with this nice (I’m sure) gentleman, and I asked her very delicately WTF she was doing talking to a down-and-out dude when she was also down and out.

“He’s nice.”

That was a plus, but I thought she should be looking for someone a tidge more solid. Say what you want about a woman’s material target-seeking, but love does not conquer all, especially at the beginning when you’re thirty-five, broke, and have at least four kids between you.

I left her alone about it because it was not my business and she was a big girl and she was going to do whatever she wanted to do regardless of any wisdom I might throw her way. Free advice is almost always worth what you pay for it.

Over the next few weeks, she regaled me with the wonderful gestures this dude made. She was in luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv. Nobody saw that coming, nosirreebob.

Then one day, in the general chat, this happened:

Well, that was alarming. I immediately opened DMs.

Oh boy.

The plan: She would fly to his state with her kids, who would effectively be their chaperone. They would meet in a hotel by the airport, as it was some distance away from his home. They would have 2 hotel rooms, one for him (I can’t remember if he brought his kids), and one for her and her kids.

Uh huh.

Ooooookay.

So she and her kids got there. He’d filled her room with balloons and flowers and just all-around romantic goodness. Normal getting-to-know-you IRL-post-internet stuff ensued … for about 1/2 hour. The kids got put in the other hotel room so they could make out. That was all it was. All clothes on, everything above the neck. I nodded approvingly.

“But then it just slipped in.”

… … … “BECKY! THE FUCK?!”

“Twice.”

I waited for years to be able to use that line in a story, but it never fit. Then one day I had a dream about a widow getting together with her widowed-father-in-law-turned-BFF, woke up, said (out loud) “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” forgot about it, went about my day, which included a stop at Young House Love DIY blog, and an idea was born.

And fuck me if I wasn’t going to start that out with

Rush lyrics play a large part in The Proviso, so much so that the female counterpart of the title-ish character calls it out:¹ “Neil Peart wrote my hymns and Rush is my choir.”

Yet … as much as even the most poverty-stricken among us can get the message of “Subdivisions” thanks to ubiquitous teen TV dramas, kids who grow up in subdivisions aren’t.

Poor, I mean.

Poverty and people who think in Poor also have a large presence in The Proviso. Only one of the six leads grew up with money, and he doesn’t find money interesting or important, which is a manifestation of his privilege. The only other one who didn’t grow up poor grew up in … a subdivision. In San Diego. In the 80s. In the exact misery of the song.

Even though I referenced “Subdivisions” in The Proviso consistent with its intended message (Chapter 22 “Misfit So Alone,” Chapter 87 “Far Unlit Unknown”), I also subverted it because my heroine, the one to whom Rush speaks so deeply, lives in such abject poverty in a falling-down relic of 19th-century gothic revival in such a backwater of a town that the particular flavor of hell of growing up in a subdivision is, for her, a dream come true—or better yet, a dream she never thought to dream at all because her future is

pre-decided

Now, the subdivision she is suddenly dropped in the middle of isn’t a rich one, either. It’s old, mid-1960s, in a sprawling ranch that tries to look French provincial, a house that still has Mamie pink tile and Formica in its kitchen and bathrooms, and sits at the very back of the developed land, waiting for the day it gets razed and replaced with closely set mcmansions. There are newer houses farther away from her upgraded home, and so there’s a clubhouse with a pool.

The house and neighborhood are not glamorous. They’re not even of the caliber of the Toronto subdivisions referenced in the song. She’s savvy enough to know that the house is wildly out of date, even if someone did attempt to modernize it with avocado green shag carpet and a harvest gold refrigerator, and the fact that the trust-fund guy she’s married to is fine with Walmart flat-pack furniture isn’t normal, nor should it be—but to her, the whole setup is magical.

But not overwhelming.

After all, you can take a poor country girl off the farm and plop her in a society matron’s living room, but there’s gonna be an immediate need for a therapist. The mint-ish 1960s ranch is as big a step up the socioeconomic culture scale as any mature person could handle. The mcmansion comes next.

This isn’t just about peer pressure. It’s a law of social survival. The song argues that in these kind of controlled environments, individuality isn’t just discouraged, it’s actually a liability. And that message, it became an anthem for a generation of outsiders. It speaks directly to the deep-seated adolescent fear of being different, of being rejected for not living up to the unspoken standard. —Neil Peart

So the next time “Subdivisions” comes on the radio, we can nod and give the generic middle-class North American teen his angsty due, but then remember that one person’s prison is another person’s paradise.

Rot & Ruin, Jonathan Maberry, p 190

More bullshit masquerading as inspirational quotes.

If you give up, it means you never wanted it.

I believe the person running this Tumblr is a teenager. Poor little bastard. I got suckered by that sentiment once upon a time, too.

I read this quote long, long ago, and I swear to high heaven it was in one book of Anne Rice’s vampire trilogy (maybe Queen of the Damned?).

It resonated with me then and it still does, and I finally figured out why.

This sentiment is the heart and soul of genre romance: What woman doesn’t like to think she has that much power in either direction?

You have to come to it on your own, through hardship and fear. You have to know who you are and what you believe and you have to take stock of that every day. You have to walk barefoot through fire on broken glass. You have to stand up to people who frighten you under conditions that terrify you. You have to be honest with yourself about what you really want. You have to be willing to fail.

Power is acquired, earned. You’ll have many opportunities in your life to earn bits and pieces of it. You’ll make bad choices; learn from them and do the best you can with them. Do not, under any circumstances, dither over what the right choice might be every single time you’re presented with one. It won’t teach you anything and you’ll be a bore at cocktail parties.

Acquiring power is a never-ending process. Every day you have to wake up and prove to the world all over again that you deserve it. There should never come a day when you wake up and say, ‘Okay, I’m powerful now; I’m done.’ Never.

—Giselle to Justice, The Proviso