Wounded Birds

Mollie Fenwick’s high school reunion is going be perfect. The Web Invites sent out and everyone accepted. Check. Fancy caterers booked and ready to roll. Check. The gorgeous Rain Lake house pristine and welcoming. Check. Becky, the teenaged vixen helping with light housekeeping is on site, ready to serve, load the dishwasher and screw Ben, Mollie’s psychiatrist/author husband. Check. Jessica, invited guest and also Ben’s lover and client, ready to stage a coup of Mollie’s marriage and life. Check. Check?

Following in the footsteps of ‘The Big Chill’, Wounded Birds, represents the theme of a collective healing of the past. Laden with irreverent humor, this book is not afraid to be sentimental, intelligent and philosophical. I think it’s because I allowed my shadow side to come out and play.

In my blog www.woundedbirds.blogspot.com, I talk about the themes of the novel and what is distilled is the idea of the connectivity of the human soul. Many of us are hobbled by our distorted perceptions of ourselves and others.. Though frail or tenuous, this connection will hopefully lead us back to our place of belonging. Truly, we can get there faster if we don’t take ourselves seriously thus allowing us to regard others through a less refractive lens. Looking back to the past or forward to the future, we can finally see people and events as they truly are in the present moment, rather than what we’ve expected or desired.

Mollie, the main character in the novel is my lens through which I view fellow humans good, bad, not-so-good or indifferent. Through her I ponder the ostensible, sad fate of the human heart:

Someday, not so far into the future, man will create android humans who will perform the menial tasks that humanity considered too low on the thought scale to perform. But somehow, Mollie felt, they’ll be able to program them to surrogate human compassion and empathy and sympathy. But what will actually be programmed into them will be mere words and phrases that children and adults wanted to hear throughout the centuries and these spoken in a soft voice devoid of anger and accusation. Words spoken kindly like, ‘there, there, tomorrow’s another day’ or ‘hey, I’m here, I’ll always be here for you’ or just ‘I know’. Perhaps they’ve already produced them, the patent established and the assembly line up and ready to roll. Mollie would be the first to press the green button.