Falling Backwards

Falling Backwards is exactly the kind of bizarre love story that I often admire in other people’s work, but usually am too nervous to try myself. It is such an unusual book for me, first because it jumps around a little in time, and second because the people who inhabit the book are so very strange, yet not in the manner of strangeness with which I am accustom.

In the early part of the book a couple bury the top tier of their wedding cake, a man pees on a door during an argument, and a family cares for a pretend cat.

Later, a book launch is taken over by an orchestra, a teenage girl makes a bedroom out of a corner of the kitchen, and every piece of art in a house is covered in canvas.

The narrator in the book gives up most everything for a particularly difficult man, who leaves her for a woman who only looks like his late wife.

Outside of the context of Falling Backwards it would be difficult to believe any of the above might occur but inside the eerie wilderness of this novel, it all makes sense. A bit too much sense. I wrote Falling Backwards from an upstairs room of a house we bought in a rush between babies. We never changed a thing in that house, not the three-dimensional floral wallpaper, not the high-pile brown bathroom carpet that lead to a khaki coloured raised bath, not even the worn wood on the lightpull. We were immersed in babies and books, a condition that lasted years, and I wonder if some of the oddity of Falling Backwards came from the occasional wanderings of my imagination as I envisioned the people who lived before us in this house and wondered who they were.

I became interested in the idea of the past being a kind of constant draw, like a weight you carry that can pull you back into itself unless you continue to exert effort against it. I tried to imagine what would happen to a couple that could not let go of a past event, or a past love. From this emerged the idea of a person inadvertently being just that weight which pulls others back to her.

The character Lea in Falling Backwards serves as catalyst for James and Rebecca’s love affair and marriage but also is the reason why that same marriage is doomed.