Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (50 page)

"Divorced, Beheaded, Survived
by Karen
Lindsey

The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn"
by
Retha M. Warnicke

"Everyday Life in Renaissance Times"
by E. R. Chamberlin

"The Royal Palaces of Tudor England:
Architecture and Court Life 1460-1547"
by Simon Thurley

"The New Complete Medical and Health
Encyclopedia"
published by Lexicon

I haven’t said anything up until now because
I’ve been fascinated by the feedback I’ve received from readers. I
didn’t want to spoil things by telling them how I wanted them to
interpret Threads, or what I expected them to get from it. The
emails I receive all focus on different aspects of the story and
quote different passages as having meaning to the reader,
indicating that people are seeing it differently and getting
different things from it. That’s exactly as it should be. Once I
put it out there I shouldn’t interfere with the reader/book
relationship.

Now that I’ve compiled enough emails and
reactions, though, I’ve decided to be a bit more forthcoming. First
of all, its genre is "Visionary Fiction", which comprises books of
a meditative nature that contain a message or a lesson, and which
usually employ a spiritual or paranormal vehicle to tell it.
Examples of the genre include, "The Five People You Meet in
Heaven", by Mitch Albom, "What Dreams May Come", by Richard
Matheson, and "The Celestine Prophesy", by James Redfield. So
it's a little different, and its intended audience is people who
like a complex story with challenging, thought provoking concepts
that require some introspective examination. (If you prefer
sirens and car chases, try, "The Di Vinci Code.")

The story is an allegory, or a kind of
"fable". Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects,
persons and actions in a narrative have meaning beyond the
narrative itself. This underlying meaning has moral, social,
religious, or political significance, and characters are often
personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
Thus, an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning
and a symbolic meaning. 

I wrote the book in layers. I’ve heard from
people who saw all of them (Bravo!), and people who saw one but not
the others. I also read the reviews and could make that distinction
pretty easily. 

And I wrote it with two opposing timelines.
The main story is in past tense, and progresses forward in time.
The secondary story - the "other-worldly" one with Anne's past
lives - is in present tense, and progresses backward. Each past
life presents her with and emphasizes a point or a lesson Anne
needs to learn about the situation she just examined in her
lifetime as Anne Boleyn.

In addition, as I constructed the story, I
played on the tapestry theme, and wove the "threads" of little
sub-stories from beginning to end throughout the lifetimes, and the
book. If you skip or skim the beginning or the middle of a
sub-story, you won’t understand or even notice its conclusion, or
will miss clues that give you insight into some of the background
relationships. For that reason, fortunately or unfortunately,
Threads demands your undivided attention – or may require a second
reading, if you'd like to catch everything.

The story contains ample foreshadowing, so
you should have a pretty good idea of where it's heading when it
ends. The ending isn't an ending at all. It's a continuation,
because in order to effectively follow the reincarnation theme the
story can have no ending, just more up ahead. 

Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII are incidental to
the story, which I could have written about any dysfunctional
couple faced with forgiving (or committing) the unforgivable. I
just liked the pair of them and the explosiveness of their
relationship, and did my best to make their known history accurate.
Their history in Threads is a melding of five notable biographies.
None of them agree on what happened in Anne's life, so I was as
careful as I could be, and listed the instances at the end of the
book where I knowingly changed the facts. 

Nevertheless, the story isn’t about Anne and Henry.
It isn’t even about reincarnation. Those are just two of the
allegorical layers – and many people have liked, or even loved the
book without looking past them. Threads in its entirety is about
spiritual evolution in one lifetime or many, and about how
difficult the growth process is. It’s about good and bad, right and
wrong, and learning the difference. It’s about personal
accountability and obligation. It’s also about love – each of the
characters in the book represents a different aspect of love – and
how it never dies, even when it disguises itself as
hatred. 

All of my life I’d been exposed to truisms,
just as everyone else has. These come in a number of forms, most
frequently in timeworn sayings, such as “Don’t judge a book by its
cover,” or “Power corrupts.”

Other times the truth comes to us in books
with eye-opening morals, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or in
books with haunting beauty and hope in the face of obscene
ugliness, like “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”

Millions of people read books or watch movies
that have the potential to inspire or teach. Millions of people
proclaim themselves devout followers of this religion or that, and
can repeat the teachings of those religions verbatim without
prompting. Everyone hears, and can recite, the timeworn sayings. It
is NOT as if people aren’t thoroughly exposed to these truths and
these morals.

What bothered me was how infrequently people
actually listened to these truisms, and actually lived their
religions, and actually learned from the morals of the stories
they’d read. Even though everyone can quote, “Don’t judge a book by
its cover,” for instance, most people don’t believe it. They still
judge people by their shoes or their hairstyles or their clothing
or their careers. They care about the kinds of cars they drive.
They value that cutthroat, embezzling Wall Street broker and his
millions of dollars (provided he doesn’t get caught – which
immediately turns a “winner” into a “loser”, and nobody likes a
loser) more than the teacher, or the woman whose endless patience
got that autistic child to speak, or the man who serves food to the
homeless in a soup kitchen. Given a choice, they’ll take money over
friendship, without even taking the time or making the effort
toward any internal soul searching. They judge and dismiss and
ridicule and condemn, see themselves as good people with value, and
make value judgments about everyone else based on superficial
things. They use a measuring stick of “success” and gauge the worth
of the people they meet by how popular they are, how pretty, how
much they earn, and how enviable their situations are.

I saw this, and lived it, and experienced it
and got tired. In short, I lost patience with people when they
acted like jerks and wrote a book. In writing that book I
reminded myself and came to terms with the fact that we're, each of
us, a work in progress. It was a cathartic effort.

I found a philosophy, reincarnation, which
makes those truisms and morals real. Whether or not you believe in
the mechanics of reincarnation, its philosophical viewpoint uses a
measuring stick that is very closely aligned to the underlying
message of every major religion and every basic moral code. It
makes adhering to those truths and messages a tangible thing with
tangible consequences. For that reason, it was a useful literary
device in the story I wanted to tell.

In essence, Threads is a reminder to everyone
using the measuring stick of “success” that, when you use a
DIFFERENT measuring stick – probably the same one your religion
uses – you have less reason to feel smug and self-satisfied because
of material things…or, as the case may be, to feel like a
failure. 

The book doesn't preach; it just offers up
another way of looking at life.

If you’re reading Threads the way I hoped you
would and keep that measuring stick with you at all times until
you’re finished, you will catch the message. If you aren't and
don’t, it’s still a nice story about the reincarnation of Anne
Boleyn.

Thanks to all of you who have written! I LOVE
hearing from you!!!

Nell Gavin is married, with two grown
children. She was raised in Chicago, spent many years in Texas, and
now lives in Oklahoma.

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