Believe Me
$22.00
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Description
In the tradition of Jodi Picoult, a fresh, smart, and deeply moving novel about the power of faith, love, and family
Thirteen-year-old Nic Delano has a lot of questions. Like why does he have a babysitter at his age-and where did she get such long legs? But mostly, what exactly is the meaning of life?
His mother, Lucy, an astrophysicist and atheist, has always encouraged Nic to ask questions. But lately she doesn’t like the answers he’s getting. Nic has been hanging out with a group of devout Christians and is starting to embrace the Bible—and a very different view of the heavens.
But when unexpected tragedy strikes, Nic and Lucy’s beliefs are truly to put to the test. And they need each other now more than ever. But will a mother and her son be able to find a common ground where faith meets understanding and love is, ultimately, what endures?“The overpublished religion vs. atheism debate takes a refreshing turn here. In an understated way, Killham takes a modest run at the great questions: does God exist? if so, where is he when people get ill or get mugged?… a sweet, engaging read.”—Publishers Weekly
“Killham’s characters are wonderful, and Nicolas is one of the all-time great thirteen year olds of fiction.”—Luanne Rice, author of Follow the Stars Home
“Killham has gone, as it says in the Book of Common Prayer, from strength to strength. Anyone would have been proud to have written this book.” —Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the OceanNina Killham was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of an American Foreign Service officer, and lived overseas much of her childhood. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, which she fled her junior year to live in Paris and eat. One of her first writing stints was for the Washington Post Food Section where she wrote about local food personalities and tested endless recipes.
After writing about travel and lifestyle for national magazines, she went off to Los Angeles to gain fame and fortune as a screenwriter and ended up working as an assistant for Columbia Pictures where grown men fought like children over parking spaces and made their secretaries pick peanut M&M’s out of a mixed candy dish because well…they don’t like peanut M&Ms. She finally left the studio to write the screenplay that was going to make her famous and rich, ending up six months later as a secretary in an ear plug factory.
She is now married to an Australian who is a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics. They live in London, have two young children and like to bicker about the meaning of life. She is also the author of How to Cook a Tart, and Mounting Desire. Believe Me is her third novel.
INTRODUCTION
Thirteen-year-old Nic Delano has a lot of questions. Like why does he have a babysitter at his age—and where did she get such long legs? Why do his parents live in separate towns? But mostly, what exactly is the meaning of life?
His mother, Lucy, an astrophysicist and atheist, has always encouraged Nic to ask questions. But lately she doesn’t like the answers her son is getting. Nic—named after Nicolas Copernicus—has been hanging around a group of devout Christians and is starting to embrace the Bible—and a very different view of the heavens. He even volunteers their home to shelter the local reverend, a Nigerian named Dele Ombatu, who considers Jesus his best friend and Lucy his greatest challenge.
When an unexpected tragedy strikes, however, Nic and Lucy’s beliefs are truly put to the test as they discover they need each other now more than ever. But will a mother and her son be able to find a common ground where faith meets understanding and love is ultimately what endures?
ABOUT NINA KILLHAM
Nina Killham was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of an American Foreign Service officer, and lived overseas much of her childhood. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, which she fled her junior year to live in Paris and eat. One of her first writing stints was for the Washington Post Food Section where she wrote about local food personalities and tested endless recipes.
After writing about travel and lifestyle for national magazines, she went off to Los Angeles to gain fame and fortune as a screenwriter and ended up working as an assistant for Columbia Pictures where grown men fought like children over parking spaces and made their secretaries pick peanut M&M’s out of a mixed candy dish because well…they don’t like peanut M&Ms. She finally left the studio to write the screenplay that was going to make her famous and rich, ending up six months later as a secretary in an ear plug factory.
She is now married to an Australian who is a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics. They live in London, have two young children and like to bicker about the meaning of life. She is also the author of How to Cook a Tart, and Mounting Desire. Believe Me is her third novel.
A CONVERSATION WITH NINA KILLHAM
Q. How much of the novel is based on your own experience?
The idea for Believe Me stemmed from my own indecision about whether to raise my children with a religious faith. I am a lapsed Catholic. My husband is a mouthy atheist. I call him a devout Darwinist. In fact, the germ of this story occurred a couple of years ago when my daughter was about six and she was asking my husband whether heaven existed and he said no and she started crying. After I calmed her down, saying Daddy had his opinions but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were true, I came and hissed at him, “You can’t deny a six-year-old child heaven.” And I began to wonder, what are the consequences of denying a child a belief in heaven?
Q. Did you know much about stars before you wrote the novel?
I knew embarrassingly little about the celestial neighborhood I live in. Basic things I should have known like What is the speed of light? What is our closest star? What is the sun made of? It’s shocking how little I knew. So I had a ball researching. I loved bringing home all these astronomy books from the library. I started with the ones in the children’s section to give me a foundation before I moved on to ones with more words and fewer pictures. My children and I would pour over them. Now my nine-year-old daughter walks around talking comfortably about Andromeda and Copernicus and relativity. In the past too many women would throw up their hands and say ‘Ooh, don’t know much about science.’ That’s changing and that’s great. It’s very important to know about science. Science is life. And as Richard Dawkins argues in Unweaving the Rainbow, knowing how something works does not take away the wonder, it just enhances it.
Q. Describe a work day.
I try to get up early because I think I work best then as my head is less filled with daily clutter. I sneak downstairs so as not to wake my children and sit in a chair by the window, drinking strong coffee and writing long hand. If I’m lucky, a fox will appear in the garden, which never fails to thrill me as we live in urban London. It’s a glorious way to begin the day because it’s just me and the quiet. Though I do end up wasting a lot of time talking to myself, whole conversations, until suddenly I hear Mommy! and my time is done. After I’ve dropped my kids at school I come back but the magic is gone and it’s more official hard work, sitting at the computer and trying not to check my emails a hundred times while I get the writing done. Soon it’s time to pick up the kids and manage their chaos. I don’t even have time to think about my characters until it’s early morning again and hopefully they come out to play.
Q. What is the hardest part about writing?
Besides the obvious discipline required to apply seat to chair, I find the biggest challenge to writing is just keeping calm. Not falling to the floor in a hissy fit or slitting my wrists in a funk when things are not going well and equally not taking a week long break because I’ve just written what has got to be the best sentence in the history of mankind. Because I know when I return to that sentence the next day it will have surely deflated. So it’s just about keeping calm and putting one word down after the other. When I think about it, so much of writing a novel is like walking: giving yourself a direction and then putting one foot in front of the other, one sentence after the other, and moving towards your destination. So for a year or so all my writing is mush and I have to just keep at it, shaping it until it becomes recognizable as a novel. Or to use another belabored analogy, it all starts off as a messy soup from which I try to pull a twelve course dinner.
Q. You mention a piece of music, Beethhoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, in Believe Me. Do you listen to music when you write?
No, not usually. Usually, I like to have complete silence but I heard that on the radio one day and fell in love with it. I bought the CD and played it several times while I wrote that passage.
Q. How do you come up with titles for your novels?
After I’ve finished a draft I give the novel to a friend who kindly reads it for feedback. When I’m done with my last draft, my husband and I get together with this same friend and his wife for dinner, and accompanied by copious amounts of red wine, we throw out title ideas. Luckily most of them never leave the room. It’s my favorite part of the whole process.
Q. What are you working on now?
A novel about displacement. I’ve been living in London for almost ten years now. I’m married to an Australian and my children are being brought up in Britain. So we’re all a bit confused at this point. Of course it’s not just a big international city situation, it’s becoming more of a global theme. As there is more mobility, more couples marry across cultures and create third culture children. I was considered a third culture kid myself because my father was in the American Foreign Service and we lived overseas a lot. So it’s something I’ve been dealing with a long time and I thought I’d finally explore it.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Table of Contents
A PLUME BOOK
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
A PLUME BOOK
BELIEVE ME
NINA KILLHAM lives in London with her husband and two children. Believe Me is her third novel.
Praise for How to Cook a Tart
“A devilish delight . . . smart, sexy, hilarious and not to be missed.”
—The Washington Post
“A delicate, wicked comedy that made me want to throw out my margarine and luxuriate in butter. I can relate to a book that celebrates eating and laughs at diets.”
—Tracy Chevalier, author of Burning Bright
“Wickedly funny.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“How to Cook a Tart is gastro-porn—as if Julia Child and William Burroughs had a bastard child. Filled with magnificent descriptions of the best of food, the novel’s dark subtext left me questioning whether I should cook less and have more sex—or cook more, just with more butter.”
—Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential
“This debut black comedy . . . is not only delicious, it’s simultaneously rare and well-done.”
—Glamour
“A wickedly wonderful dark comedy that makes mouths water and skewers self-proclaimed gourmands, cookbook writers, and self-righteous dieters.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
Praise for Mounting Desire
“Thoroughly amusing . . . Her send-up of romance novels is spot-on . . . a very funny, very clever, very adult novel.”
—The Washington Post
“Killham’s rollicking second novel . . . cleverly sends up the romance genre while standing as a funny, romantic novel in its own right. . . . Fast-paced and thoroughly enjoyable.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A dishy romp through the maze of chicks and lit.”
—BookPage
“Well-written and fast-paced. Killham lovingly pokes fun at romance-genre stereotypes. Readers who like wacky humor and can handle a few laughs at the expense of romance novels will enjoy this book.”
—Romantic Times
“Killham’s extremely funny take on the dating scene . . . is a highly amusing read.”
—Booklist
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, February 2009
Copyright © Nina Killham, 2009
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY Of CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Killham, Nina.
Believe me : a novel / Nina Killham.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-01479-0
1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 3. Faith—Fiction.
4. Maryland—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.I45B35 2009
813’.6—dc22 2008022065
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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For my children, Lara and Ben
Acknowledgments
A big thank-you to Elise Laird, Amy C. Fredericks, Stuart Vogel, Tanner Parsons, Jonathan Drori, Lisa Hogg, Isobel Dixon, and Stuart Krichevsky. Special thanks go to my sister, Amanda Davis, for tirelessly reading my drafts, and to Sarah Fortna for reminding me I wanted to write this. And, as always, endless gratitude to Andrew, for making it all possible.
Chapter One
What is the point of life? I mean, why do I have eight kinds of crunchy peanut butter to choose from, and this kid in Pakistan whose house just fell on his head doesn’t even have a word for peanut butter? Why does Darryl Green have five broken bones and I’ve never even sprained my ankle? Why do people die of stupid things all the time?
And I know what you’re thinking. Duh, you moron, you just noticed this now? And no, not just now, but I guess I’ve been thinking more about it because I’m thirteen. Mom calls it the “cusp” of manhood. She says the cusp used to be thirteen forty years ago, though now she says it doesn’t seem to arrive until a guy is at least thirty-five. So I’m thinking, okay, I’ve been born and, eventually, I’ll die, so now what? Am I supposed to do some living? But how? And if I don’t do it on reality TV, does it count?
“Nic, it’s a quarter to eight. You’ve got to go.”
“I’m busy here.”
“You’re still in the bathroom?”
“Can’t rush these things.”
“You’re going to miss the bus.”
“Any minute now . . .”
Mom keeps telling me she wants me to find my passion. She says she’s found hers: stars. She’s this big professor of astrophysics at the University of Maryland. Says she’s lucky because she found her passion early and she wants me to find mine too. She’s pretty intense. Dad says it’s her red hair, and she always frowns and says that’s a cliché. But everyone knows clichés are usually true. My dad now lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. He’s a professor too. He got a job down there, but Mom had just gotten her job here and so she wasn’t budging. They were pretty calm about it. This town isn’t big enough for the both of us, he joked, when he stuffed all his clothes and a billion books into his Volvo and drove off.
It’s not like I don’t see him. I see him lots on the weekends and vacations. It’s been two years now. They’re not divorced; they’re not anything. I’m not sure what their point is. Maybe they’ll let me know.
So I’m living with Mom alone now and every morning she hassles me.
“Got everything?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. See you later.”
I’m halfway out the door when I remember. “Oh, we’re supposed to do an oral history project interviewing two generations older than us and turn it in this morning.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
Even when Mom comes home from work wiped out, she doesn’t chill. When she comes home she starts her second job: tormenting me. She’s determined to teach me everything she knows. She keeps a humongous stack of books on the kitchen table. If a question comes up that I don’t know—and I mean any question, like What is the composition of a second generation star? or What era is a trilobite fossil from? or How many sperm does your average chimp have?—she considers it her duty to find out the rational answer then and there. It’s as though, if she doesn’t tell me right away I might break out in a bad case of ignorance and end up believing in astrology or superstitions or, worst of all, God.
She’s got a lot of opinions, my mom. And she’s not shy about telling you. Our car is the National Gallery of Bumper Stickers: FREETHINKER, ATHEISTS BELIEVE IN PEOPLE, PEACE Is PATRIOTIC, and the latest: ASTRONOMERS DO IT FOR The BIG BANG.
Everything is a debate with her. And she’s really smart. Though I got to tell you she sort of wears it on her sleeve. You know, the whole “I’m a brilliant scientist, so what the hell have you done lately?” You know the type. But she’s nice. She just gets worked up about things. Like the M74 galaxy. I mean, let’s face it, the thing is 30 million light-years away. Like it’s really going to affect us. Like it’s really going to change my day. But intelligence is a big thing for her. Nothing lamer than a dumb kid. Of course if you really are a dumb kid she’d sympathize and be all for the government paying for you to have tutoring. She’s no ogre. She just doesn’t like brains wasted. Says they are “the hallmark of humanity.” Lucky for her I’m no slouch in that department. I’m a class-one brain.
At school, Mrs. Brickman sees it differently.
“Nic, I see you’ve neglected the assignment again.”
“I told my mom, but she didn’t have time to drive me around.”
“This is the third time this month.”
“I told her.”
“I’m going to have to send a note home.”
“Maybe that’ll help. I don’t know.”
When I get back that day from science club, Mom’s where she always is. In her souped-up home office. She’s got more wires in there than Barnum and Bailey. She spends most of her nights designing computer programs to measure how far away the stars are and what might be circulating around them. She’s a planet hunter. Which means she’s looking for a star that has a planet the same distance away from it as the earth is from the sun. She’s trying to prove that we are not the only life in the universe. That our world is way more complicated than we morons can imagine.
“What’s this?” she says when I come in and hand over the note.
“It’s from my teacher. She says you’re really letting the team down.”
“But . . .”
“Sign here and you can consider yourself formally warned.”
“Nicolas . . .”
Nicolas. Can you believe it? She named me after Nicolas Copernicus. You know, the guy who figured out that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around? Can’t decide if that’s pretty cool or the geekiest thing ever. I change my mind a couple of times a day. So I’m Nic. Without the k, which is a real pain sometimes. The popular kids call me Nicotine. Otherwise it’s fine. Short and sweet. The name. Not me. I’m pretty tall for a thirteen-year-old. I just wish I’d bulk up. I’d ask Mom for some muscles for my birthday, but I don’t think she can deliver. Not that kind of scientist.
Luckily she clicks off like a blinker at 9 pm.
“Is there anything I need to know about your education before you turn in?”
“I’m flunking math.”
“Very funny.”
“Later.”
“I love you.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Mom likes to tell me she believes in the universe. She believes in its wonder. In its ability to confound us. Which is why she says she wants me to know everything. Why the leaves on the trees change colors. Why the sky is blue. How the wings of a bird make it fly.
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| Dimensions | 0.7500 × 5.3500 × 8.1000 in |
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| Subjects | atheism, atheist, FIC043000, parent, faith, teen, liberal, meaning, quirky, belief, religious, bible, literary fiction, god, big questions, evangelical, religious books, questioning, conservative, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, young man, adolescent, bible studies, only child, fiction, religion, inspirational, child, mental health, spirituality, relationships, family, spiritual, romance, love, drama, FIC045000, Christian, mystery, mother, boy, son, death, novel, teenager, coming of age, realistic fiction, dysfunctional families, novels |
