Second Guessing My Second Novel on Its Second Birthday

When a realtor left a map of our Huntington Beach neighborhood on our front porch a few years ago, I was stunned to learn that there were 609 homes in our tract and disheartened to realize that my husband and I personally knew only a small percentage of that number. My brother and his wife live around the corner from us. We know all the folks in our cul de sac. We know the man who has the same address as we do in the next cul sac because sometimes we get each other’s mail.

We’ve occasionally had the experience of running into a friend or acquaintance at our local grocery or drug store and finding out that they’ve lived in our neighborhood for years. It’s a small thrill, similar to learning that someone has the same birthday.

Those kinds of “coincidences” made me think about how our lives are more connected than we might realize. These thoughts morphed into an idea for a novel that became my pandemic project in 2020. Inspired by our walks around our neighborhood in pursuit of exercise since the gyms and yoga classes were shut down, my husband and I made up stories about the lives of those people who lived around us.

People we didn’t know but made assumptions about anyway.

Two years ago, in October of 2023, She Writes Press published Those People Behind Us. There are five characters in the book (a realtor, an ex-con living in his car, a Vietnam vet, an aerobics teacher, and a teenage boy) who live in a tract very much like ours. Initially, they don’t believe they have anything in common with each other, but it turns out that they actually do.

Their fictional city is increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices. I set the story in the summer of 2017, post-Trump’s first election and pre-pandemic. I never thought I’d have to clarify which Trump election, and I used to say at my book events that this period of time felt like it should be classified as historical fiction. I’d generally get a chuckle from the audience.

In the novel, I changed Huntington Beach’s name to Wellington Beach for several reasons. It was fun to tweak the names of Orange County landmarks just enough so they’d still be recognizable to locals. I thought the conflicts in the novel weren’t specific to Huntington Beach, but common to most American cities at that time. I created characters on both sides of the political spectrum, and although I did my best to show their humanity, I knew that some Surf City residents might bristle at my take on the city and find it too critical.

Two years later, I realize I wasn’t critical enough.

I set some of the novel’s scenes in actual events, just to make the story feel real. The homeless ex-con is glad the gym is open on the Fourth of July, just before the annual parade, the largest Independence Day parade west of the Mississippi, because he needs to take a shower. The realtors’ family sprinkles Grandma Betsy’s ashes in the ocean during that summer’s solar eclipse.

The ex-con remembers the violence that happened during the Trump march and rally at Bolsa Chica State Beachthat turned violent in March of 2017 and wishes his right-wing friend Wayne had been more discrete. The young teenage boy lies to his mother and goes to a protest on Main Street to meet a girl he has a crush on. The eventual violence at this protest was based on multiple similar events in downtown Huntington.

In another chapter, characters watch the August 2017 “Unite the Right” tiki torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on television. Their reactions vary. Some feel threatened. The aerobics teacher worries her husband has donated to fund those torches. The ex-con is slightly envious when he spots Wayne in the crowd. The Vietnam vet thinks of his father who served in WWII.

These characters are all based on people I know. None of them are real people. But last month week, things got a bit too real when the Charlottesville rally replicated itself in Surf City, minus the tiki torches.

On Wednesday, September 10, after Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, a large group of white men marched down Main Street in Huntington Beach toward the pier chanting “White Man, Fight Back!” They carried American, Republican, and Jesus flags instead of torches. They wore black shirts, khaki pants, white gaiters that covered their faces, and Patriot Front caps turned backwards.

Patriot Front is an American white nationalist and neo-fascist group.

When they reached the pier, one of the HB city council members, Butch Twining, was spotted in the crowd. The following Saturday and Sunday featured even larger Charlie Kirk memorial rallies at the pier. The entire city council attended these rallies. Patriot Front was again present.

No one should be brutally gunned down like Charlie Kirk. I’m sorry for his wife, his children, and his family. Many people find it helpful to attend public memorials of sympathy after these kinds of horrific events, but fascist groups marching down Main Street chanting white supremist slogans are the opposite of helpful. Regardless, no one on the city council made an immediate statement of condemnation, or mild disapproval, or even a simple request like, “How about if you maybe don’t do that again?”

Instead, the council members waited until the following week for the city council meeting to express their anger. Anger, not about the white supremist groups marching down Main Street and joining the Kirk memorial, but anger about criticism they’d received for not speaking out sooner. They defined the reproach from some members of the community as “hate speech.” They felt that those complaints were equal to, if not worse than, the white nationalist invasion.

These are strange days. I heard actor Jamie Lee Curtis break down in tears on Marc Maron’s podcast when she spoke about Kirk’s death. “I disagreed with him on almost every point," Curtis said. "But I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected to his faith, even though his ideas were abhorrent to me."

I admire Curtis’s compassion, especially considering that Charlie Kirk was no fan of empathy. "I can't stand the word empathy, actually,” he said. “I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage."

Charlie Kirk would never have picked up my novel. The front cover blurb (by one of my favorite authors, J. Ryan Stradal) describes Those People Behind Us as “a beautiful, propulsive, masterwork of empathy.”

I’ve always believed that even a small amount of empathy allows us to understand people we don’t agree with and people we assume we don’t agree with. It might sound naïve, but I still believe that.

As Gustavo Arellano recently wrote recently in the LA Times , “it’s the only way forward.”

In that spirit, I wish a happy second birthday to Those People Behind Us, available at LibroMobile, the only bookstore in Santa Ana. It could use your support these days.

Mary Camarillo’s first novel The Lockhart Women, published in June 2021 by She Writes Press, won first place in the Next Generation Indie Awards for first fiction. Her work has appeared in publications such as 166 Palms, The Sonora Review, Lunch Ticket, and The Ear. Her newest novel, Those People Behind Us, is out out from She Writes Press. She lives in Huntington Beach, California.