Laura Kenyon
So you danced at the ball, the slipper fit and your fairy tale life actually came true, or so you thought. Only these days — now a decade later — your prince-turned-king seems more interested in burying himself in work than doing anything spontaneous or memorable with you. And returning home earlier than expected, you just spotted him with a younger woman.
What’s a gal to do? Why, turn to her equally notorious group of girlfriends, of course, and maybe a glass or two of merlot.
The exploits of an assemblage of iconic, fairytale heroines are told in “Desperately Ever After,” a new book that begins a series by former Advertiser editor Laura Kenyon, who notably was the first woman ever to hold that position. “My time in New Canaan was such a huge part of my life,” she told the Advertiser.
And while she says her days at the Advertiser helped influence the book “in the human connection sort of way,” her foundations as a writer go back much farther to her days growing up an avid reader in Lewisboro, N.Y. The book, too, has been taking shape for some time.
“The idea for this series has been brewing since I was in high school. It probably stemmed from the fact that I watched tons of Disney movies as a kid,” she said. “It started to drive me crazy how, in these movies, people fell madly in love after one second’s glance.
“The insinuation was that because they were physically attracted to each other, they were perfectly matched, and their lives were going to be filled with butterflies and rainbows and infinite happiness forever after,” she continued.
“As we all know, life just doesn’t work that way,” Kenyon said. “Relationships take work. I wanted the untold story.”
A curious place
The story is set in the imaginary realm of Marestam, where the group of fairytale women, some of whom have become queens, face things like the catastrophe of turning 30, disinterested or unfaithful husbands, control-freak mothers-in-law, post-childbirth waistlines — and magical teleportation rings.
“I absolutely loved taking them from their original, centuries-old stories, giving them realistic problems and worries and regrets, and letting them come alive from there,” Kenyon said.
“‘Desperately Ever After’ is about a group of women coming to terms with how their lives have turned out,” she said. “They may be dealing with infidelity, temptation, aging, stress or just the ongoing need to sideline their dreams for the benefit of everyone else.”
“Some of these worries may be in their heads, while some may be too real to accept,” she noted. “Either way, it’s about them and how they deal with these issues as friends.”
Marestam itself, complete with multi-tower, storybook palaces and crowded metro train lines, is a curious place. Its inhabitants talk on “media screens,” browse websites and sip metabolism-revving, foul-tasting teas, while the government maintains a careful registry of all things magical like “pureblood” fairies and those who are descendant from them. There’s even a brief mention of “PETTA” — People for the Ethical Treatment of Talking Animals.
Thus, Marestam — which the author pronounces “MARE-iss-tam” like “mare,” a female horse, with emphasis on the first syllable — has a modern feel but is a different, somewhat parallel world to ours. It’s divided into five smaller kingdoms and operates as a “constitutional polymonarchy,” with a balance between parliament and royalty, so it echoes elements of the United Kingdom.
But Kenyon’s imaginary realm actually draws more from American shores, particularly the fairly recognizable city southwest of the author’s hometown that’s known for a lack of sleeping. “Marestam” is a reshuffling of most of the letters of “New Amsterdam” minus “New,” for instance, and careful readers might find some interesting similarities in name and character between Marestam’s five sub-kingdoms and, yes, the boroughs of New York City.
“I had way too much fun creating this world,” Kenyon joked.
Kenyon’s colorful imagery and often quick, lighthearted style makes it easy to keep flipping pages. To be sure, the book’s most resonant audience will be women in their 20s to their 40s or so. However, though Kenyon tells the story from inside the leading ladies’ heads, they and their actions aren’t necessarily put forth as being in the right, per se, and the reader is left to sympathize, empathize, criticize, or some combination thereof.
For the male reader, those options are there, and maybe something else. It’s a little like being the guy who can read women’s thoughts in the 2000 movie, “What Women Want” — readers with Y chromosomes might find themselves wondering, for instance, if the reason the missus has been giving them the cold shoulder lately is much more complicated than they thought.
Visit LauraKenyon.com for more on Kenyon, the book and future installments of the series.