Chasing the past
As characters discover in Gabrielle Pina's work, if you don't catch up with the past, it'll catch up with you
By Nikki Bazar 11/09/2006
Before Gabrielle Pina entered the creative writing program at USC -- the same program she teaches in now -- she had already completed a novel about her family. By the time she received her master's degree, that novel had been permanently shelved, Pina says, never to see the light of day.
"Paul Zindel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, told me to write it and get it out of the way," says Pina, a Pasadena resident for 12 years. "'If you don't,' he said, 'you'll find that it sneaks into everything that you write one way or another. If you pack it all into one book, you can be done with it.'"
Since shelving her "memoir," Pina draws on her lively imagination for novels instead of the limited confines of real life. Her USC master's thesis manuscript turned out to be her first published novel. "Bliss," published in 2002, is the story of a slim, successful musician who has been hiding her troubled past from her family and the public. In reality, the beautiful, world-renowned violinist grew up as an insecure, obese girl abused and neglected by her family.
The concept of a strong, successful woman hiding a secret past is explored again in Pina's second novel, "Chasing Sophea," published in October by Random House. Dahlia Chang is a mother, wife and well-off businesswoman living in Pasadena, but a traumatic event from her childhood is catching up with her in the form of a bizarre madness that both her husband and her psychologist are struggling to figure out. Family members back in Dallas where the event occurred, however, know that the only chance to save Dahlia from her madness is to bring her back into the fold of the family.
Both novels make the obvious case that you can't run from your past, but they also -- "Chasing Sophea" more overtly than "Bliss" -- highlight the entangled nature of pasts. When Dahlia returns to her family members -- a jumbled bag of similarly tormented people who operate a funeral home -- each one of them finds that the time to reckon with their own ghosts occurs in conjunction with Dahlia's arrival, as if the family can only collectively grapple with the past.
This is not only a logical effect of familial relation, according to Pina, but also a result of fate, which nominates certain individuals, like Dahlia, as survivors destined to liberate the group from a haunted past.
"No one knows why bad things happen to good people," says Pina, "but because they've had that experience, it changes them; it alters the course of their life and it makes them be the person they were always destined to be. You never know how your life, and the testament of your life, affects the people around you. Sometimes you can't see the master plan. Dahlia survived [her event] because she was meant to, because she had work to do whether she realized it or not."
In that sense, Dahlia is unable to rescue herself alone. Her salvation is inextricably bound up with that of others, a dependence that does not denote weakness, according to Pina, but is rather a necessary factor in discovering oneself.
The theme began with the first novel. "My focus in 'Bliss' was on the strength of the women in that novel, how strong they were, what they had to overcome, how successful they became, how they conquered their demons," Pina remarks. "In order for them to do that, they had to be in relationships with these types of people. You know what kind of person you are by the relationships you have with other people. That's when you really know who you are."
The tandem tasks of discovering who you are and wrestling with your demons are essential to being a "strong woman," in the sense that Pina means it. To neglect those tasks is to render yourself vulnerable to an utter collapse of the self.
In the course of her research for "Chasing Sophea," Pina spoke with numerous women, each of whom, she says, could remember a time when they were precariously straddling the line between sanity and insanity. "I wanted to explore what it would be like if an otherwise healthy, professional woman just let go of the line, just let herself go, succumbed to it and surrendered to madness," offers Pina. "I wanted to know what that was like, because so many women I spoke to could relate to a time in their lives when they felt like they wanted to, but couldn't, realizing that they couldn't let go because so many people were depending on them: husbands, children, parents, people at work ...."
The greater social comment Pina intends, then, is that women who strive to have it all are risking an inevitable implosion by suppressing their selves. "It's a misconception that a woman can have it all. You can't. You can't have it all and do everything successfully. Something has to give. You can't raise your children to the best of your ability and work 60 hours a week and everything else that comes with that: your family, your job, your responsibilities. I think women in our society, we have difficulty saying no."
As a successful novelist, mother of three children, wife and teacher at both USC and Pasadena City College, it may seem that Pina does indeed "have it all." But she claims that even she sometimes feels like letting go. Her secret? Meditation. And perhaps, the therapeutic effect of the novels themselves.
"I just love strong women," she says emphatically. "I come from a family of really strong women. My mother had three sisters; my grandmother was the matriarch of our family. One of my biggest goals in life is to affect women and girls and to help encourage them to realize their own personal power. So in the back of my mind, I guess, that will always be a theme one way or another."
Gabrielle Pina discusses "Chasing Sophea" at 4 p.m. Sunday at Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. For more information, call (626) 449-5320, or visit www.vromansbookstore.com .
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