Christy Healy: On Writing

I rarely reflect on the process of writing Unbound, simply because it was a difficult time in my life. I began writing a very rough first draft after the birth of my second child; I was struggling with PPD, grieving the loss of my mother-in-law, and trying to adjust to life with a newly-diagnosed diabetic toddler. Many writers agree that inspiration often strikes in the most mundane ways, that ideas come to us not when we are drumming fingers at our laptops, but while in the line at the grocery store or waking up in the middle of the night from a particularly vivid dream.

I love telling the story of when the idea for Unbound first came to me, as it was a very unlikely moment to inspire an epic fantasy novel—but mostly because it quintessentially, I think, defines what it means to be a young and creative mother. I was playing with my young daughter, deeply sleep-deprived and barely lucid; snappish and irritable and grumpy towards the world at large for reasons that were largely out of my control—but also determined to continue to be a present mother to my toddler while my newborn napped. So there I was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, when my daughter held up her Belle doll. “Now,” she said, “it’s Belle’s turn to be the Beast for a while.”

Such a simple little thing, and to this day, I cannot explain how it came to me – the idea for Unbound, unfurling there in my imagination, the image of a woman who had been deemed a monster: a scowling, sharp-clawed unlovable beast, and who learned to embrace said beastliness, to take something everyone else believed to be ugly and find beauty within it.

I wrote the book in snatches, but remarkably quickly, all things considered – I typed on my phone late at night with a baby sleeping on my chest; I scribbled frantic, fast notes to myself on the backs of junk mail and on discarded pieces of construction paper in the kitchen; I hunkered down over my laptop to coffee shops on Saturday mornings and cozy diners on Sunday afternoons.

I was consumed by this story, these characters, and within five weeks, I had nearly 155 thousand words stored in various documents on my hard drive. I sat down one evening and compiled it all together into a single, cohesive Word document, sat back and read it through from start to finish for the very first time, and smiled. I’d done it – I’d written a book – a very long, unwieldy one, riddled with grammatical errors and plot holes, sure, but a book nonetheless – and in doing so, I felt healed, made whole somehow. I felt like myself again, for the first time in months.

And then, for a very long time, it stayed there. I won’t lie; in a very Taylor-Swift-esque way, I honestly forgot that it existed. I went back to work teaching college students about Homer and Hamlet, adjusted to life with two small children, and read a lot and wrote a little, but I never really thought much more about Unbound and the much-needed escape I found in its creation, the joy and catharsis that it brought me.

Not until a few years later, when I was in the middle of writing something else, and my husband boasted one night when we were out with friends that I had been writing a book. It was something I’d always felt shy talking about myself, but when my little brother heard this, he leaned toward me. “Christy,” he said. “You’ve always wanted to be an author. You should do this – you should go be an author.”

Obviously, it was not as easy or simple as he made it sound. It was, and is, an incredibly difficult and emotionally draining process, but I’m glad that I listened to him, that I gave it a shot, that this book in particular will be my debut and will forever be the one that made me, truly, an author. Writing it saved me, in so many ways. I needed an escape, so I began to tell myself stories, and Unbound was the product of that need, that desperation. I remember rereading it years after I first wrote it, how it brought back that sense of relief, of creative joy.

The time apart from it gave me the clarity to see the roughness of it, the ways that I could improve and expand upon that initial creation, but it also reminded me of why I wrote it in the first place – that much-needed escapism into a different world, a reality full of both monsters and magic. Even though it has undergone many revisions and rewrites, the core of what it was first meant to be is still there, I think – an exploration of grief, a journey of rediscovery and reaffirmation, and learning to love yourself even when it feels like you’re an unlovable monster.

If it feels like escapism, fairy-tale fantasy, that’s because it is, and I’m so grateful to this story and these characters for helping me through one of the hardest periods in my life. It is an amalgamation of my love of many things – Irish mythology and folklore; twisted fairy-tales; monstrous female protagonists, and much like Rozlyn, the protagonist of Unbound, it is both a reflection and a celebration of who I was then, and who I have now become.

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Christy Healy has been a book nerd ever since she was a little girl hiding under the covers with a flashlight and a dog-eared copy of Anne of Green Gables. She started writing soon after, and the obsession only grew. An English and Rhetoric professor at a small liberal arts college, Christy has taught a variety of courses involving her fascination with the classical world and her love of mythology. Now Christy weaves stories of her own into the myths and tales of the Celtic, Indo-European, and Greco-Roman worlds that she has loved for so long. When not lost in her fantasy worlds, she lives in North Carolina with her children, her dog, and her husband.

UNBOUND

For fans of Hannah Whitten and Rebecca Ross, Unbound is a gender-bent reimagining of the classic tale of a monstrous beast and the beauty determined to tame it, set against the lush backdrop of Irish mythology and folklore.

Rozlyn Ó Conchúir is used to waiting–waiting for the king, her father, to relent and allow her to leave the solitude of her tower; waiting for the dreaded and mysterious Beast of Connacht to at last be defeated; waiting for the arrival of the man destined to win her heart and break the terrible curse placed on her and her land. So when she meets Jamie–a charming and compelling suitor–she allows herself to hope that her days of solitude and patience are over at long last.

But as she finds her trust betrayed–and newer, more sinister threats arising–Rozlyn learns that some curses are better left unbroken …

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Category: On Writing