Laugh At Any Mortal Thing

About the Book

“…And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘Tis that I may not weep.”

Lord Byron

Don Juan, Canto IV

In the past, the Salieri family was guided strictly by Sicilian ethnic tradition and religious dogma. One member of the new generation, Ann Salieri, is determined to have more choice and more control in her own life.

For the Stewart family, it´s the brutal impact of schizophrenia which limits opportunities for happiness or even survival.

In LAUGH AT ANY MORTAL THING, when Neil Stewart meets Ann Salieri, nothing seems powerful enough to limit their joy. No matter how how much they love each other or how determined they are, however, their family histories and their own frailties prove overpowering. They do possess, however, a stubborn wit, which they share with their daughter, and which, as Byron said, provides the unique relief we humans need when dealing with a humorless fate.

MAIN CHARACTERS:

Lindsay Stewart and her parents: Ann(nee Salieri)and Neil Stewart.

IMPORTANT CHARACTERS:

Rod Hutton, Neil’s assistant at an auto industry weekly.

Mary Nicholas, a nurse and Ann’s closest friend.

Robert and Katherine Stewart (Neil’s parents), and Patrick Stewart (his younger brother).

Billy Jamison, West Coast rep for the newsmagazine.

MINOR CHARACTERS:

Members of the Salieri family.

Neil’s older brother, James Stewart.

Lindsay’s teachers, schoolmates, and psychiatrist, Dr. Walker.

Other business associates of Neil’s.

Members of Rod Hutton’s family.

PART I:

The novel begins with fourteen-year-old Lindsay Stewart growing more bewildered by the world she faces when her mother becomes mortally ill and her father’s control over their lives begins to fail.

Ann Stewart, Lindsay’s mother, needs to come to terms with her ambivalence towards her religion. She has never resolved whether she blames the church for its role in her own mother’s death many years earlier, when Catholicism ruled her Sicilian family´s life.

Neil Stewart, Lindsay’s father, accustomed to relying on his own strength and ingenuity even in the heedless violence of war, finds, within his loved ones, enemies more cruel and insidious. His own father keeps a secret which honors a long-ago vow, but robs Neil of the knowledge he needs to help his mother.

Lindsay, applying her sometimes ungovernable imagination, devises explanations to normalize the behavior of the grown-ups in her life and to bolster her trust in the power of adults to manage fate. But, like her maternal grandparents who relinquished control to religious tenets or her paternal grandparents who struggled blindly with psychological anomalies, her own parents exhaust their options and themselves. They are left without the strength or awareness to recognize Lindsay’s withdrawal from reality.

Neil, Ann, and Lindsay live their lives at work, at school, at home, with family and friends coming and going, with memories of the past coming to life. Though it seems at times they each perform for the benefit of the others, they continue to have fun, tease each other, play jokes on one another until the family crumbles beneath the weight of their individual destinies.

PART II:

As Lindsay reaches young adulthood, her attempts to come of age in real life, despite her family background of tragedy and schizophrenia, are creative but not entirely successful. She picks and chooses among friends, family members, even business associates of her father’s, for comfort and stability. She also picks and chooses among her religious and ethnic guidelines to bring order to her life, despite her disordered thought processes.

First attempts--at college, a love affair, psychiatric treatment—provide intermittent success and bursts of intense happiness, but Lindsay’s determination to avoid the mistakes of past generations cannot protect her from natu

About the Author

N.J. Irwin has been an English teacher, a farmer, a small business operator, and an elected official. She has helped to design, remodel, and build several houses. Writing fiction has been the one continuing obsession, though this is her first novel. Laugh at Any Mortal Thing began as a first-place winner in a short fiction contest. When Ms. Irwin revived the winning story to create a possible Master’s Thesis, the characters became too complicated and compelling to be satisfied with anything less than a novel. The story reflects Ms. Irwin’s interest in the impact of ethnicity and religion on family relationships, her research into the heredity of some mental disorders, and her view of life that recognizes the sense of humor as the unique, and sometimes the only, comfort we humans can offer one another.