Book Spotlight & Guest Post: The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft

Title: The Far End of Happy   

Author: Kathryn Craft     

Published: May 2015, Sourcebooks Landmark  

Format: Paperback, 432 pages    

Twelve tense hours, three women, and the suicide standoff that turns one family’s little piece of heaven into a scene from hell

After
enduring years of a struggling marriage, Ronnie Farnham has decided to
divorce her husband and is beginning to hope for a happy future–until
the morning Jeff is supposed to move out, when he locks himself in their
barn with a rifle.

When a massive police presence arrives to
control the 12-hour stand off, the women in Jeff’s life are pushed to
their breaking points. Based on the author’s harrowing personal story, The Far End of Happy
is a powerful novel about the way one man’s spiral towards life’s
violent conclusion tests the resolve, love, and hope of the women he
will leave behind.

Reinventing Self as Character

by Kathryn Craft

The strangest part about writing
fiction based on true events has to be reinventing your self as a character.
While I have much in common with the protagonist in The Far End of Happy, we are not the same person. One of my first
tasks in deciding to novelize was to ask which of my characteristics to keep
and which to change.

This turned out to be a tricky
exercise because I am a relentless meaning seeker. What would my main character
look like? What occupation would she have? Would she have two sons aged eight
and ten as I did, or a bigger or smaller family? Why had she chosen her
husband, and when did things start to go downhill between them? What
relationship might any of this have to parenting decisions made by her mother
and father? Such questions suddenly had me reconsidering every decision I had
made in my real life.

Most importantly, what kind of goal
could this me-like protagonist have for the story, and what motivated this deep
need? I don’t know about you, but I’m often the last person to truly understand
my own motivations. In real life, we humans are extraordinarily complex.

I read through old journals and wrote
longhand again to simplify backstory motivations, identify closely held
beliefs, and conjure a story goal that her husband’s actions would complicate:
she needed to move on, and he determined to stand off. A character through-line
fell into place. My choices for the story grew meaningful.

Until, that is, I butted up against
the most curious exercise of all: renaming myself. Turns out pleasing my
meaning-seeking nature wasn’t easy.

I wanted a masculinized version of a
female name to suggest, subtly, that my main character was functioning as both
mother and father to her children. I began with Michelle. I’d always loved the
name, thanks to an adorable girl I knew as a kid whose braids and freckles I
coveted. I could call her Mick/Michelle! It worked. Right up until page 75 or
so, where the backstory first referenced “Mick and Jeff”—which sounded so much
like “Mutt and Jeff” I had to abandon the choice.

I switched to Bennie/Benicia—even
created a whole backstory about her teenaged mother running off to the west
coast and having the baby in a California town named Benicia—until page 75,
when “Bennie and Jeff” had me hearing Elton John singing “Bennie and the Jeff.”

Discouragement set it. This naming
felt too random.

Then one day I was thinking of my
husband Ron, the model for The Far End of
Happy’s Jeff, and how his mother and co-workers called him “Ronnie.” Yes—I
could name her Veronica/Ronnie.

At that moment the entire project
clicked into place for me. By naming her Ronnie, I could achieve that thing
story does best, and create meaning from the chaos our lives had become that
fateful day. Oddly, I latched right on to the notion and never grew confused
during the writing. It was healing for me to write about the standoff in a way
that allowed someone named Ronnie to experience the end of the marriage, the
financial disaster, and the standoff’s extreme challenges without ever losing
her willingness to embrace life and all it had to offer.

Thanks, Ronnie. Meaning found.