A friend has a violin inked across her back. It’s a beautiful piece of work and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The story has nothing to do with her. A novel that grows out of a real image invites the assumption that it grew out of a real person, and this one didn’t.
What I wanted was the answer to a question. Who chooses that image, out of everything available, and holds still for four hours face down in a chair to have it made permanent? The answer I arrived at was Annabelle, whose father was a violinist. His instrument is what she put on her back, and she was nineteen when she did it.
What she noticed while it was happening turned out to be the whole book. That you can choose to hold pain, that the choosing changes it, and that the frame around a thing determines what the thing is. She had no vocabulary for any of that at nineteen. She spends a year acquiring it.
Annabelle is one of the characters I’ve loved writing most, because her problem is so ordinary. Plenty of competent people run every room they walk into and never once say what they want, and I wanted to spend a whole book with one of them while she learned. I’m proud that the novel gives her the full year it takes.
Where does The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo start?
At 10:47 on a Tuesday morning, in an office lobby.
At twenty-two, Annabelle works reception at an oil company in Dallas, watching a clock that won’t move. Then two strangers come through the revolving door and kiss in front of her. Nothing happens. They leave. She goes back to validating parking. And something she’s been managing privately for years stops being manageable. That’s the only kind of beginning this story could have. Nobody arrives to change her life. She sees two people who aren’t performing and recognizes the difference.
The book on this: The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo follows a year in which Annabelle stops managing everything and learns to say what she wants. Adult readers only.
Why open a novel with the main character failing?
Because the prologue is the problem the book exists to solve.
Annabelle is somewhere she chose to be, having said yes to it clearly, and partway through she needs to stop and can’t.
She had been told about a signal. Three taps. She doesn’t know what she’s meant to tap, whether it needs to be the frame or something held, or whether there’s a step nobody mentioned.
She taps and waits and nothing changes, and she doesn’t know whether she did it wrong.
Her own summary of it is four words. She had no information. The scene is about somebody who wasn’t equipped, in a situation that required equipment, and it’s placed first so that everything afterward is read against it. That prologue was the hardest thing in the book to get right, and I wouldn’t move it for anything.
What’s Annabelle’s actual problem?
That she manages things, and always has.
That sentence appears in the first pages and it’s the character in five words. She handles the room. She anticipates what’s needed. She builds a version of herself for whoever is present and works it competently.
The cost is that she never asks for anything, because asking would require having decided what she wants, and deciding what she wants would mean it could be refused.
So the year the book covers is a year of learning to say a sentence out loud, and the novel is honest about how long that takes for somebody who has spent twenty-two years not doing it.
I have a lot of sympathy for people like Annabelle, and not much for the people around them who never notice. Everybody benefits from the one who handles the room, almost nobody stops to ask what she wants, and she keeps paying for their comfort out of her own life.
What is The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo really about?
Information, and asking for things.
That sounds like a strange description of a novel with this content warning on it, and it’s the accurate one. Almost every difficulty Annabelle encounters is a failure of information. Something she wasn’t told, something she didn’t know to ask, or something she knew and couldn’t say.
The chapter that closes the arc is called You Could Have Asked, and that’s what she works out. The novel carries a content warning for explicit sexual content and mature themes and it’s for adult readers only. Underneath that, it’s a book about a woman acquiring the vocabulary to describe her own life.
What does a tattoo come to mean years later?
Three things she had no words for at nineteen.
That you can choose to hold pain. That the choosing changes it. And that the frame around a thing determines what the thing is. She works that out face down in a chair for four hours while her father’s instrument is being pressed permanently into her skin, and what she feels when it’s finished isn’t grief exactly, though grief is in it. Something closer to having been carrying something loose and having it finally anchored.
A reader meets those three ideas in a tattoo parlor, before the novel has revealed what it’s about, and every one of them returns later carrying considerably more weight.
That’s the structural reason the tattoo is the thesis, delivered early and in a context nobody reads as a thesis.
How does Annabelle change?
Slowly, and the book measures it in small physical facts. More than a year in, she goes to an annual checkup, fitting it between a Tuesday lunch and a conference call she isn’t attending but whose participants will need parking validated. Blood work. The things you do when you’re a person with a body. Then the line underneath it, which she puts almost in passing. She’s been a person with a body, in the fuller sense, for over a year now. That’s how the change gets reported. Not as a revelation and not as a speech. As a woman noticing on the way to a routine appointment that a phrase she’d once have used carelessly has become true.
I love that moment more than any big scene in the book. Change that announces itself on the page usually rings false to me, and a woman quietly noticing that an old phrase has become true is much closer to how people change.
How does The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo use its supporting characters?
As evidence. Nobody in the book is there to instruct her.
At one point Annabelle spends an evening with a couple who know each other well, and what she takes from it is the ceiling she looks at afterward, and something she sees in it that she can’t name yet. Something about what two people can build if they keep at it long enough and carefully enough, and how that construction produces a warmth that reaches past the two of them.
She doesn’t have the vocabulary. She notes that she doesn’t have it. That’s the habit she’s been developing all year.
That’s the difference between this book and the version of it that would be easier to write. Nobody explains anything to Annabelle. She watches, and she gets slightly better at knowing what she’s looking at.
What holds the year together in The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo?
A job that’s falling apart while she’s busy elsewhere.
The front desk is a good vantage point and the book uses it properly.
When something is wrong at a company, the person at reception knows before anybody tells them, because nobody tells them anything. What happens instead is small deviations from the building’s normal rhythm. Her manager suddenly having closed-door meetings when he’s never had a closed-door meeting in his life.
That thread runs underneath the personal one and eventually collides with it, and the collision keeps the novel from being a sequence of encounters. It also does something for the character. She reads a workplace with complete accuracy and reads her own wanting not at all, and the gap between those two competences is the person.
Novels that hand their heroines a mentor who explains everything lean on a crutch, so I’d much sooner give readers a woman who works it out herself, slowly and at some cost. Annabelle pays for every sentence she learns to say out loud, and I’m prouder of that than of anything else in this book.
