Letters to an Imaginary Girlfriend
Welcome to my fiction page!
In 2004 I got an idea for a story about a fascinating character named Leandra. I knew most of the important details right away, and although they really never changed I let them swirl around for a while, fleshing out the details. I named the piece Falling.
Falling opens up in a restaurant at the top of a seventy story skyscraper. At a table in the back, chosen for its view of the city night outside, sits a twenty-seven year old woman named Leandra Marcoux. Leandra is treating her boyfriend Gabriel to dinner. It’s their six month anniversary; they are in love; and they have come to celebrate. It’s eight PM or so on a friday night, and they have the place pretty much to themselves.
After dinner, Leandra announces to Gabe that she has another surprise for him. She knows a way to sneak up a staircase to the topmost floor, through a window out into an alcove, up a fire escape... and out onto the roof. Gabriel has not been in the city long; she knows the idea will excite him.
They make it out onto the roof, and the view is stunning. Once there, however, Leandra reveals the other reason she took him up on top of this skyscraper, seven hundred feet above the city street below-
She believes she can fly. And she wants to demonstrate...
I knew Leandra believed she had this gift from childhood, that she had tried to share it with two other people in her life, with mixed results. I knew Gabe was a philosophy student with a great mind and some beautiful ideas about freedom and transcendence, but that he had a tendency to talk about these things more than to live them. I knew Leandra’s revelation would be a challenge to him: fascinating, but also very frightening.
It was a very exciting piece to write. I found that the vastness of the cityscape and the night sky surrounding these two people contrasted with the intimacy of their relationship, and became a part of the story. I found that as much as it was suspense, Falling was the account of a woman who needed to be true to herself, who couldn’t go on until she revealed herself fully to her man, and how he had to grapple with that revelation.
Falling turned into a forty page novella, and then into a collection of novellas and short stories called Letters to an Imaginary Girlfriend.
Some other titles are:
Sky
Stronger Than Reality
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
Chicken Soup for the Slut
Sleepers
Several titles from Letters to an Imaginary Girlfriend are now available online! Click here to discover more. Click here to read a sample of Sleepers.
