| |
I was on the phone with my mother, after she’d finished reading Helen of Sparta, when she asked me about Pirithous’s fate. She wanted to know what became of him—was insistent that he couldn’t have just been left to rot in the chair of forgetfulness for the rest of time, no matter what I said. And the more she insisted, the faster the gears turned in my head. What if—What If Pirithous had been released, but not before everyone he knew and loved, everyone he cared about was dead?
And Son of Zeus was born. One of those rare instances where an entire book kind of blossoms into being behind your eyes. Which isn’t to say it was the easiest book to write, that the work was already done, because I wrestled with it for a small eternity, after that. And the problem of his citizenship only grew larger and larger in the time it took.
The world we’re living in right now doesn’t make allowances for people who should be dead, who maybe were never supposed to have lived at all, popping out of the Underworld. But the research I did into Statelessness—because that is unquestionably what Pirithous would be in the modern day—was heartbreaking. The protections we deny people without country are unjust and immoral at best, if not flatly cruel, and I still struggle to wrap my head around it. Stateless people have so few rights, fewer still even than those who arrive in our country seeking sanctuary and a new life, though in the last decade, we’ve done a poor job of guaranteeing even those.
While issues of immigration may not be entirely modern—who is and is not counted as a citizen of any kind of state or city has been a part of the politics of almost every age—they’re not exactly the kind of problems Pirithous would consider relevant to his own actions or life. He was both a hero and a king in his own time, a demigod in his own right with powerful friends and connections. In short: he lived a very privileged life, and with the knowledge that he was very explicitly sent back into the world by his gods, it’s understandable that he would see himself as existing in this place (to some degree) outside of our authority.
But Thalia would know. She would know what he was risking if he was found out by the wrong people—it takes a determined and willful ignorance to escape the horrors we’re inflicting on desperate people for the crime of being born on the wrong side of an arbitrary border and daring to seek a better life. And it’s hard for me to imagine that the generosity of spirit that Thalia shows to Pirithous, a lost, strangely-dressed man on the side of the road, doesn’t extend to others—to those suffering on the borders or being torn from their families, their homes, their communities by ICE.
I sat on this book for years because of all of this, afraid I would do more harm than good, terrified that I would be, somehow, diminishing the actual suffering and struggle happening to real people in our country but feeling even more that it would be a betrayal of that same struggle and suffering to pretend that it was a problem that didn’t exist for Pirithous at all. I didn’t know how to tell his story without recognizing that he should not be in the country at all—and all the trouble that came with that—but I still don’t know if I did right by that issue on any level. It’s part of what keeps holding me back in writing the rest of Pirithous’s adventure in the modern world, because so much of what Thalia and Pirithous want to do (get married, travel, exist in the world without fear of being torn apart) requires addressing his statelessness as step one.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are rights I’ve taken for granted my whole life, guaranteed by the accident of my birth in the right country to the right parents at the right time. But since I started writing Son of Zeus, a full ten (!!!) years ago now, I’ve realized how privileged that was. How unjust it is that as a society, a not small percentage of us hoard those three ideals to ourselves, believe them to be ours alone as we legislate away that same life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for others, lifting them up out of reach of anyone whose pursuit doesn’t agree with our own small view of the world and what is right. Who dares to live a truth that contradicts or challenges the narratives by which we live our own lives.
In writing Son of Zeus, in allowing Pirithous’s statelessness to hang over his head as a dark cloud in the telling of his story, I can only hope I have not done more harm than good. I hope that you, too (if you haven’t already—if it isn’t already part of the struggle of your life), might start to see how strange it is, how we decide and legislate who deserves basic human rights, and how we deny them to people just because they were born on the other side of an arbitrary and imaginary line.
***
I WANT TO ALSO JUST note quickly: Pirithous’s relationship with his gods is fraught, as one’s own might be if the hand of a god on one’s shoulder had led one into ruin before, or one had watched one’s loved ones suffer in their obedience to divine powers. His hesitance to bring Thalia into the mess of his personal relationships with his gods should not be construed as an endorsement of Christianity nor a means by which I, the author, intend to suggest that the gods of Olympus are unworthy of worship by pagans today. Pirithous just has... understandable trauma, I think, under the circumstances. In retrospect, probably not the best choice of hero to send into the world with a mission to bring people back to the gods, but I suspect Persephone was working with what she had at hand.
I do believe that these gods did and do exist in the world. They may not be my gods, but that doesn’t make them any less real or less significant in the lives of those who do belong to them. I’m always trying my best to do right by pagans, Norse and otherwise, and I hope that I did not fail any of you here.
***
ALL OF THAT SAID, IT’S time for me to say thank you, too, to everyone who helped me on the journey of this book: My mother, of course, for inspiring this entire book, and Aunt Tommi Lou, for being a very early reader and immediately suggesting a second book about Pirithous and Thalia’s adventures in DC.
I’ve been poking at this manuscript for so long now, I’m struggling to remember all the people who beta and alpha read it for me—Emi, Dan, Diana P., Nick M., who was definitely not expecting the book I presented him with after he asked for more Pirithous, and Denise, who let me ask her questions for HOURS while trapped in the car on a roadtrip to DC (Sorry!!!). Thank you to Sophie, who challenged me to finish Son of Zeus in a competition for who could wrap their draft first, and of course Rick, Matthew, Valerie, and Jay, who listened to me bemoan everything from content to cover design along the way.
Thank you also to Mia and Cait and LT, whose emails I just unearthed from the bottom of my inbox. I cannot even believe I have been fighting with this book for this long, but some of these date back to the spring of 2011???? What on EARTH.
Thanks to every single person who read a draft of Helen of Sparta long before it was ever published and INSISTED that Pirithous deserved his own book—without whom, even with my mother’s prodding, I might never have invested the time in this story. (For those of you wondering, I actually wrote Son of Zeus before Tamer of Horses!) And thank you to my Patreon patrons who finally gave me the kick in the pants I needed to turn this manuscript into an actual book, if only so I could offer them some new content: Rick (again), Aven, Emily, Rebecca, Sophie (again!), Libbie, Amy Jo, and Juliet.
There’s no way I haven’t missed people in these acks, and I apologize if you are one of them—I am so grateful for all the support I’ve been given by virtually every single person in my life.
Finally, thank you, as always, to Adam. I’ve probably said it every way possible, but without him, neither this book nor any other could have been written—he has subsidized my every author adventure with pride and love and an endless well of support that honestly blows my mind. Truly, you are the best of husbands, and I am so beyond grateful for everything you have done that has allowed me to do all of this.