San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
When a stranger comes to town
Novelist’s debut skillfully vague in setting and narrator
In “We Can Only Save Ourselves,” Alison Wisdom presents time and place almost as photographs out of focus. A close read yields almost no indicators as to when and where her debut novel is set, which was by design.
“I didn’t specify a setting purposely,” she says. “I wanted it to feel a little timeless and also out of time. I was more interested in the mythology of a neighborhood, and the mythology about how communities come into being. So I followed this character, Alice, to look at why we are the ways we are. Because of that, I didn’t want to be trapped in a specific time or place.”
Wisdom’s unspecified community is small enough that the presence of a young stranger draws widespread attention. It’s also small enough that when Alice — a child beloved in the neighborhood and teeming with promise that the community projects upon her — disappears with the stranger, the repercussions extend far beyond her home.
A Friendswood native, Wisdom says, “If you looked into my secret dreams, you’d see I always wanted to be a writer. But I’m very much not a risk taker.”
She taught high school English while her husband worked his way through grad school. When he finished, he pushed her to leave her job and take a turn pursuing her interests. Wisdom took a writing workshop with Inprint Houston and received enough positive feedback ‘We Can Only Save
Ourselves’ to continue writing and submitting pieces for publication.
“I’m not a person who generally takes rejection or failure well,” she says. “But magically, I was able to disassociate enough to keep trying.”
Wisdom tried shopping around a short-story collection, but her literary agent told her she needed a novel. She’d had an interest in cults, due in part to reading Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” and in part to having graduated from Baylor University in Waco, where the Branch Davidians infamously set up a compound. Wisdom tried threading together three stories about three women in different cults but describes the novel as “terrible, just terrible.”
But one of the three continued to hold her attention. While walking the streets around her home in Timbergrove, she envisioned Wesley, a young artist with greater aspirations than talents. She imagined him with sharp connective skills, flattering strangers by asking to take their photograph. Trying to capture this character, she heard a voice, a collective “we” that was narrating a story.
“It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize who that ‘we’ was,” Wisdom says. “It was all the mothers in this neighborhood. After that, I knew what I was doing. It just took finding that voice.”
Wisdom’s Alice is a spring that gets sprung: a kid who conformed long enough that her potential energy exploded outward, first with an act of vandalism, then by running off with a stranger.
To older eyes, the warning lights flash:
“Are you good?” Alice asked the man. “A good person?”
“It’s hard to say for sure,” he called over his shoulder, “but I’m going to go with yes.”
The narrative “we” affords Wisdom great breadth in the storytelling. It combines known facts and speculation into a curious and unreliable narrator. The format allows Wisdom to report from a house where Wesley lives with multiple young women to Alice’s mother left alone and grieving.
Wisdom plays skillfully with time: Early on, Alice’s passages blitz past, the result of an exciting new set of surroundings. Time for her mother trudges, and with each passing day the possibility that normalcy returns becomes more remote.
As the story unfolds, the pace changes with its characters.
Wisdom’s goal was to investigate an incident and its repercussions: a trauma that feels familial but ripples throughout a community to the point that it becomes codified as part of that community’s folklore or mythology.
Wisdom found herself thinking about the murders committed by Charles Manson and his cult of followers. The killing of Sharon Tate and her friends made the headlines, but Wisdom thought about the LaBianca family, killed during the same spree.
“They were just an ordinary couple swept up into this thing because the danger was there,” Wisdom says.
Parenthood then provided much of the fuel.
“I started working with these ideas after I became a mother,” she says. “When you become a mother, you start looking differently at the world. You have this precious thing you want to protect. There are so many elements in her life that you’re seeking to control. Eat at this time, sleep at this time. But there are so many things outside your control. So I wanted this story to be a microcosm for that feeling when you think you have control and realize security can be an illusion.”