FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT “MATTIE LEE” AND HER (FEW) FRIENDS INTRODUCTION: About a month ago, I received my two hundredth E-mail on the fan fiction stories I’ve been writing about the Woman With Kids at Home (or “Mattie Lee,” as I’ve affectionately named her). While I’m always happy to get and reply to feedback - even the negative kind - I noticed that many of the E-mails contained similar questions; and that it might be useful for me to answer these “big” questions at once. Here are the most commonly-asked questions about Mattie and the stories, in the order of frequency in which I’ve gotten them. Almost all of the questions are “paraphrased” – that is, if I received ten E-mails asking essentially the same question but in slightly different language (say, “is Mattie Lee based on someone in real life,” “did you have someone real in mind when you wrote about Mattie?” etc.) I’ve tried to “consolidate” the questions. 1. Is Mattie – who wore a crew cut and pants but no make-up in the film – supposed to be gay (or perhaps bisexual)? Answer: Not that I’m aware. Nothing she said or did in the film or the novella indicated that she was – or was not. (After all, not every woman who wears her hair that short or who wears pants in this day and age is necessarily gay :) At the time I began writing the stories about her, though, there was some discussion on the IMDB board as to whether she was gay. After I began writing the stories, I received a great many questions and comments on this issue as well. (The most elaborate, and probably the most touching, of these E-mails was the one I received from a self- described gay activist in the Bay Area; this woman was certain Mattie was gay but in the closet). When I began writing these stories in the Summer of 2008, I wanted everyone to be able to draw his or her own conclusions about this. I made it somewhat ambiguous in the stories. Mattie’s lifelong best friend, Rose, is openly gay and they do live together. However, we also know that Mattie had at least two boyfriends (Kyle, the love of her life; and later a man named Tim). In my third story about her, “Trying to Forget,” Mattie specifically denies being gay or bi. Personally, I think Mattie has no interest in women and no more interest in men. She has had a very hard and traumatic life – full of betrayals by people she trusted. This has made her very withdrawn, suspicious, and unable to make new friends. She also has her hands too full taking care of her kids Wanda and Victor to think about passion or even romance. 2. Did anyone connected with the film or the novella help you to write the stories? Answer: Most definitely not. The ideas for Mattie’s background, how she survived her journey home from the market, etc. are mine and mine alone. However, last year, to my great surprise, I did receive (mostly favorable) feedback from two members of the cast of the film (one one of the lead actors and one of the supporting actors) regarding the stories. I can’t (or at least won’t :) identify them, but I can tell you that both of them are excellent actors and I was very happy to get their feedback. Incidentally, both of these actors seemed to have pretty different conceptions of Mattie than I did; one saw her as a good-natured nonconformist and the other had imagined she was an ardent feminist. (On a more amusing note, I was recovering from a spell of cardiac arrhythmia when I received the first of these E-mails; when I realized who had sent me the message I almost had a full-blown heart attack as I thought, “Oh no -- they found them!”) 3. Where did you get the name “Mattie Lee?” Was that the name of the character in the novella or in the film or did you come up with it yourself? Answer: I came up with the name on my own. The character of the young mother is simply identified as a “blonde(!) woman” in the novella and in Darabont’s script. I wanted to give her a name that, like the character, was distinctly Irish; Southern; old-fashioned; and yes, a bit androgynous as well. In “A Good, Bad Woman,” I explain that Mattie chose this name herself. She was born Moragh Magdalene Allen, a name that reflected her Irish-Catholic background. She never liked her first name, which almost everyone mispronounced. As she became a teenager and fell away from religion, she felt uncomfortable with her middle name. She is and always was very proud of her Southern heritage (see answer to Question #6 below), and decided to “simplify” her middle name into “Mattie Lee” – a name more befitting a good ol’ girl. I also had another reason for picking the name “Mattie.” She reminds me of the narrator of an old Australian song, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” about a young man who eagerly goes off to war without understanding what he was getting into and loses his legs. In my stories, Mattie lived sixteen happy years before making a series of terrible mistakes that left her partly crippled and forever emotionally scarred. 4. The Woman With Kids at Home was a pretty minor character in the book and the film. Why focus on her instead of David, Amanda or the other major characters? Answer: Mattie (at least to me) is more interesting – and in many ways more troubling – than any of the major characters. I wondered how this strange and unhappy young woman – who left her own children unattended and who seemed so mentally and physically brittle – was able to survive and save her family, succeeding where David and the others failed. 5. Is Mattie – with her many mistakes, misfortunes and emotional outbursts – based on anyone in real life? Yes, to a degree. When I was in my twenties, I was a “friend of friend” of a very well-meaning, but also very troubled, young woman. Looking back on it, I think she was manic-depressive. When things were going well for her, she was very sweet, colorfully eccentric, and a lot of fun to be around. But all too often she could not control her emotions or her actions. She would have terrible crying and screaming fits; curse even her closest friends; sometimes act so strangely in public that the police began to take an interest in her; or get involved with some truly dangerous people. She was also addicted to a number of the stronger painkillers (the “opioid” class, which can sometimes give a patient a sense of euphoria); this got her into a world of trouble with doctors, pharmacies, emergency rooms, drug dealers, and just about everybody else. (Once, I was in her apartment when a man began pounding on the front door, calling her name, and shouting obscenities; I later learned that he was a drug dealer to whom she owed money.) She had very little education, could not hold even an unskilled job for very long, and was almost always broke and dependent on the goodwill of her friends. Separately, some of you have asked me if Melissa McBride (the actress who played the Woman With Kids in the film) is anything like Mattie as she appears in my stories. Well, come to think of it, I *have* noticed that they both have the same haircut, green eyes, red hair, and freckles :) Seriously, I don’t think so. I’ve had only very limited contact with the actress; but she seems to be almost the exact opposite of Mattie – very easygoing, articulate, with a good sense of humor. She does seem to have a talent for playing emotionally fragile characters – the Woman With Kids in The Mist; the battered wife Carol Peletier in “The Walking Dead” TV series; and a mentally ill drifter in the short film “Lost Crossing” – but she didn’t strike me as being anything like that herself. 6. Mattie, in your stories at least, is not only Southern but “very” Southern. Why did you write her this way? When I started to write about Mattie, I needed to figure out some background for her that was consistent with the Woman With Kids that we saw in the film. In the film, she spoke with a Southern accent. (It eventually dawned on me that there was a “reason” for this: The Mist was filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana and many of the supporting cast were Southerners; the woman was played by Melissa McBride, an actress and casting director from Atlanta). I also had another reason for making Mattie Lee “so” Southern: When I was growing up (in Los Angeles), one of the more colorful characters in my life was an aunt from Grenada, Mississippi who had a love of everything Southern and at least some misgivings about anything that wasn’t. This was mostly the result of living her life in a small city in the heart of Dixie. She was proud of the Southern military tradition and valued the courtesy that most people showed one another. To her, big Northern cities seemed crowded with rude people rushing around for no reason and chasing every last dollar. Mattie feels the same way. She is living in New England, far from home, and is dismayed by what she sees as a difference in manners and values (her best friend, and all of the men in her family, joined the Army on leaving high school; many of Mattie’s new neighbors talk about having gone to Canada so as not to serve in Vietnam, a war they opposed). But Mattie’s feelings – and those of my aunt - were also partly defensive. My aunt and her family were among the very small number of Jews living in a heavily Protestant state in the middle of the “Bible Belt.” As far as I know, no one ever treated her any differently because of her religion (her husband was highly respected by his neighbors and colleagues). Yet, the religious difference somehow made her feel compelled to show that was as Southern as anyone else. Sometimes this was touching (or at least amusing) but other times she went a bit too far. Mattie Lee is also a member of a religious minority (Roman Catholic)in a mostly Protestant area of a state (Missouri) that belonged both to the Confederacy and the Union during the Civil War. Like my aunt, Mattie may also (wrongly) feel that she has something she has to “prove” to others. 7. Mattie often refers jokingly (and sometimes not-so-jokingly) to Amanda Dumfries and her other New England neighbors as “Yankees.” You’ve also indicated that she’s very conservative politically. How does she feel about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era, etc.? I haven’t really addressed this in any of the stories but I know the answer off the top of my head: Mattie thinks of the South as a different country. Her ancestors fought in the Confederate Army (the First Missouri Confederate Brigade at the battle of Champion Hill). She wishes the South had won the Civil War or had been allowed to leave the Union. She also wishes, though, that there had been no such thing as slavery or segregation. She is no racist and neither are her friends. In “A Third Chance” and “Mattie’s Last Summer,” I mention that one of her ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy (a man named Bennett McKinley) later armed and organized his neighbors to fight off attacks by Ku Klux Klan. She’s as proud of that as she is of anything. She sees the North (somewhat, but not entirely wrongly) as a terribly industrialized, polluted, noisy, crowded place with a violent culture focused on speed and making money and where people never have time for courtesy, friendship or the “little” things in life. (She wasn’t terribly surprised to find New England overrun by six-legged monsters; she already felt it was full of two-legged ones :) But to her, the South is a land of beautiful scenery (she grew up near the Ozarks), great writers and musicians; a place not ruled by a time clock; and above all, the place where she spent the happiest years of her life. 8. Mattie, in your stories, has a high school education, has done time in prison, has (to put in mildly) anger-management problems, and is addicted to painkillers. Are those traits that you attribute to Southerners in general? Answer: No. Absolutely not. When I think of the South I think of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; the Mississippi branch of my mother’s family; and (to a degree) my own father, a career Marine who was originally from Europe but who grew up in Brownsville, Texas and whose best friends in the service were from the Deep South (I think that makes him at least an “honorary” Southerner :) I’ve tried to make clear that Mattie’s faults are hers and hers alone. Her best friend (and distant cousin) Rose, who grew up in the same small Southern town as she and who is also “very” Southern, is highly motivated, very courageous (an MP wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq), and would never use drugs. Rose and her parents (Tom and Joan Sullivan, who appear in almost all of the stories) have tried time and again to save Mattie from herself. They are much more typical of the Southerners I’ve known. Also remember that Mattie, for all of her very many problems and faults, risked her life to save her children. 9. Mattie’s home town (where she grew up and where she returned after the mist destroyed her home in New England) is a small, tough industrial town called Rubidoux, Missouri. Is there actually such a place? Answer: Yes, but not in Missouri. “Rubidoux” is the name of a small blue- collar town in the Inland Empire (desert) region of Southern California. When I was much, much younger, my best friend (who actually inspired me to start writing) went to college at the University of California at Riverside. When I would visit him, we would go out gallivanting (usually with his roommate Jen) all over Riverside and sometimes the surrounding towns. I happened to be staying with them the day I found out I passed the Bar Exam (November 27, 1991; the happiest day of my life; every day since then has been downhill). The three of us celebrated by buying (and drinking) every kind of cheap wine we could find (Thunderbird, Night Train, Mad Dog 20/20, etc.) and then climbing to the top of Mount Rubidoux, a small mountain overlooking Riverside and the other Inland Empire cities. Whenever I tried to imagine what Mattie’s hometown would be like, I kept imagining her in Rubidoux. 10. How are the Mattie Lee stories going to end? Will she find peace; or take her own life; or do something else entirely? Answer: I honestly don’t know. Five of my seven stories about her – “Trying to Forget,” “Alternate Endings,” “Mattie’s Last Summer,” “Natural Enemies,” and “Tall Tales” - are based either on reader suggestions or my own ideas. When it comes to Mattie Lee, I never know what will occur to me or to someone else. I can tell you, though, that I would hate to “kill her off” – she’s basically a decent, loving person and she deserves to live. I’ve toyed with various ideas – everything from having her fall in love and get married (maybe to a man who lost his wife to an accident or illness and can thus relate to her pain) to having her write a best- selling book about her experiences in the mist. 11. Have you written anything else? Answer: Yes, but very little fiction. I’m actually a lawyer / professor by trade, and I’ve written three legal textbooks, about as far from the Mattie Lee stories as you can possibly get: “California Transportation Law,” “California Public Contract Law,” and most recently an E-book called “Interpretation of Laws.” (This last book was, however, dedicated to Mattie Lee, making it probably the first law book in history to be dedicated to a scofflaw :) As for fiction, I’ve written several chapters (roughly 100 pages) of a novella about Mattie – one which has nothing to do with the events or characters in The Mist. She is essentially the same Mattie we know and love – well-meaning, deeply flawed, highly-strung, her own worst enemy, and of course “very” Southern; and with the same background. In my book, though, she is a schoolteacher and single mother in North Hollywood – not a very nice place to live, but the place where I grew up. The novella is based on real life, on one of the worst things that happened when I was growing up - people being targeted by their fellow classmates, neighbors, etc. simply because they were “different.” This is a situation that Mattie would understand. At some point I will start posting these chapters on the Web. They aren’t fan fiction, and have no connection to The Mist, so I don’t think I can put them on Kevin Karstens’ “Mist” website. Once I figure out where to post them I will let you know.