“The Resurrection of Joan Ashby” by Cherise Wolas (post 5): Resolution of writer’s block (“resurrection”) by mutual accommodation of two alternate personalities

The front flap of the novel, which is quoted on the author’s website (meaning the author agrees with it), says that the novel is about a successful fiction writer, Joan Ashby, who marries a man who, at her request, promises that they will have no children, so she can dedicate herself to writing; but that when she accidentally gets pregnant, he betrays their pact, and she makes a selfless decision to embrace motherhood, which prevents her from writing for many years (until her true, writer self is resurrected).

But in the novel, Joan Ashby admits that she was “complicit” in the decision to have children: “And what she thinks next surprises her: she never tested Martin’s love, never learned how he would have reacted if she had said all those years ago, ‘We agreed on no children,’ and held him to his vow. They were equally complicit…” (1, p. 488). What caused her to be complicit? Why was she both for and against having children?

I interpret The Resurrection of Joan Ashby as the story of a woman with writer’s block caused by two personalities—a writer personality (Ashby) and a maternal personality (Joan? Mom?)—who had never negotiated a way for both of them to have their needs met contemporaneously. 

As noted in a previous post, she was peculiarly picky about how she was addressed, asking to be called “Ashby,” not “Joan.” This may have been because alternate personalities often have very definite ideas about their own names.

How could these personalities have resolved their differences? One way would have been for the writer personality and the maternal personality to agree that if the writer were allowed to write, then the maternal personality could have her needs met by the presence of maternal relationships in the novel. (This could have satisfied the maternal personality, because, as I have quoted more than one novelist as saying, the worlds of their novels are often experienced as “more real than real.”)

And in the novel that Ashby is writing at the end of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, the protagonist, a never-married, very successful woman sculptor, seeks out two much younger men, with whom she intends to have maternal relationships, which would accommodate the maternal personality.

Thus, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is about the resolution of writer’s block by the mutual accommodation of two alternate personalities. (I can only speculate that publication of the novel she had written previously had been blocked by the maternal personality because that previous novel did not make that accommodation.)

1. Cherise Wolas. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. New York, Flatiron Books, 2017.