“I feel like it’s an absolute crisis, that we refuse to see nuance and complexity,” says Daphne Uviller, whose recently-published new novel This Was Not the Plan tackles this topic head on. “The inability to accept and process nuance, identity politics that make you all one thing or another. It’s just not who human beings are. And I wanted to scream from the mountain tops, ‘Stop thinking in a binary way because it’s destroying us, as a nation, as a world.’ “
Instead of screaming, being a writer and wordsmith, Uviller took up her pen. With three detective novels behind her, as well as screenplays, articles, columns, and a books/poetry editorship at Time Out New York, she poured her impassioned views into a story that took some eight years to write and is provocatively set, in part, in a women’s reproductive health clinic in an upstate New York town which might bear a passing resemblance to Poughkeepsie.
Uviller is a born and bred New Yorker. “I did leave Greenwich Village kicking and screaming,” she admits. “My kids are fourth generation West 13th Street.” But the family’s relocation to Poughkeepsie in 2008, because of her husband’s work, also led to her volunteering at a Planned Parenthood clinic. And that experience, escorting patients through protesters praying and yelling, in turn presented her with the fulcrum of her story.
Now a resident of Sleepy Hollow since 2016, she is busy promoting the book, and fielding questions about its three central characters whose worlds collide under intense circumstances: Sylvia is an NYC theater director; Meg is a poor student and Caroline is a religious local who’s a protestor.
“The protestors I met were so absurd, so like caricatures that I thought they weren’t going to be believable,” Uviller comments, but her novel makes sympathetic room for a wide range of characters and lends distance on all points of view, pro-life, pro-choice, and those in between. The author works hard to balance that shading of opinion, while adding a bunch of other serious issues to the storytelling mix. Happily, another of Uviller’s strengths is her humor. There are some delightful one-liners included.
She will be in conversation about the book with SUNY New Paltz Professor Heather Hewett at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center on Monday September 16, and reading and discussing it at the Warner Library on Thursday September 26. Other events are in the pipeline.
In addition to musing on what she will write next, and as well as tending her family, Uviller devotes an average of ten hours a week to Community Wardrobe, a charitable organization of which she is co-founder and co-director. This joint effort of the Horsemen PTA and the Village of Sleepy Hollow finds new homes for good clothes, free, to local families who need them. “Our primary concern is to make sure that all of our school families have clothes, and they’re invited to come seasonally and refresh their wardrobes. It’s like a food pantry for clothes.”
Still a New Yorker at heart, Uviller seems nevertheless to have found a happy substitute in her River Towns community. “I feel so lucky to have found Sleepy Hollow. I joke it’s the Upper Upper West Side,” she says with a smile. “Being here feels like the perfect Goldilocks mix where I’m meeting the same people who I would meet in the city, and my neighbors have become friends I would truly pick as friends.”
horsemenpta.com/community-wardrobe
