Tough Love
I've been playing a lot in my new novel not only with the idea of home, but in the way people communicate what they view to be their reality. Realities that are, in fact, illusions, and how they withhold words or information or coach words in a way to create ambiguity because they themselves are ambiguous or emotionally detached from themselves, their home. As Theo says in Donna Tartt's the Goldfinch:
How can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?In my life, I have always been a fixer, a saver, a codependent, a catcher in the rye. It is hard for me to understand people who will deny themselves the rawness, the richness, the realness, of feeling. For how can we know what's real until the air around us rents, until we are close to falling into the void? As a person, unfortunately I have always been drawn to such beautiful wreckage (and maybe that's my own pathology), but as a writer, it's hard for me to get into the heads of people who will hurt others so they themselves won't have to feel pain. Maybe by finding out how these storm systems break, I can free myself from their electrifying, dark energy.