Writer Stephanie Kane Talks About Her Character with Dyslexia

Stephanie Kane is the author of three novels, Blind Spot, and Quiet Time, both Bantam paperbacks, and Extreme Indifference, currently a Scribner's hardback which will be released in paperback in November 2004. A fourth novel, Seeds Of Doubt, is scheduled to be released as a Scribner's hardback, also in November 2004. With the exception of Quiet Time, the main character in each of these books is Jackie Flowers, a trial attorney with severe dyslexia. A former trial attorney herself with a career spanning 15 years, Kane has created a heroine who both struggles with her learning disability in practicing a profession where reading and language skills are critical, but who also has found novel ways to turn her dyslexia to her advantage. In this interview with LD News, Kane discusses her law and writing career and the experiences that prompted her to create the unique character of Jackie Flowers.

LD News: You don't have a learning disability, correct?

Stephanie Kane: That's correct.

SK: Before I started writing, I practiced law for 15 years, first as a corporate lawyer, then as a criminal defense attorney and there's always the old maxim of "write what you know." So, basically, I knew I wanted to write about a female lawyer"but I didn't want her to be me. To do that, I decided to give her both a challenge and an advantage that I never had as an attorney, thinking that this would keep me on the straight and narrow, and I wouldn't backslide into writing about myself. For the challenge, I tried to think of the one thing as a lawyer I couldn't function without, and since reading is so fundamental to the way law is taught and practiced, I decided that perhaps I would give the character some kind of problem with her ability to read.

As for the advantage, when I thought back to my time in the courtroom and my years as a criminal defense attorney, I remembered that the very best trial attorneys never used notes. In court, you're listening to testimony, trying to keep track of what's being said and the way the jury is reacting to it. And the act of taking notes puts you a beat behind the action as it's unfolding, and that's not really some place you can afford to be. So it occurred to me that you would be a much better lawyer if you could throw away the legal pad and do your thinking on your feet. And an attorney with dyslexia would have both severe problems with reading, but would also have to find ways to compensate for an inability to take notes, would have to find some way to live without them.

SK: Well, I didn't know anything about the neuroscience of learning disabilities but I'd seen the psychological and social effects first hand, because a young relative of mine does have a learning disability. Some of the things he went through made a very strong impression on me. He's very bright, but when he was younger you could also see that he was very frustrated and angry. His parents finally got him to a specialist and also put him in a different school. He was eventually able to overcome a lot of his learning problems but, of course, the experience had a profound effect on him and on his self-esteem.

I also began to do research, reading books like In the Mind's Eye by Thomas West; and Reversals by Eileen Simpson, about growing up dyslexic. There were three early inspirations for my heroine's character that grew out of this research. The first was Albert Einstein, the genius who couldn't do arithmetic but who could make these quantum cognitive leaps; the second was Winston Churchill, the great orator who failed in school; and my favorite, Nikola Tesla, the inventor, who created a whole raft of electrical inventions but built them all from designs he did in his head, never from a prototype.

SK: Yes, at www.writerkane.com. I put the questionnaire on the site because I wanted to keep my research ongoing and to learn how dyslexia affects someone's life. Does it affect their creativity, and if so, how? Does it affect how they solve problems? What has been dyslexia's greatest impact on their lives? I wanted Jackie to be as accurate as possible and to change and grow in realistic ways.

Some of the responses I've received have just blown me away. One man who wrote in could have been the reincarnation of Tesla"he told me he'd built a home from scratch based on a design he'd worked out in his head, never creating a blueprint. Another person who wrote in early on was, in fact, a female attorney who told me she would sometimes memorize phone numbers by turning them into mathematical equations and that one of the ways she got through law school was by making up little songs about the legal principles she was studying, which I thought was absolutely marvelous.

I've also been trying to get personally involved as well, not necessarily for research, but just to have a more direct, more personal understanding of learning disabilities. I'd been told that there was almost nothing in the way of interventions available for at-risk adults, so I called around in Denver, where I live, finally found a program called "Open Book," and last year spent six months tutoring two men with learning disabilities, one-on-one, at a local library.

It taught me a lot. With one of the individuals I was tutoring, who was severely dyslexic, we worked primarily on phonics, though we also did some reading comprehension. One day, we were working on "tion," which makes a "shun" sound, like in "nation." I was trying to come up with other words to illustrate it and we finally worked our way up to the word "international," which he recognized from seeing at an airport, but had never known what it meant. That led to a discussion on the prefix "inter." He'd also driven across the country before on interstate highways, but had no idea that the word meant the highway went through different states.

What this whole experience of tutoring really brought home to me was that literacy is about so much more than words on a page, that reading really opens the door to a full participation in life. With my other student, I made a trip to New York City at one point, and as a present I brought him back a book that had the front pages of newspapers from around the country reporting on the World Trade Center attack. He was entranced by it, and we got into newspapers that way"the next time we met at the library he had a newspaper in front of him. Along with his learning disability he was also developmentally disabled, but he could sound words out and after a while he could get through the headlines and the first couple of paragraphs, and we could have conversations about what he had read.

SK: First of all, there's Jackie's backstory"because of her early life experiences and struggles to get through school, I've used that to give her tremendous empathy for her clients. She can see the human side, something that many attorneys, especially in criminal defense, try to steel themselves against.

I've also tried to give her a skill set that many people with learning disabilities share, but which also helps to make her a dynamite lawyer. First of all, she has to listen very carefully, which is something a lot of attorneys really don't do"too often, they're tied to their notes, tied to their script. But listening is a tremendously underrated skill, and it's key to Jackie's being able to function in the moment when she's in court. She also thinks visually; she doesn't really take notes, and she has her own system of diagrams and pictographs to record information and jog her memory. Thinking visually also enables her to see patterns that many other people would overlook, especially other attorneys, since they tend to be linear thinkers. For example, in Blind Spot, the killer leaves the bodies of his victims in certain positions and certain locations. And these positions and locations create a pattern that Jackie is eventually able to identify.

In a more abstract sense, because she thinks visually, Jackie is also very good at painting word pictures, which can be very powerful when a lawyer is speaking to a jury. If you're an attorney arguing a case, it's key to get the jury to see your client the way you do. If you can speak in a vivid way that evokes powerful visual images, you're helping the jury form the pictures in their minds that they will then use in the jury room, trying to figure out what really happened and whether or not your client is guilty as charged.

SK: Jackie's learning disability really forms the backbone of her character arc. By that I mean that, in each book, she takes another, further step toward self-acceptance and coming to terms with her learning disability. I was very conscious when I designed her that she would change and grow from book to book"the overall arc she's on is one of learning to accept herself and in each novel she gets a little closer to that. Like many people in real life who have a learning disability, self-esteem is the biggest issue for her. And though she's very closeted in the earlier books, over the course of her story she's learning a self-acceptance that eluded her in her earlier life.

SK: Not quite in the way you might expect. Though Jackie's learning disability is evident on every page of the book, the word "dyslexia" never appears in Blind Spot or Extreme Indifference. That was very deliberate on my part, because I didn't want to make the character a poster child, but instead a high-functioning professional who happens to have LD. So when Blind Spot came out, none of the mainstream reviewers picked up on Jackie's learning disability. But individuals such as Tom Viall of the International Dyslexia Association recognized it and really embraced the book, and overall the reaction from the LD community has been very positive.

I think an awful lot of people identify with Jackie"there seems to be a whole generation of people out there who have a learning disability, but who have learned on their own to compensate and are living successful lives. They won't talk about their LD, though; they're still keeping it hidden. And I find those people fascinating, the ones like Jackie, who never had interventions, who may never even have had a diagnosis but who found their own ways of living with their learning disability and of working through it. Learning about the individuals who have lived these lives has been a very humbling and humanizing experience for me.

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