There’s a scene in the 1984 John Hughes film “Sixteen Candles” where Caroline, the popular and pretty girl whose boyfriend is the hunky Jake Ryan, throws a party at Jake’s house while his parents are out of town. The place gets spectacularly trashed, and Caroline drinks until she blacks out. Jake, who is both fed up with her and pining for another (yes, that would be Samantha or “Sam,” played by Molly Ringwald), encourages geeky freshman Ted to take the drunken Caroline home. “She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference,” he says.
This scene inspired seasonal Vineyard resident and novelist Katherine A. Sherbrooke to think about the repercussions of a drunken night in high school during a very different time — the term “date rape” wasn’t yet part of public parlance in the early 1980s — and to explore what happens when a hidden past unexpectedly catches up with you.
And although it was a very different time, Sherbrooke’s newest novel, “This Much Is True” (Sibylline Press) couldn’t be more timely — sadly. Sure, we’ve been educated about date rape, and the #MeToo movement named names, but as I write this, we’re learning about a shocking cover-up of an alleged gang rape of a Cornell University student at a fraternity party.
In “This Much Is True,” which was published on Sept. 18, Veronica (“Ro”) Harmon leads a quiet and rather idyllic life. She has a loving and supportive husband, a job as a vet tech that she’s passionate about, and a talented daughter who is on the verge of breaking out in the art world, and is engaged to a terrific man. She also has a secret she has held onto involving a drunken night, her high school boyfriend — the hunky quarterback — and a nerdy sophomore who re-emerges several decades after that drunken night as a successful businessman and her daughter’s future father-in-law. (Sherbrooke notes, and I agree, that one does not need to have ever seen or even heard of the film “Sixteen Candles” to understand the book or the dilemma that Ro faces.)
“This idea first hit me over a decade ago,” Sherbrooke explained in a recent interview. “Basically the idea of a perpetrator coming back into a woman’s life in a way that she absolutely could not ignore. I really want to put a fine point on the brutal choice that survivors always have to make about whether to come forward or not.” Sherbrooke added, “How does she stay true to herself without ruining her daughter’s life? I couldn’t figure out the answer for a really long time.”
Sherbrooke introduces us to Ro as she reflects on her itinerant childhood. Her father sold franchises for a KFC-like company called Southern Home Chicken, and the family rarely stayed in one town for more than a year. “I don’t recall most of the towns I lived in as a child, or rather, I remember them only by the name of the one friend I made in each. Like Molly’s Town in Iowa.” Other towns she lived in for never-long-enough included “Emily’s Town,” “Harriet’s Town,” and “Joy’s Town.”
The drunken night, and the party that changed Ro’s life, took place in “Tracy’s Town” during her junior year of high school. Her boyfriend, and the boy she left the party with while drunk, are named Jack and Ted; Jake and Ted are the names of the characters in “Sixteen Candles.” In the film, Caroline wakes up the next morning in Ted’s car and discovers to her surprise that she’s into him. In Sherbrooke’s novel, Veronica wakes up the next morning in a car next to a kid she barely knew and apologizes to her boyfriend. “I’m sorry about the party last night,” adding, “Don’t worry, I’m OK.” But of course, she wasn’t really at all OK.
Sherbrooke dedicated the book, “For survivors,” and told me, “I hope that this will create really interesting conversations.” I suspect it will. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, and have been thinking and talking about it quite a bit since then. In fact, I just got off a call with a friend I haven’t spoken to in months, and Sherbrooke’s book was part of our catch-up conversation. I can see a lot of book clubs going deep with this one. There’s a lot to untangle, a lot to discuss.
“This Much Is True” is Sherbrooke’s fourth novel. “All my books involve women who are really fighting against the grain in one way or another, making choices that society doesn’t deem appropriate either, you know, because of the time in which they live or in general,” Sherbrooke said, adding, “I’m also fascinated by the generational impact of the choices that we make and the secrets that we keep.” An earlier Sherbrooke novel, “The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly,” which was loosely based on her mother, also revolves around the life-altering impact of a secret.
As for her Vineyard creds, after spending a summer in college working at Poole’s Fish Market, Sherbrooke returned to the Vineyard about 10 years ago with her husband and sons, and she said they were “immediately mesmerized.” They rented for a few summers, and in 2019 they bought a house in Aquinnah, which she also used as a hideaway to work on her novel.
“This Much Is True” is available at Bunch of Grapes and Edgartown Books. Katherine Sherbrooke will be teaching a workshop on revisions at an upcoming Islanders Write event.
Kate Feiffer is the director of Islanders Write. Sherbrooke addressed the writing process of this book in a Times story (bit.ly/MVT_WritingWithKAS). If you are a Vineyarder with a new book out, please contact Kate at kate@mvtimes.com.
