Critters, revisited 1,000,000,000
While we’re on the subject of critters* as we so often are in this blog, @kejia32 posted this on Twitter a few days ago:
FYI @robinmckinley fans: article by Helen Pilinovsky about «Deerskin» – caution, contains spoilers http://bit.ly/cfLAN4 **
I thought this was a very good and interesting article and . . . sorry, all you literate academics out there . . . surprisingly direct and straightforward for a scholarly piece. She makes a couple of clearly valid interpretive points I hadn’t thought of, which is one of those things that rouses a writer to caper and giggle a little because she did it right even when she didn’t know what she was doing . . . and a writer never really knows what she’s doing.***
But what I wanted to comment on here is that she barely mentions Ash, Lissar’s dog. She doesn’t have to—her concerns are elsewhere and that’s fine—but from my perspective the book not only hangs on Ash, but Ash is the reason Lissar survives. DEERSKIN is a story about horrific abuse, and while I have enormous faith in the capacity of the human organism to heal†, there are still limits. People—especially children—need something to love. Lissar had Ash. If she hadn’t had Ash, she wouldn’t have learnt about love—and she wouldn’t have grown up into a human being. She certainly wouldn’t have had the strength to escape nor the strength to endure.††
Fortunately all I have to do is go back to my nice warm book-over-filled cottage with my two beautiful††† elegant canine companions‡ and crash. I seem to be trying to come down with flu, gods frell it, I’m bored with this, okay? But keep me away from the ‘free kittens’ ads in the paper and the ‘free kittens’ notices on the vets’ surgery walls‡‡. Black Bear says that marmalade toms are known to be disgracefully friendly and I’m sure after an initial adjustment period. . . .‡‡‡
* * *
* Okay, just TWO more kitten photos. Taking photos of yourself is always a trifle aggrieved, and in this case he’s caught on to the camera and, of course, being a kitten, thinks it’s a toy. Well, it is a toy, like my glasses, necklace, watch, ring, belt buckle, folds of t-shirt suitable for pulling on and folds of jeans suitable for fraying, hair, and All Stars are all toys.^ 
Phineas and Eidolon should be back tonight. Whew. Slightly before my entire life crashes and burns. Of course they may go away again. But kittens grow up. Fortunately. About the only things I haven’t been neglecting are hellhound hurtles.
^ He is not a biter and scratcher. You can even rub his tummy without him seizing your hand’s throat with his teeth and disembowelling your palm with his hind feet.
** I rarely read reviews and almost never read critical essays of my work. Pre-blog and particularly pre-Twitter I didn’t read anything 
that Merrilee didn’t send me, and she only sent me (good) reviews from the standard professional journals: Publishers’ Weekly and so on. Now that the world has changed and a lot of us are out here milling around in the aether, people send me links like this one and I do occasionally go look at them. Occasionally. It’s true that a bad review will ruin my day, but there’s a bit more to my avoidance than sheer authorial vanity. Mind you, writers totally vary about this. And I’ve told you all this before, but this seems to me a suitable moment to mention it again. Readers who can say something usefully negative or fault-finding about my work are vanishingly rare. They do exist, and their price is above rubies. But they’re rare. It’s not that I think I’ve done it so fabulously right—au contraire: one of the worst things about my chronic cycle of insomnia is the chronic cycle of picking my books to pieces that comes with it—but that an awful lot of bad reviews are coming from some other angle than the one I wrote the story from^. And I don’t need to have my day ruined to no purpose: it’s like going in for unnecessary surgery. All you get is scars.
I decide to look at a link or not by sheer whim. It took me a couple of days to look at this one—DEERSKIN has received probably the most vicious negative response of all my books because of the subject matter and, because of the subject matter, it bothers me more^^—but since kejia32 had recently mentioned that DEERSKIN was one of her favourite books I figured it was probably safe.
^ This is equal-opportunity crankiness. I often have the same reaction to bad reviews of other people’s books. Where did they get that? I will splutter in disbelief. I tend not to read reviews of books by authors I already know I like and admire for very similar potential-day-ruining effects.
^^ Also some of the most off the wall. I had one reviewer reject it categorically, for example, on the feminist [sic] grounds that I had failed or perjured myself or something by making Lissar beautiful. Uh. What? You could certainly do a retelling of Donkeyskin in which the princess is not beautiful, but that isn’t the story I was telling.
*** There’s also some irony, for me, in her choice of the two other stories considered. DEERSKIN also started life as a story for Terri Windling’s ARMLESS MAIDEN and . . . at about 50,000 words I realised I was writing another frelling novel. That was back in the days before I was quite resigned to the fact that I am a notoriously unreliable writer of short stories.
† SPOILER: I know Lissar will stay with Ossin at the end, for an example I’ve used elsewhere. It won’t always be easy partly because it’s never always easy with human beings, but partly also because of what happened to Lissar. What happened happened and will never go away. Healing is possible. Erasure isn’t.
†† I also believe there are, unfortunately, limits to our capacity to heal—aside from whether our hearts keep beating or not. The other crucial element in Lissar’s surviving to grow up is the Moonwoman, who in DEERSKIN appears as a manifestly supernatural being. It distresses me that some readers feel that she undermines Lissar’s strength. I keep wondering if there was some way I could have written the Moonwoman to make it clearer that she saved Lissar’s life; that it was Moonwoman’s interference or madness and death. You can be pushed too far, and then either you go over the edge, or something stops you. A dog. A story. A gift, which in a fantasy novel may be a magical white deerskin dress that never gets dirty. And it is significant that Lissar subsequently takes on some of Moonwoman’s characteristics.
††† If goofy
‡ Hellhounds are very close relatives of fleethounds. Hellhounds are the embarrassing end of the family that aren’t talked about much.
‡‡ And I have to go round this week and pick up hellhounds’ autumn wormicide
‡‡‡ I’m JOKING, okay? Relax.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.