Amazon Exclusive Essay: Marisa de los Santos on Falling Together
I am an incorrigible homebody. I like my own pillow, my own
imperfect showerhead, my coffee and pizza and bagel shops, my
little rituals. I am quite old lady-ish about it. I like to write
in—and only in—my radically unbeautiful office (I share it with
guinea pigs). I like to drive my kids to swimming. At night, the
moment when I shut my book, turn off my bedside table light, and
know that everyone is ing under the same roof, our roof, is
as close to a state of grace as I ever hope to come. I have
always been this person.
So it is probably not surprising that, until now, my writing has
stuck close to home, as well. In the first two novels, my
characters did a little meandering but rarely outside of the 95
corridor, never outside of the country. They needed no passports;
they never suffered jet lag. And now, with Falling Together, what
have I done but put Will, Augusta, Jason, and my poor aviophobic
Pen on airplane after airplane and sent them clear across the
world? What was I thinking? I was thinking about the story,
mostly, and that these were people who, each in her or his own
way needed to go in quest of something (apart from Augusta, who
has everything she needs). Also, I was thinking that the
Philippines, where my her grew up, is too beautiful, too much
a part of the landscape of my heart not to write about.
I visited the Philippines for the first time when I was 22 and
on Christmas Day, woke up to voluminous sunshine, enfolding heat,
a houseful of relatives, and a roasted suckling pig,
pointy-eared, tiger’s eye-orange, and smelling like bliss. I was
not in Kansas (or Virginia) anymore. I rode in dazzlingly painted
jeepneys; I visited roadside fruit stands as resplendent as
parade-floats and cemeteries in which people laughed, ate, and
talked as though they were in their own living rooms and the
gravestones were furniture or friends. I ate a lot: the little
fists of bread called Elordes after the boxer; rice sticky with
coconut milk; fish with blue s like a secret; fruit shaped
like sea anemones, hedgehogs, brains; heavenly, palm-sized
mangoes with you can scoop like custard.
Amid all of these discoveries, the best part was the people, a
branch (or palm frond) of my family tree that I had only seen in
glimpses. Now, this family surrounded me. I learned that traits I
thought were uniquely my her’s—having conversations with his
eyebrows, a brusque, instinctive generosity that shrugged off
thanks—were family or cultural traits. I learned that home is a
word that can stretch. Since that first visit, I’ve been back
many times since, especially since my parents retired there six
years ago, and every time, home stretches to include something
new: a coral reef, a helper’s bew baby, a soup made of
mung beans, a tiny tarsier’s enormous eyes.
In Falling Together, Pen goes to the Philippines in search of
her friend, but I think she finds more than that. She sits in a
banca boat with a school of jackfish shoaling beneath it and
thinks, awestruck, “All this time, every second: this.” She
experiences the world as big and small at the same time. While I
sit at my desk, drive my children around, under my roof,
all the time, every second, there is another version of home, my
home, vibrantly alive and unfolding itself thousands of miles
away. The least I could do was put it in a book.
A Look Inside Falling Together
Click on the images below to open larger versions.
Alona Palms: This endless pool is at the beach resort that
inspired the fancy one where part of Falling Together is set.
Charles and Tarsier: The author’s son in the tarsier sanctuary
with a tiny friend. Chocolate Hills: The famous hills in Bohol,
from the same overlook where Jason bursts into tears and Pen
comforts him.