Chemiluminescence

Chemiluminescence is a centred around two sets of women, one middle aged, Anna and Helen, the other two teenage girls, Dianne and Tracette. Anna is married to Daniel and has three grown children, James, Michael and Devon, when she discovers she is seriously ill with cancer. Helen is already struggling with the disease and, after being diagnosed as terminal, decides to forgo any further treatment and leave her future to fate. The decision has already cost her marriage to Tom and she now lives alone in apartment although she still sees him on occasion. For Anna her fight for survival is paramount and she becomes increasingly self-absorbed and introspective as a result. Daniel, frightened and ultimately repulsed by both the illness he believes she can’t beat and her response to it, reject hers, using an affair with a young woman, Melanie, as his escape route. This forces both Daniel and Anna to confront their own roles and shortcomings leading to the dissolution of their marriage. Helen and Anna meet at an outpatient clinic where Helen has agreed, for Tom’s sake, to one final check-up and to underscore her own decision. They strike up a causal conversation but quickly find themselves intrigued by the other. What starts out as two women drawn into a world that both revolves around and isolates them slowly turns into their private belief that each holds the key to the other’s survival. Anna secretly hopes that Helen’s refusal to have treatment will increase her own odds while Helen begins to believe Anna is her talisman and bearing witness to her will guarantee her own recovery. When Daniel moves out to be with Melanie Anna can’t bear to remain in the house and eventually goes to live with Helen in her apartment. Daniel, now estranged from his family, stands back as the ‘problem’ of Anna is off-loaded. James, Michael and Devon passively but guiltily agree to the ‘solution’ allowing Helen to control all aspects of Anna’s care. As everyone, Helen included, begins to tire of caring for, about, Anna, they begin to look forward to her death. But when it inevitably comes they are left to face the unpalatable truth of their own failings. As the story ends no one gets to walk away unscathed as they are forced to see who they are: Flawed, selfish, often scared and not always inherently ‘good,’ despite the levels of self-deception they are prepared to stoop to. Interspersed amongst this is the story of Dianne and Tracette. Dianne is a lonely girl just beginning high school with no expectations that her life will change. That is until she meets the charismatic Tracette, a girl that is beautiful, that should be popular but isn’t due to a wild streak others sense in her. When Tracette makes an overture to Dianne they quickly become best friends even though Dianne knows Tracette will do anything to gain the popularity she craves. While drawn to Tracette’s recklessness, impulsivity, Dianne is also powerless to stop Tracette’s quest which eventually destroys their relationship. Their story is deliberately set in the fragility of young teenage girls as they try to deal with the expectations that are imposed of them from the scrutiny of boys to the devastating affect that self-awareness can produce when there is nothing to fall back on especially in Dianne’s case when Tracette ultimately, but not unexpectedly, betrays her. After a terrible accident Dianne is left to try and work through the pieces, understand what it was that Tracette wanted but what starts initially as her obsession with Tracette quickly becomes the story of who Dianne is as she is thrust into a world she barely understands. Chemiluminescence means “Chemiluminescence means “the emission of light during a chemical reaction.” For the people who populate the book this means living with their eyes wide open to the dark corners of their own failures, misgivings, self-deceit, where their flaws are forever illuminated and forgiveness is just another word.