What's the Deal with Amy?

 

I rarely read reviews, for several reasons. I recently did, to create some promos for my books. Even in the good reviews, the frustration with Amy comes up. Many people find Amy frustrating. I get it. Amy is weak, she does give in to Shawn's gaslighting, she has let him steamroll her.

I get that the whole backstory can't come out in the first chapters or even the first book. I get that readers today want a strong, independent woman and Amy is not that in those first chapters or even first book. 

But this is the difference between story-telling, evolution of a story arc, and an article for women. She is not what today's articles tell women to be. But I believe she is what many woman today are, and are facing, while striving to be stronger and often while denying this is what they've become. There's a reason for this.

Amy's story develops over the course of five books, and really, because the story is ultimately about Shawn, not her, it may not come out fully even then. I have started a future book that touches on Amy before she met Shawn and Amy's life with Angus while Shawn is gone.

Amy is a story that society doesn't want to tell because we're focused on women being strong, independent women. Yes, that's great, and it's a great ideal and I'm all for it. But for many people, not just women, we walk those valleys where we struggle against the odds thrown against us. We struggle with weakness, fear, and uncertainty. We struggle to reach that height.

Amy's backstory is that she was a highly talented musician. She was confident in herself--confident enough to see beyond Shawn's external portrayal of himself as a party boy, to think there was something beyond that image he strove to cast--and she was right in seeing who he could be. She saw something deeper in him and trusted that good she saw hiding behind the hardened and shallow exterior.

Shawn, being both the good she saw in him (which really was there but deeply buried) and the bad that existed in him, abused her faith in him to gaslight her until she became the weaker version of herself that we see in Blue Bells of Scotland. Many women in this world have been there. They see something good in another person and that good may be real or it may be only what they're portraying. There's no way to know. But they see it. When an incident doesn't match with their belief in the gaslighter, they try to explain the discrepancy away.

With enough discrepancies, many women will finally see that the story they're being told is false. This doesn't apply just to women Any person is susceptible to this, to being shown a side of a person that they come to believe in, and then bit by bit seeing parts of that person that don't fit with what they first believed. It's a matter of time and how deep their belief in that person's goodness was, until they see that maybe this person is not what they portrayed themselves to be. 

Amy's story is based on women I've known: women who believed in the goodness they first saw in their husbands or boyfriends, who never thought these men would say anything untrue or unkind, who believed these men had love for them as they loved these men. I don't see this as a fault. I see it as a strength: the ability to see someone's weaknesses and understand that we are all weak and all have our failures. But this generosity of spirit can, of course, be turned against us.

I want to stress again that this is not just a female thing. Men can also be sucked into this and see too much good in a woman, that isn't actually there. 

Through the Blue Bells Chronicles, we see Amy grow in strength as she separates from Shawn's critical messages of who she is and gains a deeper understanding of who she is, what she has let him turn her into, and why.