Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Or: Half-hiding behind the guise of fiction.
I wrote this novel last November, about two women who have been friends on and off since the age of seven. I loved writing it, mostly because I loved both women, one of whom was named Ruth; I was in one of those passioned fevers of creation, where all you think about is your beautiful, amazing project and how perfect it’s going to be when it’s done. But after I was finished with the draft, after I’d put it aside for a month so I could fall out of love with it and see it more clearly, I didn’t love it anymore. Because it’s bullshit.
So much of it is just to the left of the truth: anecdotes that happened to me, made strange by a change in age or venue; people I knew, or know, wearing the literary equivalent of Groucho glasses. Why not just tell the real story? Because I’ve hurt people by writing about them; because I’ve hurt myself. Because I’m tired of hearing how memoirists are poor writers with no imaginations, and how we should all shut up because our lives are not that special — as Fran Leibovitz once said (Fran, who, beeteedubs, used to write comedic non-fiction essays based on her life, back when she still deigned to write for publication), “If your life were all that interesting, someone else would write a book about it.” And after hearing that the book about my mother’s schizophrenia I wrote in Spring ’10 was “too depressing,” and “not so much a book, maybe, as something you should discuss with your shrink,” and “could [I] possibly make it more like Eat, Pray, Love?“, I thought, Fine. You want fiction? Here’s some fucking fiction.
And now, five months after completion, it sits, with the mom manuscript and the book about the writing group, in a drawer in my file cabinet. Sometimes I pull it out and read a few pages; sometimes I even think, There’s some stuff I like in here. I just need to completely start over from the beginning and rewrite it from scratch — honestly.
I’m going offline for a week, so I’m pulling out the draft and looking for excerpts to autopost in my absence. As with last year’s novel, I feel nervous about exhibiting pieces of it; I want to say, “I know it’s flawed! It’s not finished!” before anybody else can find a single fault with any of it. Strangely, the thing that embarrasses me the most about it is not the idea that people will suspect that both characters are me; it’s the places where I changed things that make me queasy. I feel like trying to hide or elide things by not fully owning them, by trying to describe them as happening, not to me, but to some imaginary person I thought up, is more mortifying for both me and the reader (who knows going into this that it’s “autobiographical fiction,” which may even be more reviled than memoir, if possible) than just saying what happened. It’s like when somebody lies to your face and wants you to pretend not to notice, so you both have to act like Gmail is like some kind of human-error-prone post office — “Oh, you never got it, I wonder what happened.” — instead of the computerized miracle we all know it to be. And you’re just supposed to stand there and act like you’re fooled by this, which is a lot to ask (especially if it’s not asked directly, but implicitly, which makes it a demand), as it inevitably leads you to realize that this person either thinks that you’re a) stupid enough to believe them, or b) not even worth the effort to make up a plausible excuse. After which, what can you say? “I’m so sorry you don’t respect me, as that causes me to lose some of my respect for you, because I feel you’re inaccurate in assessing my value, which indicates that you might be the kind of short-sighted, empathy-less, unimaginative dullard I don’t really feel a need to be around”?
DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE!
Anyway, I better get to editing and formatting all this hogwash, this hooey, this Hong Kong Phooey. I hope that anyone reading this will have a wonderful week; I look forward to reading you when I’m back online.
Yrs.,
(who?)
