"When We Were Bright and Beautiful"

Jillian Medoff is the author of four acclaimed novels: This Could Hurt, I Couldn't Love You More, Good Girls Gone Bad, and Hunger Point. Hunger Point was made into an original cable movie starring Christina Hendricks and Barbara Hershey and directed by Joan Micklin Silver (Lifetime TV, 2003).

Medoff applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, When We Were Bright and Beautiful, and reported the following:

Turning to page 69 in When We Were Bright and Beautiful, you'll find the end of a conversation between Cassie Quinn and her brother, Billy. They're talking about Billy's feelings for Diana Holly, the young woman who's accused him of sexually assaulting her. Then there's a time shift and Cassie is alone in her car, driving away from her parent's NYC luxury home, into the night.

Turning to me, he just out his chin. "I love her. She loves me."

He means this, I realize. "Billy, this isn't love. What you're describing, what Diana is doing, is something else entirely. But there's no way it's love."

***

Hours later, I slip out of the apartment and into the car the Valmont staff has called up for me. It's cold out but the milky sky is full of stars, so I retract the convertible top. As I head east to the FDR Drive, I feel a rush of adrenaline. I step on the gas...I gather speed, hit forty, forty-five, fifty. Dodging and weaving, I race to the bend of the horizon. Soon, the car falls away. It's just me, flying through space, weightless and untethered. I can't hear. I can't see. I don't feel. Out here, it's as peaceful, as soundless, as sleep. Out here, it's a dream.

As it happens, this page offers a fair, if brief, portrait of Cassie Forrester Quinn, the novel's main character. Cassie is a difficult, damaged twenty-three year-old woman; upon learning that her beloved brother Billy, her Irish twin, has been accused of sexual assault, she races home from graduate school to help defend him. In this passage, she and Billy are talking about his love for his former girlfriend, the woman who accused him.

"That's not love," Cassie reminds her brother. But she's also reminding herself. Like Billy, she's in a problematic relationship, one that started when she was thirteen, and has kept secret for ten years. Cassie speaks in coded language; she offers clues to reel the reader in, and then pushes them away. As illustrated in the passage above, she's on the run--from her family, her secrets, and, ultimately, herself. As soon as a conversation becomes too difficult (like the one with her brother), she bolts. So the next paragraph, where she drives away and then accelerates faster, faster, faster, perfectly encapsulates who she is. Cassie Quinn is self-destructive, reckless and deeply sensitive, which she hides behind a brainy, tough-girl exterior. As WWWBAB progresses, the book's cumulative power and purpose is revealed, which is to understand Cassie's experience, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page, as she tells her family's, and her own, heartbreaking but all-too-familiar life story.

Visit Jillian Medoff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue