Allee Mead is joining us today to talk about her novel, Isaac. Here’s the publisher’s description:
When Eleanor Lane, estranged from her family, makes the drive to her deceased father’s house to arrange his funeral, she discovers Isaac, a care-bot. Isaac had been caring for her father ever since the incident six years ago, when her father, confused, accidentally cut her with a kitchen knife.
Eleanor convinces her sister to let her take the care-bot home, beginning a new relationship with him despite herself. As she learns more about Isaac, she also discovers a caring, sensitive person in the android. He fills the void in her life created from her fear of connecting with others, and starts to reconnect Eleanor to how her fathers, John and Javi, met and fell in love.
But is Isaac a replacement for human contact? For that matter, what is Isaac? A simple programmed construct, or a person who can grow and learn? Explore love, community, and what it means to be human in Allee Mead’s debut book, Isaac.
What’s Allee’s favorite bit?
My favorite bit of my debut novella Isaac is the bar scene, in which a woman flirts with a caregiver robot (who she thinks is human) while the protagonist Eleanor sits and stews. Later, after a daquiri and three tequila shots, Eleanor throws up on the bus ride home, and Isaac the care-bot helps her clean up and get ready for bed. When I originally wrote this scene, a man flirts with Eleanor while Eleanor tries to get rid of him. When Isaac comes back to the table with the drink Eleanor ordered, she grabs Isaac and kisses him.
I know, I know. Very ’90s/early 2000s. Soon after writing this scene, I realized that changing the flirter would fit better with the story I wanted to tell. Having someone flirt with Eleanor—an aspec character who struggles with loneliness—might perpetuate the idea that a romantic relationship is the only kind worth pursuing, and we would be watching Eleanor get in her own way. Having someone flirt with Isaac, however, makes Eleanor realize how easily she could lose him and how badly that would hurt, but she can’t articulate those feelings. She just drinks.
But here’s the thing: I don’t drink. I’ve had sips of alcohol before but had never been buzzed, drunk, or hungover. I turned to my sister, who’s the youngest in my family and the most likely to remember what being drunk or hungover feels like. I sent her the scene I wrote, and she called that weekend to tell me more about drinking. (If you want to understand what a teetotaler I am, I asked her what a hangover headache felt like, and she had to remind me that the headache is from dehydration.)
Her advice was very helpful, but she was a little too willing to go along with my original draft, in which Eleanor throws up from one margarita and embarrassment. (Months later, my sister teased me about the dearth of alcohol in the original scene, but she hadn’t said anything when she first read it.) I texted my sister the day after our talk to announce I was adding tequila shots to the scene and to ask how many. She said three and to have Eleanor space them out throughout the evening. I later changed the first drink from a margarita to a daquiri since that’s what I was picturing anyway and just got my cocktails mixed up.
Eventually I started asking my sister questions that related to her work in occupational therapy, especially her work helping geriatric patients live safely at home. You know, work that Isaac would perform as a care-bot. She gave me a better sense of how Eleanor’s father John would behave as his dementia progressed. My sister’s help was invaluable, for more than just the drinking scene!
LINKS:
BIO:
Allee Mead is a North Dakota author and poet whose work has been published in journals like The Northern Mirror, Constellations, and Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal. “Isaac” is her debut novella.