STUDY: The Faery Handbag

ACT ONE (2585) 32%

Scene ONE (594)

Protagonist goes to garment district where there’s a used clothing store. They found a shirt that used to belong to Natalie. Jake bought it for her (He’s the only one with a job and money). The Garment District is like Purgatory for clothes. They’re dead until they’re bought and worn and the smell wears off on them. Then they reincarnate. Jake has fun anywhere. Protagonist goes there every week to hunt for Grandmother Zofia’s faery handbag.

Scene TWO (76)

Define the Faery Handbag. Fairies live inside it.

Scene THREE (93)

Grandma tells Protagonist (Genevieve) she has to take care of this 200 year old heirloom. Genevieve doesn’t believe her because they didn’t have handbags 200 years ago.

Scene FOUR (234)

Flashback on Grandma. Everything is a joke to her. “Promise me you won’t believe a word.” Where is the HANDBAG?

Scene FIVE (508)

Sofia raised Genevieve. She didn’t act or look her age as a “grandma”. She cheated at Scrabble using the “Baldeziwurleki” dictionary. It’s where she was born and she’s over 200 years old and she makes Genevieve to promise to remember the place. (And she scores 386 points)

Scene SIX (102)

The Baldeziwurleki word for the faery handbag means “bag of skin where the world lives” but she never spelt the word the same every time and you had to spell it slightly differently every time otherwise it’s dangerous.

Scene SEVEN (978)

Baldeziwurlekistan board and tiles to divine, prognosticate. Used it to communicate with people under the hill. They knew the future. They were cute and you don’t spend the night there. If you did, a hundred years pass. “it’s ok to fool around but DON’T spend the night”. Hill people had a weird sense of time and inter-hill/village marriages didn’t work. When Zofia was 19 the elders predicted a raid and earthquake. So the hill people asked the shaman to make a dog skin purse. And the entire village went into this magic bag. Open it one way you get a regular bag to fit a clay cooking pot, an egg and a chicken. Open it another way and you go to the Baldeziwurlekistan village. Open it the wrong way and you get the skinned dog who’s now a nightmare guarding the bag.

ACT TWO (2787) 35%

Scene EIGHT (402)

Jake was always in love with Genevieve. He was smart but couldn’t fit in. He skipped two grades and the sixth graders beat him up. So he took two years off and learned everything in the world. Then he came back because his mom had cancer. And he went into seventh grade with Genevieve. He went home with her to play scrabble with Zofia.

Scene NINE (108)

Jake’s mom gets cancer again ninth grade and dies. Jake’s dad marries the fencing teacher. Jake and Genevieve steal wine and drink it and throw up.

Scene TEN (711)

The Village and Hill people lived in the handbag for a while. The bag was tied around a rock and left in a dry well. Zofia wanted to come out and see the world. Village was tumbledown and ruined. Zofia went to another village. It was people running away as well. So they went to a city. Everyone wanted to go back into the bag but Zofia decided to stay out and take care of the bag. Zofia had fallen in love with a Russian deserter. They moved to America and had Genevieve’s mom. Zofia constantly consulted the handbag to see how they could make more money in America. The husband got curious. One night, the Russian husband climbed inside the handbag and disappeared for 20 years. Zofia thought he left her. he came back out, they made up but they fought again and he went back in again for another 20 years to see Star Wars. And he went back in to tell the people.

Scene ELEVEN (174)

Zofia borrowed books from the library for the handbag people. They always made it late because time is different. Genevieve has a hard time writing about her since she’s really dead.

Scene TWELVE (850)

Mother always told Genevieve that Grandma is a horrible liar. She would tell fairy tales. She never told Jake about the faery handbag. But she told him about running around with Russian deserter. At age 8 she believed everything Zofia told her. 13 she stopped believe. At fifteen, she saw a man come out of Zofia’s house. She follows him and he buys weird stuff. He sees her. He knows her name. She freaks out .She confronts him. It’s obvious it’s the Russian. His name is Rustan. They all have dinner and he’s posing as an “expert on Baldeziwurlekistan”. Jake suspects something. She thought about how the next time she saw Rustan, she would be old, or married to Jake and have kids. Or whatever. It was weird.

Rustan had tried to get Zofia to go back to the handbag, but she refused. She preferred to look after her daughter and granddaughter.

Scene THIRTEEN (542)

Genevieve explains why she fell in love with Jake. It was because he agreed to a date with her, Zofia, Natasha and Natalie. And she was nice to her friends. Didn’t tried to kiss her. Instead of kissing they hugged and smelled each other’s hair.

ACT THREE (2676) 33%

Scene FOURTEEN (352)

Jake had pulled off a Houdini trick but got expelled for his grade 10 AP history project. He got accepted in MIT and did it for his mom, but then after the Boston Globe covered his Houdini antics, his acceptance was withdrawn. Mom asked her why they were so stupid to pull this off. Jake promised never to do anything like that again. But then Genevieve told Jake about the faery handbag…

Scene FIFTEEN (307)

Jake vanished. Genevieve worries about the consequences of this lost handbag now. Who has it? What if one of them comes out of the bag?

Everyone else thinks Jake has ran away.

SCENE SIXTEEN (978)

Jake sneaks into the handbag while working at concession in the movie theatre. He’s gone. Zofia grabs the handbag away before Genevieve dives in. She wants to go after Jake. Grandma is like, no I’ll do it. You can’t. You’ll lose everything. She hates that she has to WAIT for JAKE now.

SCENE SEVENTEEN (757)

They’re at the library. Zofia sticks a book in the bag. The librarian confronts them. She looks in and sees the dog. Throws the bag back at Zofia. Zofia faints. She rides with her to the hospital. Leaves her mom with her to go back to the library to get the bag. But it’s closed. She goes back to the hospital. Zofia is dead by that point.

SCENE EIGHTEEN (282)

Genevieve has lost the handbag. But she fools around with the scrabble tiles and tries to look for answers. She can find the handbag again it says. Maybe she can have adventures. Have Rustan come back and tell her mom that he’s her father. But none of this is true .

COMMENTARY (W/SPOILERS)

So I reread “The Faery Handbag” again tonight. It’s got closure, but not in the traditional sense I think. And that’s why I love her work. It’s not just magical realism… it’s two levels above it. In most stories, it’s clear when something real is meant to represent something symbolic or metaphorically. Like a gun, or peanut butter, or a piano. But with writers like Kelly Link, Theodora Goss and Eugie Foster… or whatever 21st century magical realists are doing… they take it a step further. They have this thin membrane between reality, the symbolic and the fantastic. In other words, the handbag is real (but not real at the same time), and you’re constantly hopping from reality to fantastic.

So when I said “messed up” regarding these writers, I didn’t mean depraved or horrific or gross messed-up… I meant messed up as in these writers play with the traditional story structure, expectations, how we think stories should work, and what’s real and not and the fantastic. They blur lines and feed information to you weird, and you’re trying to suss out what’s going on. These stories demand second readings almost.

So let’s look at The Faery Handbag. And I’m going to share “spoilers” here but it won’t matter because — like I said, the narrative structure of Kelly LInk’s stories are all out of whack anyways, and I’m not ruining anything about breaking it down — but let’s dive into it. What’s the protagonist’s “goal” here? Externally, she’s asked to take care of the handbag, but she’s lost it. Internally… what does the handbag really represent?

The opening scene is interesting. We’re at a used clothing store. They find something that someone lost years ago. She talks about how this place is like purgatory. Clothes “die” here. It’s not until someone buys them again and wears them and puts their smell on them that they’re “reincarnated”. The clothes represent memories. Memories are forgotten here.

What is the handbag? It’s Zofia’s past. it’s her people. It’s the history of her people. It’s Zofia/Mom/Genevieve’s cultural heritage. Zofia tells us that her people were attacked. And to save themselves, they have to go into this handbag they made. I think we can safely assume that her people were all killed. Her family, her relatives, her friends. She doesn’t say this. But the fact that all the people went into the handbag and she’s the only one that gets out back into the ruined village tells me, Zofia is the lone surviver of a genocide or something. And she’s running like a fugitive to the city where there’s a war going on.

So what’s up with all the lies and the made up name of her people? Is it made up? We don’t know. She’s blurring the line between reality and fantasy for us. For me, this is like the Life of Pi trick where we mythologize our culture. To make it timeless. (And coincidentally, when you go in the handbag, you lose your sense of time). The Handbag is Zofia’s history, but mythologized, so it’s timeless. You can get lost in it. Just like you can get lost in the past. But Zofia refuses to. She’s the one person who survived, and instead of drowning in despair, she chooses reality.

Side note: Why do you have to keep spelling the name of the handbag slightly differently? To me that’s another hint that she came from an oppressed people who had to run and hide. I had a friend in high school. She was Jewish. Like many refugees they changed their last names to hide. They changed their last names slightly. Made it a bit more anglicized. Whatever. But there’s that blurring again. What’s real? What’s memory? What’s symbolic? What’s fantasy?

Russian vanished into the bag. He’s probably dead. Rustan was Zofia’s first love. Jake vanished into the bag. He’s probably dead too… or not… just missing. Who knows? But the point is… he’s history. He’s a memory now. We mythologize our memories. We turn them from hard reality into these weird narratives. That’s what Zofia does.

In the end, notice how the handbag goes missing. It’s the exact same time that Zofia dies. So was there really ever a handbag? Who knows. But it disappears. So did Genevieve lose her grandmother’s entire cultural history because the bag is gone now? She’s aware of it still, and she’s looking for it. And in a way, she’s “taking care of it” by looking for it at the end of the story. She lost the physical bag (if it really existed in the first place), but character arc wise… she’s going to hunt down her past and at least try to understand her family’s past and history.

Again - this isn’t your typical EXTERNAL PLOT with subtle INTERNAL CHARACTER ARC. It’s all smooshed together and you can’t tell what’s real, what’s not, what’s fantasy, what’s symbolic, what’s metaphor. That’s why I love this “next level magical realism”. I feel like I’m constantly in a state of wonder and confusion (the fun kind).