Books: The girl that got away

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2009, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

A 1986 graduate of East High School who grew up non-Mormon, novelist Peter Rock remembers how easy it was to play the rebel. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some are born rebels, some choose rebellion and some have rebellion thrust upon them.

"Growing up in Salt Lake City, I clearly had this fascination with smart, beautiful Mormon girls who were unattainable to me because their parents wouldn't approve," Rock said during a phone interview from Portland, Ore., where he teaches writing at Reed College. "I had a feeling I was more of a desperado than I was."

The writer is still mining that theme of the outsider in his recently released novel, My Abandonment , which takes as its inspirational foundation the real-life story of a 13-year-old girl who lived four years with her father in the vast urban wilderness of Portland's Forest Park. Focusing on his book's character Caroline, Rock said he's most interested in how people adapt or become more fluid in identity when faced with trauma or sudden change.

Rock's past books have earned the attention of Hollywood, only to have planned films fall through, but the fate of My Abandonment may well turn out differently. It recently has been optioned for adaptation, with Laura Jones, who wrote the screenplays for Oscar and Lucinda and Jane Campion's film version of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, slated to craft the script.

My Abandonment 's press materials state that along with the nature diaries of Opal Whiteley, "the travails of Elizabeth Smart" held your imagination while writing this book.

"I'm still fascinated by Elizabeth Smart. I hope she's doing well. Her abduction always seemed like a Mormon girl's story. Something like that could have happened to her elsewhere, but never quite the way it happened in Utah. I can't pretend to know her, but it's remarkable she survived. I spent a lot of time talking with people who were involved in that case. Adaptability is a fascinating mechanism, whether we're talking about the Stockholm syndrome or any other. In a peripheral way, Elizabeth Smart was always in my mind, even if there were very few details in the book that came from her story."

Were you conscious at all of any biblical parallels to your novel in having Caroline and her father taken out of Forest Park, similar to the way Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden?

"It was far from my mind. Those kinds of readings arise naturally. For me, both in writing and teaching writing, the focus is trying to tell the story from the inside, not to consider who a reader's going to think or act around it. With this book, it was a matter of finding out who this girl was. What does she care about? What can she know? What does she want? It wasn't a hard book to write after figuring that out. I just followed her. Now, 2 1/2 years after I wrote the last word, it seems more her book than mine. If I could send it out into the reading public without my name on it, and if that would serve the book well, I would be happy."

You read Emerson, Thoreau and Rousseau in preparation for crafting the father's character. What was it like reading books you read at university a second time?

"There's a darker side to those books, and a cynical side which really involves a rejection of civilization and communication. They're almost an 'overcelebration' in that the authors seem to be trying to convince themselves of virtues they're not really sure of. The sense you get from them is that these are books for people who can't exist in society, so they champion a margin where maybe they can exist."

Were there any questions you wanted to linger on readers' minds once they finished the book?

"I didn't want to have a whole lot of intentions, really. I didn't want it to be didactic. I wanted to sustain a sense of wonder and make it a happy book. Certainly there's a disparity between what happens in the book and how Caroline reacts. Is this life she's living workable, authentic? How much can she change into another person? One of the big questions is, 'Is this a happy story?' 'Is it a tragedy?' 'Is it both?' I'm not sure."