Writing A BORN MANIAC,
or PUDDLES’S PROGRESS 

October 14, 2011 

When I gave Bev a book of her own (THE HUSBAND BENCH or BEV'S BOOK), I knew that Puddles would want one too; in fact, I could hear her clamoring in my head. In that back-burner part of my brain, various titles stewed (Site Fidelity; A Gunthwaite Girl [from a song we used to sing about “When a Laconia girl walks down the street”]). Then suddenly I remembered Puddles saying in the Camden, Maine, scene in Henrietta Snow, “I’m a born Maniac,” and I knew I had the title. 

Of course Puddles wanted an alliterating subtitle like Bev’s, and that suddenly arrived in my mind too, with Puddles recalling The Pilgrim’s Progress references in Little Women and reading excerpts from The Pilgrim’s Progress in senior English class. I already knew that Puddles would be returning to Maine, a state that up to now hadn’t found its way into my novels as much as it has into my life. 

When my sister, Penny, and I were children, we usually went to the ocean in New Hampshire, to a cottage our grandparents rented in Rye Harbor. But in her girlhood my mother had summered on Bustins Island in Maine and loved it, so a couple of summers our parents took us to Maine, unfamiliar to us and exotic. Down east from Ogunquit to Pemaquid Point we traveled, the latter making such an impression on us that decades later Penny came to live in that vicinity. During visits to Penny, I have to drive past Ye Olde Fort Cabins, a cabin colony that doesn’t look much changed from when the Doan family stayed there. 

When Don and I moved to Center Sandwich in 1976, we discovered that we couldn’t get New Hampshire TV channels anymore. Instead, we got Maine! During the ensuing years we’ve watched so much Maine news that we feel we really should vote in the Pine Tree State, not the Granite State. This became more Maine background for Puddles. In the 1980s, Don and I began “collecting” Maine islands and continued to do so for the next fifteen years, from Matinicus to Isle au Haut. So I knew that when I took Puddles to Maine, she would go to an island. 

The one I invented, Quarry Island, is made up from all of the ones where Don and I have stayed. As you’ll see in A BORN MANIAC’s “More about This Book” description on this site, there’s a castle in the book. It was inspired by a castle in New Hampshire’s Ossipee mountain range, nowadays named Castle in the Clouds and open to the public. When I was a kid, it was a private extravaganza known as “the Plant estate,” though by that time it was no longer owned by Thomas G. Plant, who had built it, but by the Tobey family. A daughter, Elizabeth Tobey Gonnerman, was married to my father’s college roommate. When the Gonnermans came up from Washington, D.C., for a visit there, we were invited. The place of course made a lasting impression on me, one that I exaggerated for the fictional castle. About inspirations: When I began writing THE CHEERLEADER  I started out with the simple idea of basing three main characters on me and my two closest friends. I was the only one of this triumivirate to become a cheerleader. In my original lineup of characters, I had Bev based on my best friend, Sally, and another non-cheering friend nicknamed Nutty, inspired by my dear friend Gail. Puddles was supposed to be just one of the cheerleaders. But then she spoke up on the first page, and I realized I had to change everything around and make Puddles the third member of the triumvirate, based on Gail, no matter that Gail hadn’t been a cheerleader and had actually left Laconia High School after her sophomore year for a private school in Massachusetts. Nutty became one of the class-ahead cheerleaders. With the Bev-Sally character, Bev immediately developed into her own self, enhancing the plot by not being totally nice and wonderful like my Sally, and Puddles too took off from the Gail base. When I reread THE CHEERLEADER after a lapse of several years, I was startled to find that some of Puddles’s attitude reminded me of my mother, Ernie, who had a tendency to say the first thing that came into her head. Penny and I went in fear of what on earth Ernie would say when she opened her mouth, and we agree that it’s a wonder we ourselves can speak at all because we’re always checking what we’re going to say before we say it. Penny does admit that advancing age is bringing out more Ernie in her—and maybe that’s a good thing. As for Puddles’s last name and nickname: When I was naming the characters, into my mind popped the nickname given to Larry Pond by his fraternity brothers at Williams. Larry is the husband of my dear friend from Bennington days, Gloria Dibble Pond. I loved this nickname, “Puddles,” and suddenly it seemed perfect for my purposes. I’ve had a grand time with Puddles and her progress, and I hope you do too.

© 2011 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved