A Loaded Meaning by Meg Moseley

My brother graduated from our tiny high school in California the year before I entered, but his reputation lingered. “Your brother’s serious, isn’t he?” an upperclassman asked me on the first day of school. Not yet knowing the word’s loaded meaning there, I shrugged and said “Yeah, sure.”

I soon learned that the whole student body defined “serious” in a way that I’ve never heard before or since. The adjective went beyond describing a sober perspective or intelligent dedication to schoolwork. The word implied moral superiority. A “serious” student looked down on the rest of us from a lofty pedestal of virtue.

After a while, even my parents learned the new definition. When they wanted to know more about one of my new friends, I said solemnly, if not quite truthfully, “Oh, Susie’s serious,” and an imaginary halo began to hover above her head. My parents assumed Susie wasn’t the type to cruise Main at midnight. If she was “serious,” she would be a good influence on me.

Actually, she was. She laughed her way through life, and that was a good thing for me to learn. But just like me, Susie was a mixture of good and bad. Unlike me, she wasn’t afraid to show it, and her honesty and authenticity did me a world of good.

Like people, novels can be a mixture of good and bad. Sunshine and storm. Comedy and tragedy. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when they laugh.” Laughter at a funeral is as natural as happy tears at a wedding. Grief and hilarity aren’t opposites or enemies. They’re neighbors, living so close that they could spit at each other from their kitchen windows.

When I started writing When Sparrows Fall, I knew the heroine had a tough row to hoe. A widow, only two years past losing her husband, Miranda Hanford can’t trust the people or even the beliefs she’d once leaned on as an extremist homeschooler. Desperate to hold her family together in the face of spiritual abuse, Miranda needs to find her voice and speak up, but she’s certainly not in the mood to crack a joke.

Then Jack, the half-brother of her late husband, shows up. A Ph.D. and a professor literature, he walks into her life with a wisecrack on his lips. He flirts. He teases. He shoots her sacred cows. He makes fun of her herbal “haywater” tea, offers her a cigar, and helps her sass the powers of darkness in the name of God.

Sometimes I worried that I would never find the right balance between the story’s heavy topics and the streak of mischief that Jack brings with him. But “grace has a grand laughter in it.” So says the narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, a novel far weightier than any I will ever write. I believe her narrator speaks the truth, and I’m eternally grateful for the grand laughter that’s like sunshine in our earthly storms.

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A Californian transplanted to the mountains of Georgia, Meg Moseley is the author of When Sparrows Fall, a contemporary novel that earned 4.5 stars and a “Top Pick” status from Romantic Times. Meg’s life experiences include being an administrative assistant at a college, working at a candle factory, and home-schooling for over twenty years. Mom to three grown children, she enjoys books, travel, motorcycle rides with her husband, and gardening. Visit her blog, www.megmoseley.wordpress.com, and sign up for her occasional newsletter at her website, www.megmoseley.com.