Watermarks

"Watermarks" is a novel in the voice of Vivian Cleary, twenty-five, an Olympic hopeful in the equestrian sport of Three-Day Eventing. Since childhood, Vivian has dedicated her life to horses and the headlong gallop of her career; at the age of eighteen she left her Georgia home for a training barn in Virginia and never looked back. But as the novel opens, Vivian receives a call from the mother she rarely speaks to: Vivian's twin brother, Giles, is missing. She must now put her career on hold to return home, to dip back into a past she has tried in vain to leave behind.;The novel enacts a tug-of-war between present and past: Vivian's hard-won independence played against a deep sense of interconnection with her family, especially her brother. The twins have remained in contact, even created a mutual fiction of "one life" that continues to sustain them. Yet while Vivian has taken control of her life, Giles has become dangerously inclined to handing that control over to others. Through memory, Vivian must go back to recover his story as well as her own: if she can pin down where and how she lost him, she might have a chance to save not only him but also the part of herself that was lost with him. Meanwhile, in the present narrative, Vivian journeys home to search for Giles in the flesh.