not my real name, obviously
You Might Know Me
You may have read one of my best-selling books, seen my solo show, used my website, or watched the seven-season Netflix series based on my novel.
But you don't know me as Quitterie James, the pseudonym I've adopted for my new book Love Trouble, a highly-charged autobiographical novel I wrote 35 years ago and was afraid to publish. So I hid the manuscript -- hid it so well, in fact, that for decades I believed it was lost.
Told in alternating points of view, Love Trouble is the story of a young couple who escape their families to marry at 19. But their parents won't let them go, using and manipulating them until Catherine makes a desperate run to save her life, while Tom clings to their relationship even more desperately to save his.
Love Trouble is my true story, about events a half century ago that were extreme even then but feel truly shocking today. Not many stories get told from this deeply inside this wild a storm. Not many people who survive them go on to become professional writers .
When I dug to the bottom of an old trunk and found the manuscript for Love Trouble, I felt like I was seeing a ghost.. I was afraid: afraid to reencounter my painful past, afraid to read the novel I'd written before I knew how to write one.
What I discovered shocked me, in the most unexpected and amazing way. Love Trouble is the best thing I've ever written, more real, more raw than anything that I could write today. Too much life, too much history, too much technology obscures that period of my life and that time in the world when everything was less homogenized, more hidden.
Love Trouble is a voice from the past, from my personal past but more crucially from our collective past, from the pivotal moment in women's history when repression and liberation, freedom and control collided and opened up possibilities for women while at the same time shutting them down.
Now that I've rescued my story from oblivion, I need to hold it up to the light. I may still be afraid to own it as a memoir and publish it under my real name, but Love Trouble is a story whose truth needs finally to be told.
Quitterie, by the way, is an old French saint's name that means "the red one". It's pronounced kee-tree, and yes, in there is a clue.