“Originally, I was writing this book as a memoir,” Sondra Helene says of her debut novel, Appearances, which explains many of the similarities between her and her lead, Samantha. They are both natives of the Boston area, speech pathologists, and active volunteers at local charities. The shared experience that drives the novel, however, is that they both lost a beloved sister to lung cancer. “I didn’t know what to do with my grief,” Helene says of her sister’s death 13 years ago. “But writing has always been an outlet for me.”
Helene passed around her short stories in high school, but she didn’t pursue writing in college. (Her mother was scared she would never find a steady job.) Years later, after her sister’s passing, Helene learned about Grub Street—a center for writing and storytelling in Boston. Now she’s on Grub Street’s board. “I started taking classes there because I had a story to tell,” Helene says. She began writing essays to express her raw anger, but over time and throughout many nonfiction workshops, she decided that she wanted to use her writing to also explore new, fictional territory. Regarding her sister’s illness and other situations, she thought a made-up “main character could do things a little differently.”
While writing Appearances, which Kirkus calls “thoughtful and engaging,” Helene began reimagining larger chunks of her life, adding new plotlines and characters. “I thought it could be a better story than being a sad story about cancer,” Helene says. She probed other issues that Samantha could confront, constructing a web of deep family problems. “I wanted to make a family drama that honored my sister but without it being only about her death,” Helene explains.
Appearances often revolves around Samantha’s wealthy husband, Richard, and his growing jealousy—not of other men, but of Samantha’s close-knit bond with her own family. Helene had been reflecting on the ways relationships with in-laws can easily graduate from tricky to explosive with seemingly little to no reason, a phenomenon she had witnessed in friends’ lives and sought to explore. “I wanted to show in this book that sometimes the history that people bring with them, from their own background and from their own childhood, just creates conflict,” Helene says. “There’s not one dramatic episode that causes a rift. It’s the little things that happen. I felt like that represented real life.”
In the book, Richard expresses his resentment of Samantha’s relationship with her sister by complaining about their long phone calls and berating her about neglecting the rest of her family. Helene ably portrays a wife maintaining her composure as her resentment builds. In one scene, for example, the couple is at the hospital for the birth of Samantha’s niece, and Richard is less than engaged. Samantha, growing increasingly exasperated, wryly notes:
My husband barely stirred. I shook his arm, wanting him to wake and acknowledge this new person in our family. I shook so hard that there can be only one explanation for his lack of response: Richard was feigning sleep.
When Samantha’s sister announces her cancer diagnosis, Helene really raises the stakes. Rather than use the illness as a device of reconciliation, it only exacerbates the situation. Even Richard’s conciliatory attempt to send French tulips to his ill sister-in-law backfires. “Nobody is being altruistic or anything like that,” Helene says of her headstrong characters. “Everybody sticks to their positions.”
Richard’s unyielding nature in particular creates a tense atmosphere, and descriptions of him banging his fists on the table while speaking of his in-laws feel make him seem physically threatening. “When I was writing it, I didn’t plan on it that way,” Helene says about the undercurrent of emotional abuse beneath the surface of the book’s main relationship. “I was just thinking of a stubborn character who was jealous and who couldn’t express himself well….But now, I do think that.” Helene’s own mixed feelings and evolving views on her characters speak to their well-rendered complexity, and that of the situations she throws them into, which have no easy answers.
“The ending was really hard for me,” Helene admits. She found herself wondering, “Should I just have them get divorced and that’s it?” But once again, she decided to carve out a less clear path. “I wanted them to have their own little epiphanies,” Helene says. “And I wanted to see Richard and Samantha both take some responsibility.”
The family tempest unfolds against a glittering world of luxury and wealth, filled with charity balls and wonderful vacations to Europe and the Caribbean. It would all appear very enviable. For Helene, this setting of upper-class Boston was important for underscoring that everyone has problems that can be difficult to understand, much less solve. “No matter what you have, no matter how privileged you are, you can’t escape difficulty,” she says, “You can’t escape marital difficulty. You can’t escape mortality….Money itself may make it easier, but it can’t really protect you.”
Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.
