TOBY PRESS PUBLISHES NOVEL NOW IN DEVELOPMENT FOR BARBRA STREISAND'S BARWOOD FILMS

A TRICK OF LIGHT By Karen Blomain

The man she had loved and had spent her life with was dead. All the ways she had ever thought she might feel in this situation eluded her. Hattie continued to study Ben's features, which seemed to change again and again in the shifting light. She suddenly knew one thing about her life with Ben. She had lived alongside him through both the glorious and the mundane days of a long marriage, and yet they had both borne their individual loneliness. Hattie's body trembled again at the daunting knowledge that she had never really known Ben at all.

In A TRICK OF LIGHT (Toby Press, Spring 2001, Paperback, ISBN: 1-902881-42-7, $15.95), Karen Blomain explores agoraphobia, bigamy, middle-aged sexuality, and widowhood. The resulting first novel is both disturbing and captivating.

It is 1982 in Fenton, Pennsylvania. Traveling salesman Ben Darling comes home after a long business trip and dies in his wife's arms after they make love. Understandably, Hattie Darling is devastated. Only to her closest friend does she reveal that she is suffering from more than grief. Something darker and more frightening nags at Hattie. Just before Ben died he was about to tell her something that he "should have told her a long time ago." Uncovering Ben's secret becomes Hattie's obsession.

A charming, strong-willed agoraphobic, Hattie had long refused to travel with her husband. But after Ben dies, Hattie realizes that there are vast blank spaces in her knowledge of his life on the road. Unable to mourn Ben as she thinks she should, Hattie is seized with the desire to understand who he was by following the path of Ben's business travels. Her odyssey takes her from the security of the familiar-deep nurturing friendships and her lovely old farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania to a blue-collar neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut, a setting lushly rendered with old world custom and charm.

In Hartford, the path leads her to the door of a guileless, frail young Polish woman who introduces herself as Anya Darling. The suspicions Hattie had not even allowed herself to name are confirmed when she sees and is tormented by Anya and Ben's wedding photo. A bigamist, Ben was also the father of Anna's young daughter, Kasia.

In a surprising turn of events, Hattie does not confront Anya with the truth about Ben. Instead, she befriends Anya and Kasia and moves in with them, little by little gaining their trust and finding out the painful details of Ben's other life. Unwilling at first, Hattie begins to love Ben's other wife and child. In a pivotal moment of self-knowledge, Hattie Darling realizes she cannot hurt them. Another layer of complications results from Hattie's meeting and falling in love with a man to whom she can never reveal her true identity.

As her sexuality reawakens, her anger is replaced by acceptance and forgiveness. Hattie recalls the long buried key to her own isolation and Ben's infidelity, "To remember only the happy times was the widow's way; memory's trick of light. It couldn't be trusted." As she comes to understand that it is possible to love two people, Hattie is freed from her own fear and sorrow. But love brings its own complications. Mirroring Ben's conflict, Hattie can no longer straddle two worlds but must choose between the love of a man and the welfare of a child.

Is it believable that a woman like Hattie Darling could forgive her dead husband and come to love his other family? Blomain thinks so. "When I first started the book, I didn't know the extent of Hattie's ability to forgive and love. As the character grew and changed, I marveled at what she was capable of. The plot allows for the exploration of Hattie's emotional life and provide an understanding of how she finds peace in a seemingly untenable situation."

A strongly plotted, suspenseful and bittersweet story, A TRICK OF LIGHT is also about the very complex and special bonds that can arise between women in even the worst circumstances. And about how one self-proclaimed "ordinary" person can live even the most complex life with passion and integrity.

Film rights to A TRICK OF LIGHT were acquired by Barbra Streisand's Barwood Films. The property is currently in development as a CBS movie of the week.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Blomain, a native of Pennsylvania, is a university professor of creative writing who has received two PEN USA Syndicated Prizes, numerous fellowships and residencies. She has published four volumes of poetry and has edited an anthology of regional poetry. Blomain's short stories have been read on NPR's The Sound of Writing. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and has conducted writing workshops throughout the United States and abroad.

A TRICK OF LIGHT is the first book in a trilogy spanning forty years of the small town lives of three women. Currently in manuscript form, the second book, CAHOOTS, takes place in 1992 and details the sexual awakening of middle-aged Athena Wescott and her conflict with small town mores. Now in the planning stages, book three is the story of the brilliant and eccentric, Eleanor Roderi, a former Catholic nun whose quirky sense of outrage draws her into conflicts with toxic waste dumpers, gangsters and taxidermists.

Blomain and her husband, writer/photographer Michael Downend are the parents of nine children. They live in Maine and Pennsylvania.