Have any of you seen the story this week of the astronaut who allegedly donned a trench coat and a wig, packed a buck knife, BB gun, and steel mallet and drove 1000 miles, from Houston to Orlando, to confront an engineer who she suspected was seeing another astronaut, a pilot, in whom she was romantically interested?  She intended, she claims, according to news sources and police affidavits, to merely talk to the woman about her relationship with the man.  But then she pepper sprayed the other woman, allegedly; that, it seems to me, would not be conducive to civilized conversation.

     And they say fiction is farfetched?

     I was blown away by the story and would have thought it a prank if I’d seen it on April 1^st.  (There are elements of the tale - for example, the adult diapers she wore on the drive - that are passing strange.)

     But it does raise the question, to me, how far out is too far out?  How much behavior could a writer justify in the name of love?

     I think everyone would agree that if reports are correct, this woman went waaaaay too far in her effort to establish just what her rival’s relationship was with the man, and it all seems so sad to me, this intelligent, well-educated, and clearly driven woman who now has had her fabulous career derailed by love… or rather, obsession.  Because, as a writer, I think I’d have a hard time making the heroine anything but dangerously obsessed if she went to confront a rival with a BB Gun (apparently not loaded, according to her lawyer) which she intended to use to ‘scare’ the woman into talking to her. 

     It’s interesting to me though, to try to imagine some circumstance in which the heroine is not dangerously close to the edge of emotional breakdown, but has a rational reason for her behavior.  What has this fellow told her about the other woman?  Has he maybe been telling her fibs, perhaps saying that the other woman is pursuing him relentlessly?  That’s not even really speculation, but my own mind beginning to play with the scenario.  For those of you who don’t write, this is the kind of news story that is likely to set off the ‘what if’ trail in a writer’s mind.

     What’s weird is, I will never write a story about a woman doing what this one supposedly did, but the ideas that come from my internal speculation will show up in some other way, erupting to the surface in unexpected places, like springwater burbling out of the ground.  I may not even be aware of how they are connected.

     But the lingering question that remains with me is, how far is too far in fiction?  Can you ever imagine a heroine (not a secondary character; they have lots more latitude) in a romance novel behaving this way and yet ending up with her happily-ever-after ending?  How far would this strain the willing ‘suspension of disbelief’ necessary to most romances and mysteries?