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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Let's talk about truth in fiction. You bookended your collection with "The Mansion on the Hill" and "Demonology." Both are about the death of the narrator's sister. In "Mansion," the sister dies in a car crash. In "Demonology," the sister dies from a heart attack. When I first read "Demonology" I believed it was a true story, until I read "The Mansion." Is my first reaction right?
"Demonology" is mostly true, and it is what it is. Some of what I have done in my work amounts to insisting that literature has no genre, that genre is a late addition to the literary gesture, and so I have allowed "Demonology" to be described however various editors wish to describe it. For me it's about preserving an actual person, a person whom I loved, in language, but that's not to say that everything in it is true. "The Mansion on the Hill" is purely fictional, meanwhile, but it is obviously taken up with similar issues for the simple reason that I was not done with them. In some ways I wish I had never published "Demonology." I only keep publishing it because it seems to help other people. I haven't read the story in several years. I didn't even read it in galleys; I asked someone else to read it for me. I can't read it aloud. I don't even look at it.
In the commentary to "Demonology," you also say, "I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself." Yet elsewhere you've very bravely revealed yourself -- your bouts with drugs, alcohol and depression, time spent in a psychiatric hospital.
I think openness is an important spiritual activity. I try not to be stupid about it, and my life has not been all that interesting, so there are no Anaïs Nin-esque revelations to yield up. But I think that I want to pass out of this world known completely by others, not a cipher, not a James Gould Cozzens locked in his house reclusively. I write to be in relation to readers, and I want these readers to have an experience of me, so that when I leave here, as soon I must (I'm paraphrasing Montaigne), they may have some idea of my habits and opinions. And once people start writing profiles of you, and so forth, this all comes out anyhow, so you may as well be the renderer of the facts.
Does writing help in thinking about all of that?
I think it does, certainly. You know the Beckett play "Happy Days," the one where the protagonist is buried up to her neck? Remember the sound when she first opens her mouth, the torrent of language that comes out? It's a real primal gesture of communication. When I wrote "Demonology," that's about the level on which I was operating. And it's not meant to arrive at a solution to the trauma of that time. It's meant to just be a freeing up of that voice. I suppose the idea is that we as readers in experiencing the truth of that gesture know better what it's like to be human. That's the kind of work that makes me feel enriched -- like I was there. A parallel example is that tremendous Lorrie Moore story, the pediatric oncology story in "Birds of America," "People Like That Are the Only People Here." It does the thing for me that other people say "Demonology" does for them. I felt stronger when I read that story. I hope one day I can write something as valuable.
