Lovely Faces

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About the Story

Absence makes the heart grow hungrier. Julia is starving.

On a hot August day in 1973, in the quiet seaside city of Morro Bay, California, fourteen-year-old Julia Miller's life finally begins. A girl her age, Concetta "Connie" Marino, moves in next to her childhood home, and Julia finds herself compelled to lap up every small, sweet morsel of information she can gather about her.

It doesn't take her long to find out that Connie carries with her deep, dark secrets... Secrets that only drive Julia further and further into her obsession and infatuation with her. Soon enough, Julia finds out what exactly she could be capable of if it meant capturing Connie's heart and keeping it for herself, forever.

Nearly thirty years later, Julia is now a widow with a young adult daughter, returning to Morro Bay to plan her father's funeral after his sudden passing. And while she knows she must behave for the sake of her family, the temptation to fall back into old habits feels... oh so lovely.

About the Setting

Morro Bay is a coastal city with a population of just over 10,000 people located along Highway 1 on the Central California coast, 12 miles north of San Luis Obispo. It is home to Morro Rock, a large volcanic plug that sits just off the shore along an estuary with sea lions and otters, among other marine mammals. The rock itself is a state-protected sanctuary for peregrine falcons, and it is illegal to climb to its summit. Morro Bay is a hot spot for tourists who'd rather spend a vacation that would be quieter than more popular places along the central coast, such as Pismo Beach or Monterey Bay. The weather is mild year round.

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The Cast of Lovely Faces

Julia Miller

Julia is the protagonist and main voice of Lovely Faces. She is creative and artistic, with a treasured hobby of painting and sculpting dolls that, when she becomes older, becomes her trade. She has a wide reach of clients across the country and takes serious pride in her handiwork.

She knows she is a victim of deep tragedy, someone who has done nothing wrong, and that everyone except for Connie is out to get her. Her suffering is the worst out of anyone else's; nobody seems to understand that heavy familial expectations placing her on a track upon which she doesn't belong are driving her to do things others wouldn't even dream of. After all, anyone would crack under all this pressure, right?

All she wants is a quiet life with her beloved Connie, and yet the weight of familial expectations is suffocating... Will there ever be a time when the two can live in peace together?

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Concetta "Connie" Marino

Connie is the secondary voice of Lovely Faces. A very lively person to be around, she is often seen laughing and joking around with her peers. Being the new kid in town really boosted her popularity when she first moved to Morro Bay, but she still stuck around Julia, her beloved neighbor. She comes from a family of mechanics who own their own chain of auto shops, one she comes to inherit when she's old enough.

Though, peel back the layers of charisma and one will find a different person entirely. She likes to test the boundaries of Julia's love, to see exactly for herself how far she would go just for her attention. Julia says she would do anything, but where's the fun in treating your precious dolls with love and care when you can simply... destroy them?

But perhaps she's left these habits of hers behind her. A lot has happened in thirty years, including a fifteen year prison sentence. Could it be possible her ego has been humbled by now?

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Andrew Hernandez

Andrew was a family friend of Julia from a young age, and the two eventually married. He was a respected lawyer working for a big firm, and a very successful one at that. But his greatest success, in his opinion, would be bringing Heather into this world. In his spare time, what little he had of it outside of work and being an exceptional father, he would sculpt beautiful clay works of art.

He was the most popular boy in his and Julia's shared graduating class, and he always loved her with all his heart, despite her remaining entirely indifferent towards him at best and cold towards him at worst. And yet, he persisted, because he deserved to be loved, too. They were high school sweethearts, the only couple that lasted into adulthood.

Even though he was good at hiding it in front of his peers when he was younger, Andrew suffered from lifelong manic depression, an illness which eventually led to him taking his own life mere months prior. Nobody knows what triggered this downward spiral, but it was a tragedy that shook both his and Julia's families to their very cores.

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Heather Hernandez

Heather is Julia's young adult daughter. She's in her third year of university, studying photography. Like both of her parents, she is also very bright and creative. However, since her father's death, Heather has given up on connecting with Julia, who, for as long as she can remember, has been incredibly difficult to bond with.

Just after her twenty-first birthday, she was the one to find her father's body, and now she has to grieve once again as she accompanies Julia back to Morro Bay to bury her grandfather. She's taking all this grief very hard; it's hard not to, in her place.

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Behind the Curtain

CONTENT WARNINGS

Lovely Faces contains many disturbing themes, including but not limited to what is listed here. Please read at your own risk.

Graphic Violence | Death | Suicide | Suicidal Ideation | Sex | Underage Sex Between Minors | Unsanitary Sex | Dubious Consent | Generational Trauma | Child Neglect and Abuse | Domestic Abuse | Drug and Alcohol Use | Underage Drug and Alcohol Use | Prescription Drug Abuse | Smoking | Delusions | Undiagnosed Mental Illness | Outdated Medical Diagnoses and Terms | Christianity | Terminal Illness | Murder | Homophobia | Misogyny | Internalized Homophobia | Internalized Misogyny | Prison | Cannibalism | Pregnancy and Childbirth

Inspirations

No story exists in a vacuum, and Lovely Faces is no exception.

The first thing that comes to mind when I try to think of what inspired me to write this book is always the song "Hotel California" by the Eagles, which is likely obvious by the lyrics I used as act titles. I initially wanted to write a love story that explored the lyric "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" and it all kind of spiraled from there.

But when it comes to other stories that inspired this one, it was mostly a matter of me thinking "What if this was gay? What if this was worse?" And these questions were particularly aimed at such classics as the works of Edgar Allan Poe (my 9th grade English class studied his writing and it permanently rewired my brain), Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

I'm aware how pretentious that last paragraph sounded, but I really don't have any more recent inspirations to add here...

Acknowledgements

If I've learned anything while pitching this book to people as I write it, it is that I've clearly surrounded myself by the right kind of people, because I was never met with the disgust or shock or discomfort that I expected, but rather a collective unhinging of jaws, all ready to consume Lovely Faces word by word the moment it leaves my hands. And even though at this point I may not know how far I want to throw this book out at the general public, if I want to do that at all, I know that I would never have gotten this far without this kind of support.

First and foremost, I would like to extend my most heartfelt, grossest, tear and snot-filled gratitude to Revy, who has bravely accepted my 3AM thoughts for the last three-ish years. Your insight and feedback has been crucial for this book's development, and honestly without you there would be no Lovely Faces, just an abandoned drabble lost within a sea of fanfics. Without your encouragement, I would have never found it within me to commit to this story, so really, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I would finally like to thank you for writing a book at the same time as me, and for being further along in the process than me, so that I can see exactly how many mental breakdowns I'm going to have if I choose to publish. Everyone reading these acknowledgements right now, stop what you're doing, put Lovely Faces down, and read Stardust of Morgrad.

I would also like to thank those whose paths have crossed with mine, for better or for worse, however long or brief it may have lasted, who have helped shape me into who I am today. My life's story, along with any story I could possibly write, wouldn't be nearly as colorful without your influence.

With love, R. Trickey