Author Takes on Tough Subject With Humor and Style
ELLSWORTH — In small towns across America, saying you’re gay — coming out as they say — takes courage.

Carrie Jones, a former Ellsworth City Councilor and local newspaper reporter, has published a young adult novel “Tips on having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend” and she has three more books in the works.—STAFF PHOTO BY LETITIA BALDWIN

Belle is shattered.

“It isn’t every day that my high school boyfriend, Eastbrook High School’s Harvest King, for God’s sakes, tells me he’s gay,” Belle quips in the newly published novel “Tips on having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend.” “It’s not every day that the Harvest Queen is dumped in the middle of a road in my mother’s silly subdivision with the stars watching the humiliation and the dogs barking because they want to come help tear my heart out and leave it on the cold, gray ground.”

Carrie Jones, whom many will remember as Carrie Ciciotte when she served on the Ellsworth City Council from 2001 to 2003 and reported for The Ellsworth American and other weekly newspapers in Hancock County, wrote “Tips on having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend” (Flux, 2007). She has already written a sequel “Love (and Other Uses for Duct Tape)” and another young adult novel “True Grit” due out in 2008. The 36-year-old Ellsworth author has also penned a children’s picture book about Moe Berg, who led a double life as a spy and major league baseball catcher, being published next year by Black Sparrow Books in Boston.

At The Maine Grind, Carrie Jones looked at home. She happily tapped away on her Sony Vaio along with a bevy of “Bedouins.” These modern-day workers who hole up daily with their laptops and cell phones in Wi-fi coffeehouses. As a full-time writer, much of her working day is spent alone and she delights in getting out in the world.

Like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall character, Jones presents herself to the world — wrinkles and all. The ’93 Bates College graduate is charmingly self-deprecating. On her Web site, she reveals wearing mismatched socks and other flaws. People who know her well will inquire how many times she apologized in one conversation.

“It’s not every day that the Harvest Queen is dumped in the middle of a road in my mother’s silly subdivision with the stars watching the humiliation and the dogs barking because they want to come help tear my heart out and leave it on the cold, gray ground.”

“I then apologize and berate myself for not even being able to spell my own last name!” Jones relates at carriejonesbooks.com. “What an idiot. He gives me an e-mail address. I send him the rest of the manuscript. Yeah, that baby’s going somewhere. Not.

“Although, he was kind and he did say, ‘It’s the manuscript I care about, not your inability to spell your own name.’”

Behind the ditsy demeanor, however, is a sharp observer whose ears are attuned to the “Geesh,” “Super cool,” “Really…I swear” and other bits of dialogue overhead at The Grind, Marden’s, Wal-Mart, Hannaford, Dunkin’ Donuts and other meeting places in Ellsworth. Over the years, her eyes have been busily recording scenes from different facets of her life in northern New England and filing them away for use some day. Fiction writing, her medium of late, has become a powerful tool for expressing views about prejudice in any form whether it’s someone sexual identity, skin color or social class.

Jones, whose father is a retired truck driver, grew up in Bedford, N.H. Her mother works as the receptionist at a dental supply company. Her late eldest brother had cystic fibrosis.

She describes her hometown as an affluent community that has produced a parade of talented entertainers. Her Manchester High School West classmates include comedian Sarah Silverman, whom The New Yorker describes as projecting a “quiet depravity,” “Saturday Night Live” comedians and brothers Seth and Josh Meyers and movie producer and screenwriter Steven Sills.

While her book is fictional, “Tips on having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend” was inspired by a story she once heard about a girl being hassled for having a gay boyfriend. “There was something that struck me as so wrong about that,” she recalled.

Belle, the main character in Jones’ debut novel, does get hassled. A neighborhood boy tells her, “Nice girls don’t go out with fags” and assaults her during school. Eddie is the same guy who beats up his girlfriend when he finds her kissing a girl in his pickup.

In “Tips on having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend,” Jones breaks stereotypes.

There’s Dylan, of course, the gay boyfriend who is “really hunky, doesn’t speak all high and stuff, has a studly boy walk, eats cheeseburgers all the time, and he watches football.” He’s the one who winds up thrashing Eddie for accosting Belle.

Meanwhile, super-jock Tom Tanner tackles Eddie and helps keep him from beating his high school sweetheart to a pulp. The Eastbrook police chief’s son, who calls Belle “Commie” because she’s belongs to Amnesty International and Students for Social Justice, tells her he didn’t just stand there and watch like others because it’s “Not in the DNA.” He adds, “The whole cop dad thing.”

Jones says the fictional town, depicted in “Tips on having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend” is a “moosh [means cross] between Eastbrook and Ellsworth. It’s not “The Beans of Egypt,” but it’s a Maine not on most tourists’ itineraries. It’s the wildly beautiful landscape of many inland Maine towns where money is tight and the roads are cracked and potholed. The plot, though, is a universal one that young and old adults can identify with whether they’re from the real-life Maine town of Eastbrook or Wausa, Neb. The story also offers insights for parents whose beloved offspring are going through a sullen, uncommunicative get-out-of-my-face phase.

Some teenage help, though, may be required to decipher expressions like “Punk’d” [coined from actor and Demi Moore hubby Ashton Kutcher’s defunct MTV show]. “Punk’d,” by the way, means being played a trick or bamboozled, says the author. 

Readers should scarf or snarf her book up.