Paulette Bates AldenBesprekingen

Wow. This little gem of a novel sucks you in and holds you hostage – not unlike the characters within the stomach knotting storyline. It’s a page turner – suspenseful, gritty, and real. The characters are exceptionally rendered, layer by layer by layer, and you end up caring about each one in the ever-twisting plot.

The Answer to Your Question is an apt title – the core of the novel, and the raw energy the author taps into over and over again, is the psychology driving the seemingly unanswerable choices and actions we all make. What draws us into relationships – those that are healthy and those that are not? What propels some of us to do the unimaginable? The author provides you with just the level of detail you need to piece together your own understanding of the individual motivations driving the choices each character makes. And like our own choices, as one of the main characters, Jean, points out in the novel: “It’s not bits and pieces you can pick and choose. It’s whole cloth. Everything counts.”

A psychological thriller, check. But what I loved about this novel most was the quality of the writing. It’s beautifully written. I found myself re-reading passages and lines simply because I found the detail, language and dialog so beautiful, often hauntingly so.

Easily the most enjoyable novel I have read in some time. An exceptional work by a talented writer.

Like others have noted this isn't really short stories. It's a novel following Miram as she deals with losses in her life. A Southerner now living in the North, a professor, a writer, a wife, a daughter... these all play a role in Miram's life.

I liked the theme but the Miram this and Miram that got to me after a while. I think this story could have been better if it was done in first person. That's really my biggest complaint. I think Paulette wanted to write this in first person but didn't really know how. The book read like a memoir or an autobiography and I wouldn't be surprised if this book wasn't really a thinly fictionalized account of someone's real life.

Crossing the Moon. Paulette Bates Alden. 1996. What interested me most in this autobiography was not the on-again-off-again desire of the author to have as child as I am thirty years past that or her account of dehumanizing fertility treatments but her description of her southern childhood and college years in the fifties and sixties. She could have been writing about me, my female relatives and my friends. She didn’t fit in with the traditional life she was expected to embrace nor was she ever comfortable with the hippy-life that held a certain appeal. She is good writer and I enjoyed reading about her cross country trip to California and her writing classes with one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose is one of my favorite novels).

Motherhood and family relationships are the core of Paulette Bates Alden’s memoir, CROSSING THE MOON. Born in 1947 and raised in a traditional southern Baptist environment in South Carolina, she left home to go to college where she studied writing. Her first stop was Chapel Hill, North Carolina, then on to Stanford in California for graduate studies.
Her life became totally different than the one she had imagined while growing up and being lived by almost everyone else with whom she had grown up. Most all the girls she had known in South Carolina had gotten married and had children. At Stanford, there was a lot of talk and relationships involving sex. “We talked a lot about giving birth, but we meant to ourselves.” In her studies she realized that more literature written by men. “One can only conjecture about how many great feminine novels are walking around in flesh and blood. Women seem to have babies instead of books.”
She eventually did get married but wasn’t interested in the children part until she was about forty years old. She wondered if that was a rejection of her mother, whose role in her life looked different in retrospect.
Much of the book is about the relationship between her and her mother, the way it seemed to her as a child and then as an adult, understanding what her mother was trying to accomplish. She remembered that while growing up, her mother “couldn’t look at [her sister] and me without thinking up some way to improve us, something else that we needed to do. No wonder we wanted to escape her.” “By the time we were teenagers, the very qualities in her we had valued in childhood became the source of conflict....We began to resist her, to separate from her, the normal thing. But this pulling apart was not without its pain, anger, and sorrow on both sides.... She wanted what was best for us, but what was best was defined by what society had in mind.... And in that era when everything turned upside down, even if we didn’t always know who we were, at least we knew who we weren’t: our mothers and fathers.” At one point when she was visiting her mother and met with childhood friends she “grew to see that at least in part my mother was right. As I became more comfortable with myself and more surely established in my own life, it became easier to accept my friends and the choices they made. I wasn’t so defensive or threatened.”
As she neared the end of her child bearing years, her interest in becoming a mother increased dramatically. When it wasn’t as easy as she expected it to be and she and her husband began undergoing infertility treatment, that interest became the most important issue in her life. She does into detail explaining the various tests and steps they took trying to achieve parenthood for several years. The way she dealt with not being able to maintain a pregnancy presented an important window to understanding how some women can deal with this situation and which flies against those who are doing so much to make abortion illegal: “It will never get that far. It will never be a baby I lose; it will be a pregnancy.” When she finally decided to stop trying, she
realized “Giving up on a child felt like a death. It was a death, but there was no ritual, no ceremony to mark it. There was no body, no funeral.”
At times I had the feeling that, initially, her wanting to have a child was more the result of peer pressure than of a genuine desire on her part. “Did I really want to be a mother, or did I really just want to conform to society’s expectations or me?”

CROSSING THE MOON is a very honest, open telling of the relationships between parents and children, husband and wife. It questions how much the way we view our own relationships with our parents, particularly our mothers, determines the type of lives we choose to live and how changes in that perspective can influence our future decisions. It also takes us through the agony of trying to achieve a goal that appears to be so easy for so many yet out of reach for others.
It was well-written and flowed smoothly.
This book was a free Amazon download.

Bold and compelling - this is the heartfelt story of Inga & Jean, and how their lives became intertwined. This novel pulls the reader into the intense scrutiny of two characters' psyche. Each protagonist has a voice that grows stronger, as they each reach out for their own emotional survival. An intriguing tale, told with an original voice. Paulette Alden has done well to reveal the story of the two unfortunate souls who imprinted on each other while on the path of their own journeys. Both are confronted with unimaginable loss. Inga deals with her fate and choses life after mayhem. Jean, a simple woman, learns about the world and copes with the immeasurable heartache. Our humanity is often tested by tragedy. Questions arise... How we answer is the way we each define ourselves. Inga and Jean replied with decency and loyalty in this wonderful story. They asked the hard questions, and faced the answers. I highly recommend this book for all those who appreciate the human struggle and are not afraid to hear a voice seeking an answer to their question.

The Answer to Your Question by Paulette Alden is a first-rate, character-driven psychological thriller. It’s about the character Ben Daudelin, a serial murderer, but it approaches him from the unique points of view of two women very close to him: Inga Daudelin, his mother, and Jean Jones, a young teenager kidnapped and held hostage by Ben. The book takes us deep into the mind of these two main characters and through them, and their interactions with Ben, we get as close as we can to understanding the true nature this psychological phenomenon.

The author is masterful at creating characters. I quickly became attached to the book’s two main characters. They became wholly real; I cared about them…and when either was psychologically or physically in danger, I couldn’t stop reading. Once I was about a third of the way through this book, I was completely lost in the story; time was suspended; I couldn’t stop until the end. I love books that do that and consider it the sign of a really good writer and a good book.

Inga is the serial murderer’s mother. She is in her forties and works as a librarian in Tacoma, Washington. The author admits that she modeled Inga after the famous serial murderer Ted Bundy’s mother who was also a librarian and worked in Tacoma. In the first chapter, we are with Inga when the police come to her home and inform her that her good-natured, affable twenty-five-year-old son, Ben, is wanted as a suspect in the brutal murders of four women. She is completely blindsided and incredulous. Foremost, she is a mother, and throughout the story, her love for her son never falters; but as the book progresses, little by little, her doubts about his innocence grow. The book is an absorbing and intriguing emotional study of that process.

But it is much more than that. It is also an effective and moving psychological thriller…and that’s because of Jean’s participation in the plot.

Jean, is an odd, vulnerable sixteen-year-old woman who works with Inga in the library as a shelving clerk. She was raised deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and seems preternaturally wise beyond her years—a young woman who possesses a primal understanding of the cruel realities of the natural world. She emotionally attaches herself to Inga and eventually gets drawn into Inga’s situation with Ben. Eventually, Ben kidnaps Jean and the two develop an odd relationship. Through Jean’s interactions with Ben, the author makes us aware of the extreme complexities of Ben’s character.

The book asks: How can someone like Ben, who seems so outwardly normal, actually be a serial murderer? The answer is not straightforward, but subtle and authentic. The author makes the reader understand that characters like Ben are enigmas. We can never completely fathom the complexity of their characters and motivations. In the context of this book, that answer seemed eloquent and fitting.

Paulette Alden is a powerful writer, which is something we should expect from anyone who managed to win a prestigious place as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford’s Creative Writing Program. If you enjoy first-rate, character-driven, psychological thrillers, you shouldn’t pass this up.