Married to the Motive by Josh Malerman: An Author Essay
Some early readers tell me that Emily and Jack from Pictures of You resemble my wife Allison and myself more than the two main characters of Watching Evil Dead, which is a nonfiction account of a night Allison and I had some thirteen years ago. But if that sounds like a headscratcher, it shouldn’t: us book lovers know (even if we don’t know, we know) that fiction resonates loud. I feel a book more than I’ll ever dissect one. And while I did my best to render the two of us in reality, I’m not surprised to find we make more sense in fiction than we do in fact.
Allison is an artist. And what is Pictures of You if not a story about bizarre vision, encouragement vs discouragement, and the push and pull of creating, titling, and signing works of art? Yes, the artist in the book is coming from a dark place, and Allison couldn’t be standing in a brighter one, but let’s step back from the details of both and just… feel.
Was she on my mind while writing? Of course. I’ve witnessed the incredible in this house, as Allison creates layer upon layer, from sketch to finished and framed. And while it’s the process of getting from one to the other than has thrilled me witless, it’s that last word, frame, that caught my obsession.
The artist in Pictures of You has a funny way of painting. One day, carrying a big frame cross-town, maddeningly burdened with the desire to find her own voice, she placed said frame on the ground for a breather and saw through it… art.
Living art. No canvas, no brush. Simply… the act of framing life.
Sounds amazing, right? Interesting at least. But, as they say, these sorts of revelations are best realized in the right hands.
As for Allison’s work ethic, it’s the fastidiousness, the adherence. Often us writers say, It could always be better. But then Allison goes and makes that so.
Just so.
Still, if anybody in the book resembles Allison, it’s not the mean artist. It’s the woman our cruel star holds captive, taunting her with no escape, with becoming a living still life, with ugly declarations of what is and what is not art. But Emily is experiencing two struggles: the first, and clearest, is the need to get out of this situation. The second, and less visible, comes straight from the source: Emily realizes she has a relationship with art that she has not examined in her adult life. And why not? What has held her back? What has embarrassed her in museums, made her anxious when the subject comes up with Jack, what had her rolling her eyes every time any friend, family, or film mentioned the subject… art? A unique realization, fit for a unique predicament. Yet, I can’t help but draw a straight line from these new thoughts of Emily’s to the life Allison and I lead. For, while we’re the opposite of embarrassed of art, we are the type of people who might pause when in the grips of someone else’s malicious vision to wonder at the artistry of even that.
I think that’s what I mean by feel. The life we lead over here, the integral pieces of it, cracked apart as though food for a mosaic, and rearranged in the form of a novel. The elements are all there. And while I hope I’m as funny as Jack, Allison is every bit the self-determined, philosophical person who has a serious relationship with art.
And maybe that’s the real resemblance. Between the main players of Pictures of You and anybody who (thrillingly) calls themselves an artist: the relationship is a complicated, chaotic, rewarding, finicky, fun, extraordinary accord. And sometimes the search for your own voice means simply speaking and sometimes it might mean framing the existing world around you, as it stands, just so.
I see the parallels (wonderfully distorted) between the book and our lives here in Michigan, and I ask myself: is there any better place for self-discovery, for identity, than in the things you do, the ideas you have, the gumption to carry them out, and, therefore, the art you make? And so I declare I do see I’ve written what I know, and that fiction is often more relatable than fact, and feeling a book means more to me than examining one, and I tell myself maybe Allison and I are a lot of Emily and Jack, but I tell myself, too, that if we are Emily and Jack, and if Pictures of You is a mosaic of the life we lead, then we are also the woman behind the frame. The woman who found her voice while carrying an empty frame, pausing from physical exhaustion, but psychologically still alert, still searching… her mind open (always) to all things art.
