A good friend came to my home with her husband one evening. She’s a writer like me, but a private one, more inclined to poetry by way of personal therapy than fiction for consumption. After dinner, while our husbands stepped outside to smoke cigars, she and I went down to the basement to dig through old trunks. While we crouched in my dusty crawl space flipping through photo albums and buzzing from wine, Lisa pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of her jeans.
“Listen,” she said, and she read me a poem that spoke, with unflinching honesty, of things I never knew: the depths of her sadness, her failing marriage, an extramarital affair, her first climax. It was a piece of work that left me wincing, unable to look her in the eye for its bare-naked truth. And it was spectacular.
Like poetry, the best fiction is drawn from real life experiences, and, it stands to reason, the sweetest juice is squeezed from the most dramatic, traumatic of these; think Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” a story Hempel wrote after being instructed to write her worst secret, the thing that would dismantle her sense of self.
Two months after that small dinner party, Lisa was living alone—without her husband or her children. Her lover, too, was gone. Yet her magnificent poem had taken first prize in a contest and earned her publication. Which raises the question: How much honesty, and at what cost?
Mark Twain preached: Write what you know. I think it’s impossible to do otherwise. Certainly fiction writers are supposed to be inventive, to explore their imaginations, to lie even, but essentially they are truth tellers.
Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, claims that the writer’s job “is to see people as they really are.” John Gregory Brown, in his essay “Other Bodies, Ourselves: the Mask of Fiction,” states that “every writer of fiction must be, first and foremost, a liar.” I say: Every story is a truth, a truth hidden in lies. The essence of every fictional character is drawn from the core traits of a real person, perhaps embellished, perhaps disguised with new hair, new gender, a different past or a different path, but still essentially true to a real person.
And I wonder about the moral implications of that. Is it right to risk hurting the ones we love for our stories, to betray confidences, to exploit the experiences of others that we, by mere chance of association, happen to be privy to?
Alice Munro’s short story “Family Furnishings” tells of a writer who, for the sake of a story, betrays her Aunt Alfrida’s confidence, albeit unintentionally. When the story is published and people are hurt, the narrator denies that it was her aunt’s story at all, despite all the resemblances.
The story concludes with what feels very much like a veiled apology on the part of the author herself: “I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.”
Munro’s story is not autobiographical; but she has admitted that as a young writer, she would have sacrificed almost anything for her stories. And the mere fact of this story indicates that Munro has considered the same questions I’m raising here, grappled with the guilt that haunts me.
I took an informal poll: “If I were to take a personal experience of yours, one filled with the sort of drama that we love to read about, and put it into a story, maintaining the truth of your ordeal but changing the details, the setting, the characters—disguising it so well that even you wouldn’t recognize it for your own—would you feel betrayed?” My findings: Yes, people would feel betrayed if they knew that it was their personal circumstances I was case-studying, recreating, and distributing.
“But how would I know?” each of my friends asked, with a forgiving air of dismissal.
Still, that forgiveness does little to soothe my conscience; I know that a betrayal, even one never discovered, is a betrayal nevertheless. If a husband cheats, whether or not he is discovered, he has been unfaithful. Similarly, if a writer steals the experiences of another for literary exploitation—whether or not she is caught—she is a thief of stories.
Admittedly, I’ve stolen Lisa’s story before. I changed the details, the circumstances, the setting. I dropped bits of myself into the main character, and I reshaped the ending. But the seed from which my story grew was Lisa’s unfulfilled marriage, her unhappiness.
I let her read it.
She cried. She liked it—it resonated with her, she said. But she didn’t recognize it as her own.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner professes that characters drawn from reality begin to metamorphose into fictional characters through the various disguises forced upon them. Similarly, a saga plucked from reality, disguised in alternative circumstances, will encourage a different conclusion. Lisa’s story, in becoming, let’s say, Catherine’s story, will end differently, particularly if we change the details and assign various fictional traits to Catherine: She is unusually tall, she’s the daughter of a single mother. Suddenly Catherine’s motivations are different from Lisa’s, leading the story to a different conclusion—an anniversary celebration, even.
There is another aspect of this matter, a philosophical one: What is truth? While I won’t delve too deeply into this philosophical abyss, it’s important to note that truth is primarily subjective. The story I believe to be Lisa’s is not necessarily the story she’d call her own. The Lisa I know is not the Lisa she knows.
Mary Higgins Clark once admitted to having drawn a character from reality, an acquaintance so deliciously arrogant that she couldn’t resist. When her book was published and this same man telephoned her, she expected him to be offended, outraged. Instead, he gushed over her character, raving about how much he enjoyed him because he was so unbelievably outrageous. The image this man had of himself was obviously not the image the author had of him.
Stephen King, in On Writing, suggests that “every character you create is partly you. When you ask yourself what a certain character will do given a certain set of circumstances, you’re making the decision based on what you yourself would (or, in the case of a bad guy, wouldn’t) do.”
If that is true, and I believe it is, then the characters—who we have already established drive plot—are fundamentally author influenced. Therefore, a story snatched from reality, Lisa’s perhaps, at the mercy of my imagination and my storytelling, essentially becomes mine.
John Gregory Brown sums it up: “When a fiction writer recognizes that this is his obligation—not merely to tell a good lie but to tell a lie so good that it has the very ring of truth, the taste and touch and smell of truth—he begins to see that his own life ... must always be there in his work.”
So, good stories consist of two truths: the reality from which they originate, and the honesty of the author (within the fabrication of the story). But the very best fiction incorporates a third truth, a universal truth that will hit the reader with the fervor of enlightenment, or at least satisfying recognition.
Amy Hempel wrote “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” based on a personal truth that she believed could dismantle her in the telling. Then she immersed herself so thoroughly in the story that, as it unfolds, the reader becomes almost dismantled under the excruciating weight of the narrator’s weakness, guilt, and fear at the bedside of her dying friend. The story faces grief head on before concluding with the reactions and communications of a mother chimpanzee at the death of her baby: “Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.” And that heart-wrenching last line sheds a brilliant light back over the entirety of the story, into the narrator’s future, and, most important, into the reader’s own reality.
With her story, Hempel illuminates this universal truth of grief: that it is complicated; that it transcends time, space, and species; and that it hurts like hell. It is stories such as these that we love the most—stories that teach us, that magnify truths, making them either distinguishable or comprehensible, or both.
Truth in fiction: It’s a peculiar paradox.
It’s unavoidable—an author can write only what she knows, or what she imagines she knows. And, as Hempel’s story so aptly proves, truth, in all its forms, is an essential element of great fiction.
Months ago, I developed a strange case of writer’s block. It wasn’t for a shortage of material or a lack of words. I had plenty of both. In fact, stories rushed through me regularly, flooding my mind with a fervor akin to that described by Munro’s narrator. But it wasn’t the air I was grabbing them from; it was the world, my world—inhabited with friends and family, neighbors and teachers, people I would never want to hurt.
I couldn’t write for months.
Eventually, I wrote this piece you’re reading now, this nonfiction work of confession and examination. I let Lisa read it. She cried, again. Then she vehemently denied what I claimed to be her true story: “You have taken a loosely told chapter from my life, and made it what you wanted. You believe this to be my story, but I know it’s not.”
So this is not her story, after all. Apparently it was mine all along.
