In the most recent issue of Poets & Writers magazine, the feature article (“The Deepest Place” by Kevin Nance) is about Adam Haslett and his new novel, Imagine Me Gone. The novel is based largely on events and losses in Haslett’s own life, centering around the mental illnesses that infiltrated his family. Haslett says, “The genesis of the book was a sense of having to give meaning to experience that otherwise was unalloyed loss.”
I think this is why all of us writers write–to give meaning to things that seem random and unfair and painful. We want life to make sense, and writing is our way of making sense. By packaging experiences into paragraphs, we create order.
Whenever people ask me if my stories are based on my life, I scoff and say, “No, I write fiction.” But, really, it’s impossible for fiction to be purely fiction. Stories are told from the perspective of one person (the author), and that perspective is inherently influenced by the author’s “real” life. All of the ideas I’m thinking up for my next novel are based on events of the past year of my life. I won’t actually write about those events, but the feelings they stirred up will be baked into each and every chapter. I’m sure of that.
Haslett goes on: “To make meaning out of pain, and to do it communicatively–you write alone, of course, but for the purpose of trying to communicate–is to feel less alone.”
So, if writing fiction is a way of dealing with real-life things, why not write a memoir? For me, there’s freedom in fiction. With fiction, I can go beyond my real-life feelings and explore the “what ifs” that I fear. I can take more risks. I can maintain privacy. I don’t have to worry about being “truthful”; I get to exaggerate with reckless abandon and dramatize the hell out of things. I get to play. But, yeah, ultimately, I’m creating characters and worlds that I hope will help me connect with people in real life. Ultimately, I’m exaggerating and dramatizing very real feelings and I want people to understand those feelings and share their own. I want to, as Haslett says, feel less alone.
