Pictures of You: Holly Robinson

“Why Are the Men in Your Novels So Nice?” by Holly Robinson

Recently, I was talking to a book club about my latest novel when a woman demanded, “Why are the men in your novels so nice?”

The woman said the word “nice” like it was a deadly contagious disease, or maybe a tricky tax question. I stumbled through an answer about writing emotional family mysteries with dark secrets, and how I try to give readers a beacon of hope by the end of each novel.

However, the real answer is simpler, I realized later: the men in my novels are nice because I have a great brother.

My brother Donald lives across the ocean in a brick farmhouse surrounded by rose bushes. He texts me pictures from his walks in the English countryside and calls me every week. In return, I bake his favorite cookies for his birthday each year and mail them, despite overseas postal costs that rival my car payments.

Donald and I make each other laugh as we share confidences about everything from jobs to family life, so it’s no accident that many of the male characters in my fiction share some of his traits: they are science nerds and cooks, great dads, Scotch lovers, handy with tools, and funny as hell. However, we haven’t always gotten along. Far from it.

In every family, there are labels, and you spend most of your life trying to rip them off. In ours, my father was stern, Mom was fun, I was smart, and Donald was wild. He was skinny and so blond that he looked bald in most lights. It didn’t help his looks any that Mom buzzed his hair like a Marine’s, which only called attention to the fact that Donald’s head was long and narrow; everyone, even our parents, called him “Picklehead.”

I was older by three years, but I was such a passive, book-loving kid that it was easy for my hellcat brother to maintain the upper hand. Donald had a genius for escaping mischief unscathed and was savvy at getting others to do his bidding. Arguing with him was like arguing with a prophet: Donald always knew he was right. Consequently, my role was that of fall guy.

My brother would pinch me on long car rides, steal my things and break them, and once bit me so hard that I still have a small scar on my hip. Our parents used to have to roll up blankets to put between us in the car because we fought so incessantly.

Donald convinced me to race a newspaper boy on a bicycle, which led to me being run over by the bicycle and breaking my nose. He also talked me into climbing a telephone pole, using the same metal rungs the telephone repairmen used, and shimmying down it again in shorts. Mom had to spend an entire evening plucking splinters out of my legs. And, long after I should have been old enough to know better, Donald led me to believe that I could use badminton racquets under my arms as wings and fly off my grandmother’s barn roof. I was furious every time my brother tricked me.

I eventually wised up, but my brother and I didn’t fight any less during our teens and twenties. We tried living together when Donald dropped out of college, but his stereo shook the shingles off the house and he made it clear he didn’t approve of my habits with men. (Which, looking back, were pretty appalling).

How, then, did we get to be close, with so much bad history between us?

The answer is easy: like all siblings, Donald and I shared a childhood nobody else can understand.

Our father was in the Navy, which meant we moved every year or so for the first fifteen years of my life. My brother and I were like the sole survivors of a shipwreck, only there wasn’t much point in sending up flares for help, because the island kept changing location. We were natural enemies, as rivals for our overworked mother’s attention—she was busy tending to our little sister, who was terminally, terribly ill with cystic fibrosis—but forced into being bookends for each other anyway. Otherwise we wouldn’t have survived the things we did.

For example, when Donald and I were very young—maybe five and eight years old–Dad kept a cabin cruiser on the Chesapeake Bay. At cocktail hour, our parents would strap Donald and me into life jackets, hitch us onto ropes, and drop us into the water. They made sure to hoist up the ladder as we paddled and bobbed like bright orange ducklings around the boat. I was happy enough, but scrawny Donald was miserably blue-lipped with cold in minutes. He’d mewl at Mom to let down the ladder, but she’d lean over the boat railing to gaze down at him with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, shaking her head.

“Just a few more minutes, kids,” she’d say. “Your father and I need some time to ourselves.”

Through our teens, Donald and I survived our sister’s death, our younger brother being born two weeks later, our mother going numb from a combination of grief and childbirth, our father turning his passion for the Navy into a very different sort of passion for his gerbil farm, our parents’ divorce, our father’s remarriage to a second wife, and the sudden death of a beloved stepbrother in a car accident.

There was a hiatus of perhaps ten years, while we lived our separate and mostly unshared lives  on opposite coasts of the country. And then we came together again, Donald and me, for our marriages and parenthood–our daughters were born a month apart—as well as for long talks when our father was divorcing our stepmother and remarrying our mother, who accepted him as her husband again with a shrug, saying, “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.” More recently, it is Donald I turned to for comfort when our father and grandmother died, and when we nearly lost our mother as well.

My brother has provided me with the necessary ingredients for a relationship laboratory all my life, teaching me about envy, trust, betrayal, adventure, creativity and laughter. There is probably no man whose opinion mattered more to me as I was growing up, and certainly no man who could make me angrier or cry harder or laugh longer.

We novelists make things up and have fun telling stories. In each piece of fiction we create, however, we inevitably infuse the ingredients of our own lives, bits of self that we stir and recombine, separate out and boil down as we attempt to ask life’s biggest questions about who we love, and why love matters. My brother is one of my key ingredients, as ordinary but life-sustaining as salt.

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Novelist, journalist and celebrity ghost writer Holly Robinson is the author of several books, including The Gerbil farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir and the novels Beach Plum Island and The Wishing Hill. Her newest novel, Haven Lake, will be published in April 2015.  Her articles and essays appear frequently in publications such as NPR’S Cognoscenti, The Huffington Post, More, Parents, Redbook and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. She and her husband have five children and a stubborn Pekingese. They divide their time between Massachusetts and Prince Edward Island, and are crazy enough to be fixing up old houses one shingle at a time in both places. Find her at www.authorhollyrobinson.com and on Twitter @hollyrob1.