Don’t Forget the Girl

Jun 21, 2023 | 2023 Articles, Mysteryrat's Maze

by Rebecca McKanna

This is one of several LGBTQIA mysteries being featured this month in honor of Pride! You can find them all in our mystery section.

In my novel, Don’t Forget the Girl, one of the central themes is vulnerability – when and how we let people really see us. One of the characters, Chelsea, allows people to misinterpret her sexuality. Her most formative romantic relationship was with a woman when she was a teenager. However, they kept it a secret, and once the other woman died, Chelsea never felt right telling that story. With that omission of her romantic history, people read her as straight rather than bi, and she never corrects that misconception, even though sometimes it feels lonely. Throughout the book, Chelsea struggles to let people fully see her, even though she craves that intimacy as much as she fears it.

There’s a scene where Chelsea, an Episcopal priest, is listening to one of her young parishioners. The girl comes out to Chelsea and explains that she has just come out to her mother with disastrous results. Chelsea tries to commiserate with her, telling her she understands how hard that must be. The girl responds, “Well, you can’t really understand. You’re straight.”

Instead of correcting her and explaining that she’s bisexual, Chelsea allows the misconception to stand. Both because of Chelsea’s fear of being really seen and because of a misplaced sense of paying penance for past wrongs, Chelsea nods and agrees with the girl, even though it feels lonely.

In real life, as in the book, I’ve been struck by the generational differences in terms of openness about sexuality. A few years ago, I served as a mentor in a program for kids. As my mentee turned thirteen, they started to question their sexuality and gender identity, first coming out as a lesbian and then non-binary. I was proud of them for so many reasons. For interrogating their sexuality and gender so early in their life. For being brave enough – and wanting me to see this part of them enough – that they shared these things with me. But nestled within those proud feelings, was something murkier.

Rebecca McKanna

My mentee was questioning things at thirteen that I, as an elder millennial, didn’t consider until I was an adult. They were brave and vulnerable. Meanwhile, like Chelsea, I let people’s assumptions about my sexuality go largely unchecked. If you’re partnered with someone of the opposite sex, as Chelsea is in the book and I am in real life, there’s an assumption that is the extent of your sexuality. You’re a woman married to a man? Well, obviously you’re straight. Like Chelsea had with her young parishioner, I felt lonely when I said goodbye to my mentee that afternoon.

After that day, I began to, when it felt organic and right, talk about my bisexuality with the people I was closest to. My mother was supportive. Several of my friends met my disclosure with their own – they, too, were elder millennials who hadn’t allowed themselves to fully unpack their sexuality until adulthood. There were the occasional awkward or disappointing moments. My father was a little stunned and one friend responded dismissively, but overall the risk was worth the reward. And when I finally told my mentee, they were deeply unsurprised except to wonder why I had waited so long to tell them.

There’s that Anaïs Nin quote about the day coming “when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” The same thing happens with vulnerability and intimacy – at a certain point the loneliness of not sharing all of yourself with the people you care most about will become more painful than the risk of exposure.

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Rebecca McKenna’s fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 and honored as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her work has appeared as one of Narrative Magazine’s Stories of the Week and has been published in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, Third Coast, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications. She has received financial support from the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. An assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, she earned her MFA from Purdue University. Rebecca was born and raised in Iowa.

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