Alecia Whitaker Alecia Whitaker grew up with a big imagination on a small farm in Kentucky. She knows more about cows, tobacco, frog gigging, and carpentry than the average girl, and she applies the work ethic and common sense she learned from her southern upbringing to the way she now navigates her career and family life in the big city. Although she graduated from the University of Kentucky with a BFA in Theatre and a BS in Advertising, she's always been a writer. Her personal essays have been published in the anthology BLINK: Fiction in the Blink of an Eye and several times in Underwired Magazine. She co-wrote the popular one act play Becoming Woman with a grant from The Kentucky Foundation for Women. THE QUEEN OF KENTUCKY is her first novel and proudest artistic accomplishment. She now lives in New York City with her husband and son. Here she talks about how an author's life informs his or her work.
As THE QUEEN OF KENTUCKY is the first book I’ve written about being raised in Kentucky, I have heard this question a lot lately: how much of the book is based on your real life? It's a fair question. I've been reminding folks back home that the book is fiction and that I think of these characters as very distinct fictional people; but then a reader will say, "I pictured your family's front porch in that big Bandit scene," or "I pictured Ricki Jo's dad as your dad," and I have to stop and think... because you know, I sort of do, too.
When I was growing up, my dad would wind through the back roads and if he saw a house under construction, he would pull in and we would explore. It was such a neat feeling, walking around a sort of 3-D blueprint. We would make guesses about the layout, trying to sort out the bathrooms from the closets and the common area rooms from the bedrooms. He showed me the wiring and plumbing and we would imagine what sort of appliances they would connect. I loved walking through that framework, avoiding nails and gaping holes, and daydreaming about the family that would live here, what the outside of the house would look like, how I would decorate if it were mine.
THE QUEEN OF KENTUCKY is sort of like that. The 2x4's holding the book up are my family, my hometown, my distinct memory of puberty and all its awkwardness, while the characters in the book make up the brick-work, the paint colors and the type of cars that will sit in the garage. Ricki Jo, Luke, Wolf, and the Fab Four spoke to me, voices battling each other in my head as they forced their way onto the page, coming alive in such an exciting way that I could barely keep up.
Many authors use their debut novel as a sort of autobiographical jumping-off point to their careers. It's the old "write what you know" saying come true. But this book is not a diary. I look at my own life as if it were the story's skeleton, with all of the characters' dreams, experiences, and personalities providing the flesh. No, everything that happens in the book did not happen to me. But yes, I borrowed from my own experiences of working in tobacco, riding the bus, and starting high school. I never could keep a good diary, but I've always loved telling a good story.
