A Word Please

My guest today is author Liliana Badd. Liliana is here to discuss her novel Exit, which is a powerful story of a woman confonted by death. First, let’s get to know a bit about Liliana:

I am, what I call myself, a SWS (a Solitary Woman Survivor.”) After having lived for 26 years under the dementia of a communism regime, I fled to France where I lived for 20 years, surviving the Cold War. At times, I had the weird feeling that the historical events were cruelly intermingling with my personal life. In 2000, after a cruel confrontation with Death, I started a new life in Las Vegas, Nevada. I arrived in LV on a vacation. And the desert “entrapped” me. Alone with myself, I was changing not a city or a country, but a continent. Determinism and free will. My life has been a succession of “earthquakes.” And I have rebuilt it from scratch, each time. I am living now, what can be called my 5th life. At 57, I have started a new life; I’m again a student, in the medical field.

In 1985, in Paris, I had the extreme honor to meet Emil Cioran, a famous born-Romanian author and philosopher having lived the life of an exiled in France. He said about me: “You are a rambling soul, a restless mind.”

Paradoxically, I have never been able to write anything in my native languages. It is in the stillness of the Las Vegas desert that my life experience and emotions, cumulated in my soul, have exploded, intertwining and weaving in thousands of words, having become my novels. I have become a writer in Las Vegas.
***

Now for a look at Liliana’s book:

Since my illness, I have had some real challenges. I perceive the rigorous succession of circumstances. I trespassed across the borders of my former life; I crossed the seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into the desert, always making my way toward other cities; I affronted death& I allowed other men to touch my body; I met men and women and listened to their stories; I stirred controversy and passions; and all that led me where? To understand that to live is to be marked, to see life in the present tense. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story and this is the only celebration, we, mortals really know. The words of a story. Still doubting. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. (Edgar Allan Poe) Ondines story is dedicated to all those men and women I will never meet in person, and whose lives collapsed on a beautiful day, condemned to an incurable illness. It is my hope that Ondines story will be like a ray of sunshine, a pleasant interlude, in their daily wrestle. And when they feel depressed, defeated and overwhelmed by their fate, I would like to remind them that, for as little as we know with certitude, for wealthy or poor, for healthy or sick, for old or younger, for all of us, sooner or later, at the end of our journey through the space called Life, there it is, majestic in its implacable serenity, silently awaiting the EXIT.

After reading Exit, I spoke to Liliana about her work. Here is our conversation:

What made you want to write this particular story?

I still wonder how Ondine’s story came to my mind. I was aware that writing about someone being diagnosed with an incurable illness was a daring challenge. There are too many stories about this subject… and I accepted the challenge. And there was something else that kept bothering me for a long time: the ending. Once the ending came to my mind, which is so unexpected that will truly surprise my readers, I could continue with Ondine’s story.

In 2006, while on a vacation in Europe, due to an unexpected health incident, I had to be hospitalized and had plasma transfusions. It was that year that Ondine’s story started germinating in my mind. The more I was thinking about this frustrated middle-aged woman, settled in her bourgeois Parisian life, feeling she failed her life, the more excited I was becoming. The story started shaping itself; Ondine started to exist. I was well advanced in my writing when I experienced a series of flu-like events, with profuse sweats, day and night, extreme fatigue and sometimes, intense malaise. All at once, I became aware that those symptoms were similar to Ondine’s symptoms. Almost hating her, I abandoned her altogether. I was not going to write a story, which strangely could be mine. I kept fighting my symptoms,fearing I might have been contaminated with HIV. I cowardly lived in anxiety and fear for long months. And one day, my symptoms went away.

It was only then that I had the courage to go and get tested. The test came back negative. I started feeling well again, exuberantly, filled with energy. My energy was coming back. And so was Ondine, more alive then ever.

The events of life were my genuine inspiration in EXIT. The awareness that we truly exist if we relate to life globally, forgetting our individual ego.

Ondine has lived her life in a “sanitized” environment, as tiny as an eggshell, selfishly ignoring the matters of the world. Turned upside down, Ondine gestates in an overwhelming and morbid depression, calling it “the illness of death,” questioning her marriage, her family, her career and her treatment. She begins to contemplate an easier road… suicide.

After her awakening – aided by the compassionate Dr. Monique Veil – she becomes a friend with a prostitute with AIDS and a Russian painter with whom she begins a passionate affair. When an independent newspaper publishes the photos Ondine had taken of her prostitute friend on her deathbed, her life begins an unexpected spiral in a new direction.

Later in life, Ondine returns to Paris, meditating on her life after her illness and how she has affronted death, stirring controversy and passion, understanding that “to live is to change.” Does Ondine have enough time left in life on the edge of non-life? As I have already stated, a surprise unexpected twist will leave readers shocked at the end of Ondine’s story.

As Ondine travels about, we visit some wonderful, historical places. Did writing those scenes require much research?

The entire book required long months of intensive research work.

I spent long hours before I took a decision on her name. Ondine comes from the Latin “onda” – a wave. Her life flows as smoothly as a wave in a peaceful ocean, and then brutally it becomes a drop in a tormented ocean. Everything turns upside down in Ondine’s life when she is diagnosed with leukemia.

EXIT is the story of someone’s fulfilling her dearest dream. Ondine has dreamt all her life of becoming a writer… and has never had the experience such a divine responsibility requires. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” (H.D. Thoreau). It is the illness that will spectacularly open for her the door to her dream – shoving her into the cruel reality of life. Awakening.

After her awakening, Ondine becomes a journalist/social photographer. The very essence of this profession implies traveling and meeting people; listen to their stories and translate them into writing. Ondine’s experience as a social journalist/photographer is based on true-to-life events having required long months of research. Readers may appreciate the footnotes, which will help them with the locations of the story.

Then, the different types of leukemia, their treatments and respective prognosis as well as the legislation on euthanasia and assisted suicide in various countries in Europe required an intensive research work as well.

Ondine says it: “Since my illness, I have had some real challenges. I perceive the rigorous succession of circumstances. I trespassed across the borders of my former life; I crossed the seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into the desert, always making my way toward other cities; I affronted death… I allowed other men to touch my body; I met men and women and listened to their stories; I stirred controversy and passions; and all that led me – where? To understand that to live is to be marked, to see life in the present tense. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story and this is the only celebration, we, mortals really know. The words of a story. Still doubting…’Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.’” (E.A. Poe)

Ondine is a complicated woman, with many hidden layers. Did you need to do a lot of outlining while creating her character?

Ondine’s story could be any woman’s tale. EXIT is the story of a lover, a wife, a mother. Ondine acquires a true-to-life substance as the story develops. Ondine becomes “real” through her own metamorphosis as imposed by her diagnosed leukemia, and actively interacting with the other characters.

EXIT is a landmark in my life. It took me three years to achieve it. For three years, I lived as secluded as in a convent. Thinking and living with the characters, in a parallel world. My mind was asking them questions, they seemed to talk in their own voices, and my mind was listening to their stories, imagining we were on a huge theatrical set. They were the narrators, I was the director, and the audience was the world. The story enclosed me with these characters and with them only. I identified myself with my characters to such an extent, that I seem to have managed to reach a degree of authenticity imbuing EXIT with the atmosphere of an autobiography. The other characters are as alive as Ondine is, and I have not developed a stronger relationship with any of them. They exist by themselves and I exist through them. Some friends of my parents after having read EXIT as a manuscript, and who knew me as a child wrote: “We thought it over and over again, and we do not remember you having had any brothers…When did you go to South America?” Another friend asked me: “Did you really go to a brothel and meet Solange?

The action in EXIT takes place from April 2004 to April 2009. A short lapse of time, when Ondine’s former life, feelings and social environment had to be described in detail. From a technical point of view, I had to use a non-linear writing technique, alternating passages dealing with the past, ‘before’ being diagnosed when she remembers her entire life, and the present, ‘after’. As Ondine says it: “From this moment onward, my life will be forever divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’” (EXIT page 4). Past tense is respectively used for all past events – present tense for the events taking place in the present. However, I paid particular attention in dating the events, like in a diary, so as readers may always follow the story.

If readers could come away from your book with one message, what would you want that to be?

The life lessons Ondine learns about her inner self and about life are individual to herself and only to herself, although those lessons could be anyone’s lessons.

Ondine’s story may help readers in finding some answers. Should it be only one answer: Never give up. As long as we are alive, there is always hope. Women and men, alike, will relate to Ondine’s story at some point or another. I will give you an example. It is the most rewarding experience a writer may hope to live. A couple of days ago, I met, here in Las Vegas, a doctor – who spends his life taking care of children without healthcare benefits within a program called “clinics in schools.” He has given up a successful private medical practice to serve the cause of poor children and their families. Well, he incarnates my character, Doctor Christophe Duquesne, in the novel. And I told him: “What a blessing for an author to meet in real life one of her fictitious characters.”

The novel is dedicated to a renowned oncologist in Las Vegas. Her passion, her devotion to her patients, her vision “the patient always comes first; all else is secondary,” having been the human inspiration for Dr. Veil’s character in the novel.

The stories, published in Ondine’s work as a social photographer, are all true-to-life: the children born with AIDS in Romania, innocent victims of a demented dictatorship, the immigration slum in the outskirts of Paris, the story of the young woman abducted for organ trafficking. These true-to-life stories imbue EXIT with authenticity, making it, as a book-reviewer recently wrote, “an empowering novel.”

When EXIT was finished – I understood the secret of the SECRET. Exit is a symbol… we enter and cry, and that is life; we cry and leave and that is death. We are not born equal… yet, there comes a moment in our lives when each one of us will have to face the EXIT. At that moment we become equal… and there will be one question for all of us, without exception: “What have you done with your life?” I do not want to have to answer, “What a fearful thing is to reach the end of life and think I have noting to account for except a thin veil of confused images signifying nothing but wasted opportunities.” (EXIT, page 263).

What are you working on now?

I am again “pregnant.” The idea of my next novel, “The Hourglass” is in germination. It will be a daring story about the impossible love between two women.
***

Here is a look at Liliana’s book on Amazon, in both print and Kindle format:

You can learn more about Liliana and her work in the following places:

Website: http://exitlilianabadd.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/people/Liliana-Badd/100001415304102
Blog: http://exitnovel.wordpress.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lilianabadd

Feel free to leave questions and/or comments for Liliana here.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: author interviews, General Fiction, Guest Authors, Kindle Books, Liliana Badd, Women's Fiction. Indie Authors