Indie Authors Spotlight is a BRAND NEW weekly meme that will be held every SATURDAY. It is hosted by Beckie @ Bittersweet Enchantment & CYP @ A Bookalicious Story. The idea of this meme is to promote indie authors and to help them and their books get recognized. This will be a great way for book bloggers to take part in helping these authors be spotlighted for their hard work.
Introducing...
Lili, The Story of LifeThe Blurb
Stephen Flashman loves sex. As a womanizer, he’s been using women for sex all his life. Flashman is what we would call in these latter days an amoral creature, a free and independent operator looking for nothing more than the next score. As far as the ugly side of casual hookups is concerned, Flashman is ruthless and unmoved: he experiences none of the emotional fallout from casual sex, for he has detached his heart from the all-important business of satisfying the libido, which as he sees it, is simply the calculus of getting one’s needs met in an increasingly individualistic society—it is what every mature person seeking fortune and pleasure must inevitably do.
But there are two women who leave an indelible mark upon Flashman’s life, two women whose memory he somehow cannot lay to rest in a sea of forgettable conquests. Diane Densher is one of those women: she is incredibly smart, savvy and ambitious, possessing in abundance all the traits Flashman has sought so arduously to develop in himself; she is an Ivy League graduate and a successful executive with a budding career on Wall Street—in short, she is everything Flashman had always aspired to be. No matter how many times Flashman sleeps with her, he never manages to possess her, to gain the upper hand as it were; there is something about her which tells Flashman that she secretly despises him, a subtly veiled conceit which regards him as not quite her equal, as someone she will eventually detach from and discard as she moves onward and upward, just as Flashman himself has done to so many women in his past. Diane does in fact break up with Flashman, suddenly and without warning: Flashman treats it like just another breakup, but deep down her rejection of him conjures forth insecurities from his past he had long kept repressed, along with a terrible nagging feeling which haunts him incessantly, that he could not keep her because she recognized him as a failure and unworthy to be her mate—to Flashman their parting is not a matter of simple disconnect between lovers but a judgment, a verdict upon his whole life and self-worth, and he is tormented ceaselessly by the need to somehow win her back. Noelle Cummings is just the opposite of her ambitious and serious-minded predecessor: she is a free spirit from her head to her toes, carried along by a simple and insatiable zest for life itself, to live each day as if it were her last. Where Flashman is cerebral and cynical, Noelle is tactile and sanguine and eternally hopeful; for her life is not a matter of acquiring or achieving but experiencing, of living from moment to moment with contagious cheer and joyful expectancy, and she casts a wistful light into Flashman’s bleak inner world. After breaking up with Noelle, Flashman is torn between his affections for both women when a sudden development turns his life upside down: Noelle reveals to him that she is pregnant with his child, but is anxious and fearful about raising a child on her own; she tells Flashman that she is thinking of terminating the pregnancy.
For Flashman it is the moment which sears his heart, which tears at the very core of his being: with Diane showing signs of renewed interest, should Flashman continue to give chase to her, or should he devote his energies to Noelle and do all he can to ensure the birth of his child, while knowing his life will never be the same again?
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About the author: I approach writing principally as I have come to approach life, as a communal experience, a journey in which I evolve by sharing the insights life has taught me and by absorbing and assimilating the insights of others. I am somewhat saddened when I witnessed our country so polarized, so hardened and trenchantly shackled by our ideology that we cannot even bring ourselves to talk to one another; it is as if America has come apart at the seams into little camps, walled cities who have nothing but contempt for one another. As regards myself I do not believe that I am a kind of sage who can bring the masses to the light, so to speak; although many weighty, serious matters get treated in this novel, I never seek to express that treatment in the form of some kind of dogmatic pronouncement, as if to say, "this is how things are; this is what truth is; and there is no other view than my own". For that matter I would not claim to have captured reality, but rather to have simply shared a perception of it--it is my hope that the novel itself would then become a communal enterprise, in that the shared reflections and feedback of readers would cast a light upon the experiences I have shared; and in this way we might grow together. The character of Lily is haltingly, even unconsciously attempting to make his way out of a spiritual darkness, to actualize his humanity in some way; and I think the struggle will find resonance with readers because it is the principle struggle of human life itself, the thread of commonality which all people share and contend with. Some of the content of this novel might come across as controversial, or even repugnant; but I am merely interested in presenting a particular snapshot of reality, a certain depiction of the human condition, in the hope that I might facilitate a discussion amongst readers, or bring them to a place in which they might perceive things differently. And this is because at the juncture in life in which I find presently myself--I am now somewhat older--I do not think that the years have brought me wisdom per se, but perhaps only the wisdom that I need to open myself, to see gray areas and tear down barriers in order to actualize my own humanity. It is my wish that the novel Lily might serve as a catalyst for that exchange, that process through which growth takes place.
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A Commentary by Samuel
To A Bookalicious Story Readers: this is Samuel Bagby, the author of Lily, and I would like to take the opportunity to shed some light upon the themes which lay at the heart of the novel, as well as to give you a needed bit of context to interpret attitudes and personalities in the story that might seem offensive at first glance. To begin with it is obvious that the character of the novel, Flashman, is a chauvinist who is looking to use women. He is not a likable, attractive character; one might have pity for him, because in many ways he has had a hard life, but nevertheless it is a challenge to have much affection for him. Flashman is someone who would offend any morally sensible woman or man: but he does not even have the moral compass to recognize that he has so woefully lost his way.
For the moral and spiritual state of a human being does not happen by itself, or in a vacuum; Flashman’s mother had died early in his childhood, and he was left to his father, whose sexist and abusive ways subsequently shaped Flashman into the unsavory young man we meet in the narrative. Flashman was never taught to love and respect women because his father had never loved and respected them: but there is a part of him that desperately yearns to do so. Flashman looks to fill himself up, to fulfill himself with sex: but he is too damaged, to emotionally crippled, to open up and truly love a woman in the sexual act; he is too inhibited to articulate to a woman the deep spiritual soundings he can neither repress nor fully comprehend. Flashman seems chauvinist, and to some degree he is—but in his deepest heart he was fulfilled by women, first by his mother and then by his daughter later in the novel. He skulks about strip clubs and ravenously devours pornography at night, but in a pathetic way his inner self is only groping about in a kind of existential darkness to find somehow a wife and from her a child that would give him what he had lost so many years ago when his mother had left him.
Flashman himself is a type of the greater American culture around him, he is its sort of incarnation, a man who wishes to use women as casual objects for his pleasure, but who somehow, no matter how many partners and affairs he has, never seems content, never seems satisfied or fulfilled. Flashman dutifully follows the philosophy handed down to his generation from those before, doing all the things American society tells its young people to do in order to be happy, and yet remains somehow empty, at a loss; the novel seeks to apply no sort of moralistic assessment or formula to the state of things, but to ask respectfully whether the culture has perhaps gone off kilter somehow, to ask whether the present sexual mores honors women and men and honors sex itself—the greatest gift human beings can share with one another.
I would be remiss, very much so, if I didn’t relate that there is some amount of political commentary in the book—but then again it isn’t really political commentary per se, but a reflection upon American politics itself. That is to say there is no intent in the book to promote a certain ideology, to advance either liberal or conservative ideas, or even to criticize them—for it’s my own contention that America as a nation benefits from both liberal and conservative thinking, they are like the relatives of a common family who as much as they bicker and fight still need each other. Rather the book seeks to cast a light on this sort of rabid partisanship we see so often now, in which left and right alike seem interested only in lashing out at each other with a kind of unthinking cruelty that unhinges the public debate into an ugly slogging match which ultimately does no one any good. It cannot be a salutary state of affairs that American politicians and citizens alike are so consumed with partisan rancor that they cannot bring themselves to speak to one another openly and with respect; reputations are sullied, the insults fly and in the end we the American people are the victims, with our problems left to fester unsolved; and it is this sort of endless “gotcha” game that the political passages of the book seek to draw attention to.
I approach writing principally as I have come to approach life, as a communal experience, a journey in which I evolve by sharing the insights life has taught me and by absorbing and assimilating the insights of others. Although many weighty, serious matters get treated in this novel, I never seek to express that treatment in the form of some kind of dogmatic pronouncement, as if to say, "this is how things are; this is what truth is; and there is no other view than my own". For that matter I would not claim to have captured reality, but rather to have simply shared a perception of it--it is my hope that the novel itself would then become a communal enterprise, in that the shared reflections and feedback of readers would cast a light upon the experiences I have shared; and in this way we might grow together. The character of Lily is haltingly, even unconsciously attempting to make his way out of a spiritual darkness, to actualize his humanity in some way; deep in the abyss of himself he is seeking a greater love, for meaning and belonging, but he stumbles into all the various snares and traps that modern culture insinuates into the minds of young people—the mindset that objectifies and debases, the mindset that is popular and easy and makes a fat profit for cynical people, while burying over our fundamental identity as spiritual beings who love and need to be loved. I believe that the struggle of the character will find resonance with readers because it is the principle struggle of human life itself, the thread of commonality which all people share and contend with. As I mentioned before some of the content of this novel might come across as controversial, or even repugnant; but I am merely interested in presenting a particular snapshot of reality, a certain depiction of the human condition, in the hope that I might spark a discussion amongst readers, or bring them to a place in which they might perceive things more clearly, or meaningfully. And this is because at the juncture in life in which I find presently myself--I am now somewhat older--I do not think that the years have brought me wisdom per se, but perhaps only the wisdom that I need to open myself, to see gray areas and tear down barriers in order to actualize my own humanity. It is my wish that the novel Lily might serve as a kind of catalyst for that exchange, that process through which growth takes place.
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Giveaway Time
Samuel is so kindly giving away 20 ecopies of Lily: The Story of a Life! Just fill in the Google Docs form below and you're good to go! No requirements to enter. Giveaway is international and ends in two weeks, on May 20th.
