A Masterclass on Writing Character
Content Warning: mentions pretty much everything including suicide.
This book of two novellas popped into my letter box around the time my mum was dying. I was interested in it because Yom Kippur in a Gym deals with thoughts of suicide, and I wanted to see how the author Dr. Nora Gold, a former professor of social work, handled it.
After the death of my mother, I needed space and put the book aside until I felt stronger and could allow myself to fall into the narratives where all the characters struggle with heavy weight of personal crises.
I’m glad I did. In the past I’ve found that timing is crucial to getting the most out of literature. The first time I tried to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel on a long-haul flight I couldn’t get into it, but when I returned home to Brisbane and pulled it out in the quiet of my study, I couldn’t put it down.
It was the same for Nora Gold’s novellas. I devoured them recently on a flight.
In Yom Kippur, five characters begin the spiritual Jewish ceremony carrying hefty secrets, lost dreams, and emotional pain that make them feel isolated, lost, and alone. One character even has a plan to kill himself after the ceremony. When the rabbi collapses, the five characters spring into action, helping the rabbi and, unknowingly at first, each other. They leave the ceremony together, as changed people moving towards hope, healing and belonging.
Dr. Nora Gold has won multiple awards for her fiction and this comes through in her beautiful prose. She is also an activist and the founder of jewishfiction.net who, with depth and humour, writes about the medical patriarchy, suicide, sibling estrangement, chronic illness, shame, childhood epilepsy, grief, the power of sharing secrets, and the rampant stigmatisation of disabilities.
As a writer I appreciated the considered decisions that Dr Gold put into the stories and her background of experience. Both Yom Kippur and In Sickness and In Health plunge us into the complicated lives and the rich tapestry of characters being human. They are masterclasses in how to write deep characters.
Even though I loved learning about the spiritual ceremony of Yom Kippur, I fell in love with the character of Lily from In Sickness and In Health. Throughout the story, Lily who is an artist and art teacher, is confined to her bed because of a mysterious illness. During this time we go back and forth between past and more recent healthy present, learning about her childhood epilepsy that left teachers misdiagnosing her with “mental retardation” at a time when people were still categorized based on their IQ as morons, imbeciles and idiots. (For more on this please read Adelle Purdham’s brilliant piece in the Toronto Star: One commonly used word we need to release into the abyss of history.)
We see Lily’s brilliant determination and fight to overcome being treated as “defective.” Lily’s character was so multi-dimensional that I felt I was fighting alongside her, railing at the injustice of stuffing her with medication that dulled her completely: “They filled you up like filling an empty bottle, and once it was full, they screwed on the cap. You got screwed.” I was also laughing with her as she spilled out insults in different languages to help her get through her current physical crisis.
In the text, Dr Gold deftly handles the transition from how people were judged and labelled, to the language we use today: “a person with a disability.” This is one of great powers of fiction—to educate without the reader feeling they’re being educated.
If there was anything I’d change about the books, it’s the use of language around suicide in Yom Kippur. Unfortunately, the out-dated term “commit” suicide—rather than die by suicide—is used once. This shouldn’t deter readers, but it may upset those of us affected by suicide. Which goes to show that, even when we’re an expert, we always need a sensitivity reader.
In Sickness and In Health and Yom Kippur in a Gym, Two Novellas by Nora Gold (Guernica Editions 2024)