Excerpt
 The black snake. Feel yourself drawn! Behind the tall house bearing shingles the color of pewter. Into the heat-shimmering marsh below, sloping to the Cassadaga River. Your first morning in Ransomville, you slip from your hard, unfamiliar bed, dress swiftly, and leave the house wanting to see the river close up. Sun on your forehead light as a warning slap, already it's hot before 8 A.M. Run, run!—feet sinking on the spongy earth. A fierce excited din of birds, bullfrogs, cicadas on all sides. At the bottom of the hill someone has laid planks down, into the marsh; you wonder if it's safe to walk on them, they're so rotted.
Fear is good, fear is normal. Fear will save your life.
Who has told you this, which adult, your mother, your father—or will it be Jared, Jr., to come?
Through a straggly stand of polelike barkless trees, you will learn are bamboo, the river shines bottle-green in the morning sun. Reflecting light like shattered glass. Which way is the river flowing, which way is north? North to Lake Oriskany? Hundreds of miles away.
On the farther shore of the river there's a gauzy mist. The backs of houses and buildings nearly obscured by trees, junglelike vegetation. You enter the marsh shyly, a strange sensation like floating walking on the planks; the marsh is living, the dark rich damp soil makes an oozing, bubbling sound. The Cassadaga is a beautiful river, your mother has said. We'll be there, looking out onto it.
From your mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If only it isn't too late. If no one stops you.
Just inside the marsh, where some of the cattails, reeds, bamboo stalks tower over your head, you see it—something black moving swiftly and sinuously. Gleaming-glittering along its length, S-shaped, oily-black. A snake! Long as your arm! You have an impression of an angry uplifted spade-shaped head, glaring-yellow eyes. It slithers across the very plank you're standing on, three feet away, you're paralyzed, staring, too frightened to scream. Many times you've seen garter snakes, grass snakes they're called, but this snake!—its terrible eyes fixed upon you.
An instant later, it's gone.
Already you've turned, panicked, running away. A flurry of gnats in your face and you wave wildly at them, "Oh! oh!"—blind and desperate as a small child running back up the hill, it's a considerable hill, to your great-aunt's house; the house so new to you you've never seen it before from this perspective, weatherworn and shabby with a look of anger, resentment like all such houses that yet maintain their dignity and some measure of pretension from the street, and you're as disoriented as when you wake from a disturbing dream into a secondary dream, not knowing where you are, surrendering to pure emotion, and by the time, breathless, sweating, you're at the house, your mother has come outside to catch you in her arms. "What on earth, Josie? What's wrong with you?" Mother asks, and you tell her the snake, a long black snake, measuring with your tremulous arms the length of the snake, at least three feet long, and it seemed to be looking at you, as if you knew you, and Mother laughs, brushing at your uncombed hair with a cool hand, "Yes? Really?"
Your great-aunt Esther Allan Burkhardt, whose house this is, and whom you'd never seen before the previous day, has come to stand in a doorway, frowning at you and Mother, arms wrapped in her apron. White as flour the apron, and her round rimless emotionless eyeglasses winking in the sun
"That'd be a garter snake," the old woman says flatly. "They don't grow beyond ten or twelve inches and they're not dangerous that I ever heard of. You keep to yourself, miss, and they keep to themselves."
Barry Moser
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Interview
Courtesy of Ecco Press
Q: What was your inspiration for FIRST LOVE?
A: FIRST LOVE began as more of a straight, realistic story about a young girl who, with her divorced mother, comes to live with distant relatives in upstate New York. Among the family is a young man accused, though never convicted, of child molestation. The family doesn't tell the girl or her mother about the young man's past—and the girl becomes his victim.
For two or three years, I had this idea for a novella. I wanted to present it from the girl's point of view, in retrospect. I began to meditate on the bond that often develops between victim and abuser, and FIRST LOVE evolved.
Q: You describe FIRST LOVE as a Gothic romance. Can you explain?
A: FIRST LOVE is a Gothic romance because it deals with taboo subjects: a child's romantic yearning for a relationship with a young man; a victim's enchantment with and devotion to an abuser. Such emotions are complicated—and they make people very uncomfortable. And the setting comes from the Gothic tradition: an isolated, forbidding house with family secrets.
Q: FIRST LOVE deals with many social themes: child abuse, sexual obsession, psychological manipulation, broken families. Can you discuss?
A: It's hard to talk about a work of literature in that way. There's a danger of becoming reductionist. A work of literature is its language, mood, atmosphere. It's not just about an issue.
Q: Your protagonist, Josie S__, is an 11-year-old wise beyond her years, who at times seems to seek out abuse at the hands of her 25-year-old cousin, Jared, Jr. What motivates her?
A: I believe there's a strong element of masochism in most women. Josie is a young woman involved in, and fascinated by, her own degradation. She's fascinated by the mystery of Jared, Jr., this imposing male. She's also motherless and fatherless, desperate for attention, willing to be exploited. Look at members of cults, followers of David Koresh. People will endure much degradation for attention, for love.
Q: Why do you say Josie is "motherless"?
A: Josie's mother doesn't want to "play" mother, doesn't want to be a mother. She's a strong-willed woman of her own, and very narcissistic. She's not a villian, but she's not there for Josie. FIRST LOVE is about that too.
Q: FIRST LOVE's real villain, Jared, Jr., is studying to become a Presbyterian minister. Would you call him a religious fanatic?
A: Jared, Jr., is fighting the demons of his own internal disbelief. He's inherited a burden from his grandfather. Living in "The Reverand's" house, he's trying to live up to "The Reverand's" name, "The Reverand's" calling. Jared, Jr. is disturbed, weak and pathetic. But there's no excuse for child abuse.
Q: FIRST LOVE is set in rural, upstate New York, which the Boston Herald has called the "nourishing heartland" of your best fiction. Is the inspiration for Ransomville taken from your birthplace, Lockport, New York?
A: Ransomville is a real place, not far from where my parents live. But the real Ransomville is nothing like the fictionalized setting of FIRST LOVE.
Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1996, p850
- Publisher's Weekly, June 24, 1996, p44
- Booklist, July, 1996, p1804
- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, August 4, 1996, p1
- Boston Globe, August 4, 1996, N, 15
- Boston Herald, August 4, 1996, p57
- People, August 26, 1996, p29
- Library Journal, August, 1996, p113
- Glamour, September 1996, p132
- Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 8, 1996, p11
- Detroit News, September 14, 1996, D26
- New York Times Book Review, September15, 1996, p11
- Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1996, 14, 3
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