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By Shelley Klingelsmith
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Katrina Kittle
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The landmarks are familiar. Nicholas is a stage manager at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. His girlfriend, Summer, and her family live near Dayton. But their story of coping with a family member with AIDS may not be familiar enough to everyone. That is why Dayton author Katrina Kittle is telling it.
Through the eyes of Summer, Traveling Light recounts the final year of her brother Todd's life. Summer's neurotic behavior makes her an excellent narrator. She has moved home to help Todd after an injury ends a promising ballet career. Although the book most closely follows Summer, it's well-rounded, offering glimpses into the individual dramas of each character in a life-goes-on effort alongside the tragedy Todd is facing.
It's tempting to reduce Kittle's debut novel to another book about AIDS. Although it also focuses on families coping and growing, at times the story is overshadowed by its touching detail of the disease in both its emotional and physical manifestations.
Kittle says, "I lost two very close friends to AIDS. One of them I had lost track of and found out after the fact he had been completely rejected by his family and had died pretty much by himself."
She felt devastated by this news and, although it was too late to help him, she wanted to help someone. "I contacted the local AIDS organization because I thought if there were people like him in my own town maybe I could do something," Kittle says. She began volunteering with the AIDS Foundation Miami Valley.
At the time, Kittle was teaching high school. "I initially was drawn to writing a story that would put a human face on AIDS for my students," she says. Her students acted as if AIDS could never affect their lives. "They seemed to like me and respond to me and, in the back of my head, I thought 'What if I told them I had a brother with AIDS?' Something to make them understand that it could be anyone," she says.
With this in mind, she started writing. "Early on I did attempt to make it Todd's story, but I was worried that that was not my story to tell, and I would not be able to pull it off," she says. Kittle wavered between knowing that a gay male perspective could be a barrier to exactly the kind of people she was trying to reach and wanting to write a novel for people who had no problem with gay characters or a strong gay relationship.
"There are so many wonderful AIDS novels written already, that I thought, 'What do I have to contribute that hasn't already been done?' That's how I decided on the sister as the narrator," she says.
Kittle then had to determine how much of her soapbox she could fit into the novel without sounding preachy. For starters, Todd does not get AIDS from another man. "I think the way Todd contracts the virus was a real important issue to me, because so many kids are like 'I'm not gay, so I don't have to worry about this,' " she says.
Kittle wanted to dispel myths with this book, even some she didn't realize were there. "Some people in the early drafts thought everyone was too nice and accepting of Todd, and again that's a myth. Some parents don't have a problem," she says.
She didn't realize it, but she was tackling false information, not only about AIDS but about gay people, too. "In some of my writers' groups, and I think these are pretty intelligent, educated groups, they would say things like, 'Gay people wouldn't ever like hockey, would they?' "
Kittle had plenty of fodder for characters. Through her work with the AIDS foundation, she had witnessed firsthand the different ways families react. "There are families who aren't accepting of the family member with AIDS, and sometimes they will be involved in the treatment, even though it's clear they think the person deserved it or whatever," Kittle says. "If you get to know them, usually it's a mask for some great burden they're carrying."
With this in mind, Kittle created one of the book's more complex characters, Todd and Summer's sister, Abby. She does not interact much with the family and, when she does, it is without her husband, who disapproves of Todd's sexuality.
"She was the villain I piled all of my feelings about people who don't accept homosexuals into," Kittle says.
When writing on the physical and medical aspects of AIDS, Kittle took her cues from something author Pat Conroy once said: If there's anything that you find yourself avoiding because you think it is unpleasant or scary, then that is exactly where you should go because it's the most alive.
"I know that some of the passages are pretty ugly," Kittle says, "and I didn't want to be so graphic that I turned people off, but I didn't want to sugarcoat. It is a story about AIDS and that can be pretty obscene at times."
Around all these points Kittle constructed a touching novel about a family dealing with one major crisis and countless smaller ones.
"You walk the fine line of not wanting to be on the soapbox," Kittle says, a little worried she may have buried some of the book's literary aspects. But the literary landmarks are still there. The characters are interesting, the plot is unpredictable and -- most importantly -- engaging. And I cried at the end, a sure sign that Kittle did not blunt the emotional impact of the novel.
KATRINA KITTLE will be signing Traveling Light at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
