I have a whole row of candy-colored Meg Cabot books on my shelf, but the three "Boy" books are my favorites. The Boy Next Door, Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy's Got One. They're epistolary in the sense that they're built out of journal entries, email, messaging, voicemail, letters, notes, even documents from office work.
The Boy Next Door tells its story through conversations between Mel Fuller, a newspaper columnist, and her friends and co-workers, as she works through finding her neighbor unconscious, the victim of an assault, and tries to take care of the neighbor's Great Dane and two cats with the help of a man she thinks is the neighbor's relative. He isn't--and they fall in love--which is the twist that drives much of the drama of the book.
I'm interested in the epistolary format for something I'm writing myself, so I wanted to dig into these three books and see what works and what doesn't.
Epistolary is brilliant for lies and for contrasting points of view. Lies are evident when one person tells a second person something but a third person something else. I don't know why this is so much more fun in an epistolary format, but probably it's because of the very limited access to multiple points of view in traditional narrative. In epistolary, we can just see that John is lying to Mel because we've seen his email to Max where Max asks him to lie. In traditional narrative, everything is limited to the point of view character in first person or the variously biased limited omniscient narrators.
This makes me think of Agatha Christie more than anything, because she is so good at giving you the information but not telegraphing what you're supposed to think about it. The Tommy and Tuppence books are leaping to mind, possibly because there's a common element of youthful zaniness. We meet multiple characters in the first Tommy and Tuppence book whom they and therefore we misread, or trust in error, or don't quite grasp for various reasons.
Trust seems to be an important element here. Trusting the wrong person. The main character not trusting his or her instincts. This is a fascinating thing for me in any narrative, truly. Why do we trust someone? Why don't we?
Our main character, Mel, is right to trust the person she does and right to mistrust the person she does. That seems crucial in this type of story, where our heroine can be tricked but can't be an idiot. We don't lose affection for Tommy and Tuppence because they're far outclassed by these various international spies and so on. But it would be completely wrong if Mel liked the villain and didn't like the hero. We have to know we can accept her point of view as truthful because we're right there in her email with her. That surprises me, in retrospect. I wonder whether epistolary can succeed when the main character is full of lies?
The other comparable novel I adore is Rainbow Rowell's Attachments, but half of it isn't epistolary. And it involves one person reading messages between two others, but not communicating with them. It's not really epistolary, strictly speaking.
The conceit of the epistolary format combined with these particular twists seems to be: it's a lot easier to for someone to lie to someone else (and not have us judge the one getting lied to) when the whole thing is via written communication.
In other words, it's easier for us to accept dramatic irony via written communication. We all think we can spot a liar when they lie to our faces, even though that's evidently not true, so we judge those who get lied to and tricked more when they are told lies to their faces, too.
We know that John is not Max. Mel does not, partly because he's being such a good guy and taking good care of the animals, and even her when she gets sick. However, John is lying to her. He does beat himself up a lot about it, especially in email to his sister-in-law, which she crucially forwards to Mel to prove to her how good a person John is. Evidence! Written evidence matters.
Also we as readers know from evidence that John is a good guy, so we don't mind so much that he's lying to Mel about his identity. This is crucial to this format, I suspect.
There are some extremely funny strings of emails in which Mel divulges a little bit of personal information and it gets passed around and discussed by her whole office. There are excellent emails from John's young nieces, Mel's mother, Mel's best friend's husband, and so on.
The emails from Aaron Spender were delightful because he's a pompous jackass all full of his own wounded self-importance. He uses language in a way that shows how overly dramatic he is about himself.
Cabot does this extremely well, maybe even better, in Boy Meets Girl with the character of Stuart Hertzog, who goes into an amazing false elevated style to try to sound high-flown and serious, then turns around and makes crass, childish threats to his siblings. Amy Jenkins does the same thing, uses false elevated style with him, then makes ugly and crass racist and homophobic cracks about him and his family to other friends. I think it's the dual voices there from one person that make this so brilliant. There's even an amazing failure to respond from one of her friends that shows exactly what the friend things of her after this.
My conclusion is that people who have dual agendas and dual voices that showcase them are perfect for the epistolary genre. Liars, people with something to hide, people who talk behind other people's backs. We love to see those people get taken down by their own words and actions. The entire plot of Boy Meets Girl hinges on that. The plot of The Boy Next Door hinges on an actually harmless lie that turns out not to be harmless because of the relationship that begins because of it.
Does epistolary narrative have to turn on lies? I keep thinking about Dracula, probably the most famous epistolary novel of all time. It's not so much a lie as more dramatic irony, as we definitely know that Dracula is a vampire, while everyone else is confused or figuring it out. Maybe the first readers were as confused as the characters, but I don't think anyone reading it now could possibly be unaware. So maybe like with all dramatic irony, the pleasure is knowing what the characters don't and watching how it all plays out.
The project I'm working on has two characters going through experiences together but hiding very different ugly histories. I'm not sure the dramatic irony holds up, since revealing the truth won't cause a disruption between them. It's more about hiding an unfortunate past. But then, children blame themselves for what happens to them and believe others will blame them as well. Getting past that self-blame is a huge step for a child who has undergone terrible things.
I'm not sure epistolary will be the best route for this, but I'm still thinking about it.
My MFA was adamant that first person is only interesting and worth doing when it diverges from plain reality, when there is an attitude or twist or confusion or lies or something else going on. I am coming to think that epistolary is the same way. Currently I have a whole draft of two dueling points of view and interpretations of the same events. Would epistolary add something to that? It could add a lot of levels of lying, but the lies have to be essential, like one person planning to leave on X date and not telling the other fragile person about it, so only we know.
Though I also really enjoy someone muddling through life and presenting one face to the world and another to their private journal and their communications. Saying, "I'm super great" to the people around them and "This is horrible, get me out of here" in a text. We're back to dramatic irony again, though. And again, I'm not sure that's enough to justify epistolary. It might be if I were starting this from scratch, but it's a major rewrite, so it needs to be eminently worthwhile.
Writing The Boy Next Door without the epistolary format would render it less interesting, less compelling, less fun, because we would lose all those various points of view and inputs on everything. We would lose the amazing Vivica and her twenty-five life-sized driftwood sculptures of dolphins, as well as her painful realization about Mel's article at the end. We would lose a lot of what makes the whole story fun. Nobody writes omniscient narrators who jump around from person to person anymore, do they? So that is a big part of the point of the epistolary format. Lots of points of view and attitudes. Lots of ways to know someone is lying. Lots of fallout from those lies.
My own book definitely needs to be enriched by all of those extra points of view and complex lives the characters left behind them and all of their contacts and friends and families. I'm instantly seeing how much better it would be to SEE the terrible things their aunts say than to have them just talk about all of it. Think about how enraged you'd get upon seeing a mean text someone sent your friend, versus just hearing about it.
And it is so important to me to see the private journal and text and messaging versions of reality versus public-facing versions of reality. I love that contrast so much. That's worthwhile. I'm going to do it.
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