Hypertext Magazine asked Karin Cecile Davidson, author of Sybelia Drive, “Why is LuLu so fierce when it comes to her friendship with Rainey, with just about anyone in the novel?”
By Karin Cecile Davidson
LuLu’s kind of a wild child, pretty much all the way through the novel. It’s the late 1960s in a small lake town in Florida: LuLu’s daddy’s taking off to serve as US Marine Corps Sergeant in Vietnam; her mama’s one of those go-out-and-play, semi-detached parents who allows her children a lot of freedom; her brother Saul’s entering a world of music and preteen angst. LuLu’s looking for someone to hold onto, and Rainey shows up. In her mind, this is beyond perfect. Rainey, of course, isn’t sure about all this. Her world is in flux and remains that way for a very long time.
The late 60s and early 70s are also a time of flux, with the peace movement pulsing against the war in Vietnam, with those left on the home front coping with worry and trying to make ends meet, and with a slanted U.S. foreign policy that deploys men and women into a war zone and country which has been dealing with foreign powers and its struggle for independence for far too long. Nine and ten-year-old girls aren’t keeping up with all this, but they’re feeling the wake, as if each father, friend, and son who takes off from the airbase in Orlando were a pebble dropped into Lake Sybelia. On the surface the resulting rings widen and eventually flatten out, and the memories widen as well, but in the girls’ minds, they remain bright and weighted with meaning, like a snatch of show tunes once shared or an embrace that comes at the end of each day.
For LuLu that’s just it. She has to grab onto whomever she can. She’s not good with goodbyes, and she’s not sorry she punched the kid on the playground. She’s looking for attention, and she’ll get it even if it means making a mess. Rainey’s the answer to this conundrum. She arrives at just the right moment, and she stays for the duration, even if she’d rather find a way out. LuLu in the end is Rainey’s touchstone, too. Stuck with each other in best-friend love, because sometimes that’s just how it goes.
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Karin Cecile Davidson is originally from the Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared in Story Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Five Points, Colorado Review, The Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her awards include a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a 2018 Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, a 2015 Studios of Key West Artist Residency, a 2014 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a 2012 Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, the 2012 Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and a 2012 Peter Taylor Fellowship. Her fiction has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net, as well as shortlisted for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, the Nelligan Prize, the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, and the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition, among others. She has an MFA from Lesley University and is an Interviews Editor for Newfound Journal. Her writing can be found at karinceciledavidson.com.