Melissa Cary
Brown says one of the book’s characters was inspired by her son, who is on the autism spectrum.
Madison author Rebecca L. Brown’s debut novel began with one thought: What if someone were to die and people were happy about it?
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In Brown’s Flying at Night (Berkley Hardcover), the protagonist Piper Whitman Hart is trying to carve out a space for herself among her male family members. She left her career as an artist to raise her odd but sweet fourth-grade son Fred. Her emotionally abusive father, known publicly as “The Silver Eagle,” is an airline pilot who’s holding on to the brief fame he earned from a successful emergency landing. Meanwhile, Piper’s absent husband Isaac, a UW-Madison law professor, spends his free time working with grad students to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners. The characters frequent familiar Madison locales, including the Madison Public Library, the Chocolate Shoppe, University Hospital and the Wisconsin Veterans Museum — where Fred feeds a temporary obsession with war.
Suddenly, Piper’s father suffers a massive heart attack and is taken off life support, much to the relief of Piper and her mother. But just as Fred is diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, Piper’s father regains consciousness. After her mother leaves the marriage, Piper is left to care for them both, and has to come to terms with some harsh realities.
Brown, a kindergarten teacher and UW-Madison grad, says the character of Fred was inspired by her oldest son, now a high-functioning 15-year-old on the autistic spectrum.
“My experience with parenting him felt very lonely because I didn’t have anyone who had gone through a process of diagnosing a special-needs child — one that wasn’t completely obvious,” Brown says. “Because I was a teacher, I felt I should have known.”
Brown wrote three previous books that weren’t published. She wrote the first 100 pages of Flying at Night in a summer writing class at the Madison Writers’ Studio, founded by Susanna Daniel in 2013. Daniel is the mother of one of the students at the school where Brown teaches on weekday mornings.
Brown finished her novel during afternoons before her three boys came home from school.
She racked up 300 rejection letters before getting support from Madison author Susan Gloss, who wrote Vintage, the story of a fictional Madison resale store. Gloss passed Brown’s book along to her literary agent nearly two years ago, which set the wheels in motion to getting it published by the Penguin imprint.
Though the book has a character with autistic spectrum disorder, it’s also about motherhood. “There’s a lot in the book that anyone who has mothered will recognize — that almost kind of brutal love that you have for someone and you want to fix things and make things right,” says Brown. “I’m still battling that.”
Rebecca L. Brown will read from Flying at Night at 6 p.m. on April 12 at A Room of One’s Own.
