Yesterday, regular commenter Andy mentioned a poet who seemed to resent being asked if his poem had been inspired by him and his son. As I hope I made clear, I think all questions for writers are fair game. But this is one of the trickiest. It happens that I was asked Friday if a character in one of my early novels was inspired by someone close to me and I found myself almost — almost — nonplussed. The best response, I think, is the new cliche: It’s complicated.
First of all, let’s put aside the issue of roman a clefs, in which we are supposed to associate the characters with well-known people. That’s a very specialized subgenre, one in which I don’t traffic.
But are characters in my books based on real people? Yes. No. Not in the way you think. Not really. Kinda. But no, not in the end, not if I’ve done my job right.
I understand the question, I really do. As a reader, I also am curious about the “real” in fiction. I think it’s because, much as I try to suppress it, I have a yen for gossip. Just recently, I pulled THE STORY OF MY LIFE off the shelf, thinking it would give me insight into Rielle Hunter, said to be the inspiration for the main character. But in the end, the girl in that book is Jay McInerney’s creation. She informs us only about her character and McInerney’s ideas about a certain type of young woman in a certain era. The writer Julian Barnes is on the record as saying he considers this book a magnificent achievement in terms of voice; I go back and forth. It’s a pretty great voice, but I feel the portrayal falls short of true empathy, which may have been the intent.
Obsessed as I’ve been with Philip Roth, I’ve found it hard not to look for clues for his life in his work. Clearly, that is his first wife in LETTING GO and MY LIFE AS A MAN. Yet when Roth finally published a memoir, THE FACTS, it was instructive largely as a way of detailing how one can take a true incident from one’s own biography, use it in fiction with almost no embellishment and still transform it. This is the case with a pivotal scene in MY LIFE AS A MAN, but also a scene from WHEN SHE WAS GOOD. Here’s what Roth writes about the former:
“To reshape even its smallest facet would have been an aesthetic blunder, a defacement of [my wife's] single greatest imaginative feat . . . “
An excerpt from THE FACTS appeared in Vanity Fair. In a subsequent issue, a friend of Roth’s (now deceased) first wife wrote to complain that he had been slandering her for years, first in his fiction and now in his nonfiction. That letter gave me pause. I resolved to try to read differently, to stop looking for the truth about real people in the fiction of others. It’s a hard resolution to keep, especially when one’s TBR list includes novels such as AN AMERICAN WIFE and HOMER AND LANGLEY, when one has grown up reading Erica Jong.
I will tell you this much about my work: I have used many, many bits of my autobiography, but I almost always give them to the characters least likely to be associated with me. Like Ronnie Fuller in EVERY SECRET THING, I once created a complicated narrative based on the colors of my magnetic alphabet set. Like Jane Doe in WHAT THE DEAD KNOW, I worked in a Swiss Colony — and was fired from one after the seasonal downturn.
And, okay, like Tess Monaghan I was once a dancing Comet can in a ballet performed at Baltimore City Jail.
Am I anyone in LIFE SENTENCES? Were those characters based on real-life people. Yes. No. Sorta. It’s complicated.
When I started this entry, I played around with using the example of a writer describing sunrise. Chances are, it will be based on a sunrise that the writer has seen, but perhaps not in the place described, and possibly not inspiring the same emotions or subtextual meaning it carries in the novel. The writer uses the real-life sunrise to capture the colors, the slant of light (depending on season), perhaps the smells. As readers, we probably know this, even if we never think about it. We don’t ask (unless we were there <g>), “Hey was that the sunrise over Fort McHenry that morning we rowed there?” We’re not concerned with knowing the “real” sunrise.
People/characters change that equation. Perhaps it’s that gossipy thing I referenced. Perhaps it’s because readers are people, and can’t help wondering how they would feel if they had fictional doubles.
But I think this goes back to yesterday’s discussion. There is a tendency to think that if we can reduce fiction to its parts — the idea, the genesis of characters, the mechanics of plot — then we can better understand it, or even commit acts of fiction on our own.
Do I dare admit that there is, in the end, an element of magic in what we do? Or, if not magic, then serendipity, happenstance, things that cannot be planned no matter how we question, analyze and ponder?
Maybe it’s the measure of the artistry in the artist.
Certainly many, if not all, artists use real events or the emotions invoked by real events and real people in their art (whether it’s written or not).
As a reader, I don’t need to know the reality to appreciate the art. But sometimes knowing the reality creates a deeper appreciation for the art.
No quarrel there, Linda. It can be interesting and informative to know the raw materials with which writers have worked. It’s especially informative in the case of Roth, who had a relatively sheltered life and not much autobiography from which to draw. In THE FACTS, it’s particularly interesting to read how he used an experience from his college life and gave it to two characters very different from him and his college girlfriend, thereby changing the meaning/significance of the episode.
My fear is that some people make the mistake I made — thinking the fiction can inform us about the real-life people. (Rielle Hunter, in my case.) But maybe I’m projecting my flaws onto others.
I sometimes have a hard time separating the art from the artist. It is one reason why I avoid watching or reading interviews with actors.
I should apply this to authors as well, which I discovered after viewing Cormac McCarthy�s interview about The Road. He granted a rare-first-ever-television interview to Oprah. While I realize Oprah isn�t an investigative journalist, it rubbed me the wrong way when she asked a pertinent question, and did not follow up with the obvious (to me) second question. McCarthy described a trip with his young son (whom he dedicated the book to) as being the catalyst to The Road. Oprah asked him if The Road is a love letter to his son, John Francis. He says it never would have occurred to him to write a story of a father and a son without having had John Francis. Oprah asks if having a child so late in life makes one appreciate the child more. His answer was yes, if one has a child when they�re young it�s [no big deal] � which changes significantly if the viewer knows he has another adult son, Cullen � which Oprah never asks about. Cullen was raised by a mother who was a poet of recognition and professor who was loved by her students. The only reason I know that is because I love to do amateur investigative research on the internet. I found her online funeral guestbook � morbid, I know � but I couldn�t get the question, �I wonder what his first son thinks of all this?� out of my head. Also because McCarthy uses almost his first son�s name (one character off) as a troubled character�s name in one book and in another novel (which is noted as somewhat autobiographical) � he has his son die! Finding that guestbook, which lists Cullen McCarthy as having a wife and child, and how appreciated his mother was by her students � let me pretend that I found out that his son was doing okay.
Which I realize is none of my business.
Also, I�m not stupid to marketing � so I DO realize why Oprah never asked (I imagine it was a deal-breaker for the exclusive).
Thanks for giving me a venue to vent this obscure thing here.
- H.
Heather, I would have found that infuriating as well, on a lot of levels.
Heh. Full disclosure – I , um…have never read anything by Cormac McCarthy.
After browsing, I couldn�t get past the pretentious, �I�m too good for punctuation� thing.
- H.
Nathan Zuckerman, the famous Roth alter ego, makes his first appearance in MY LIFE AS A MAN, but it’s a different Nathan Zuckerman, and he’s NEVER included in the bibliographies of the Zuckerman story. I always found that kinda fascinating.
Yes, he’s the character in the stories within the stories, right? Salad Days and Courting Disaster? I especially like the latter, which has a superb set piece about Zuckerman teaching writing at a night school.
I’m honored that my comment prompted this discussion. I didn’t mean to suggest that somehow authors are obligated to answer all questions that a reader may have. Particularly one that may invade the author’s privacy. And I can understand how tedious it may get to keep having to respond to the “Are you Tess?” questions. I think you handle interactions with the reading public in a superb way. You’re thoughtful and engaging. Plus you have a fan Facebook page and a blog. I just think that in the age of declining readership, the daily closure of book stores, the decrease in monies for book purchases by libraries (with the closures of libraries and the letting go of librarians (sigh)), authors may need to be willing to engage with their readers even more to keep interest up. In the past, it may have been true that the only connection necessary was that the author wrote the book and the reader read it. Now authors, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, need to be their own marketers/promoters and interact with the public. As a reader, I like that.
Andy,
I hope you understand — I think your wife’s question was legitimate. And the only questions I consider tedious are the ones from would-be screenwriters who want something from my SO. (I’d put a <g> there, but I’m deadly serious.)
I’ll take it further: reading is interactive. There was nothing holy/sacred/pure about readers not having contact with writers. Yes, it’s true that writing tends to attract solitary, shy types who don’t wish to engage with readers and I think people should be true to themselves. But I’m clearly not one of those folks. I like the feedback. I like the back-and-forth. My job doesn’t end when I finish writing; it’s barely begun.
Zuckerman (Useful Fictions – Salad Days and Courting Disaster, yes) is the fictional creation of Peter Tarnopol (My True Story) – seems like it could be a private Roth joke that five years later he starts writing this series of Zuckerman novels that explores the relationship between fiction and “reality” – for the next 30 years, ending (maybe) with EXIT GHOST – and all those other wonderful novels in between, from THE COUNTERLIFE to the one in which “Philip Roth” is the fiction (OPERATION SHYLOCK?)…
And Roth has always claimed Operation Shylock is nonfiction!
You always read that GHOST WRITER is the “first” Nathan Zuckerman novel.
I love the work of Vincent Van Gogh and I loved it when I first saw it and before I knew anything about art history. It is bold, sad, expressive and ground breaking. But after I read his collected letters to his brother, Theo, it made the viewing of his work much much richer. So there are cases where the true biographical information adds to the experience. I appreciate what he accomplished knowing more about his life, his family, his relationships and his struggles.
Conversely, there is a very talented theatre performer whose singing is outstanding. And I enjoyed his work very much until he was convicted of having sexual relations with a 15 year old female when he was almost 40 years old. Does he still sing like an angel? Sure. But can I listen and not have his artistry be colored by his personal life choices? Not so much.
Life is very complicated.
Well, Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s front man, says that he gets asked what this or that song “really” means, and his answer is (paraphrasing): you tell me!
He figures ownership of the meaning passes from him to the listeners; it becomes theirs. Indeed, in the case of music, we attach all sorts of meanings (depending on where we are in our lives, at that moment) to the music of the moment – and (at least in my case) when we hear it again it’s like opening a scrapbook up.
But indeed, books are not usually re-read dozens of times, including unexpectedly as we drive to the other side of town (hopefully!), the way popular music comes to us.
Non-fiction is what pulls me most powerfully between the covers of a book, and the expectations one has with regard to the people in them are (of course) quite different than in fiction.
For example, Michael Burlingame’s massive new (and award winning) Lincoln biography is superb stuff – I love the thing, and found it fascinating and funny – but that book made me quite angry, too. Burlingame pounds the crap out of Mary Lincoln, and continues on and on (I think for thirty-odd pages in the first volume), making the rubble bounce.
Burlingame’s treatment of the educated and refined woman who first saw and cultivated something in the rough-edged, socially awkward young man – the woman who picked him, and allowed him to marry-UP, and who raised children alone while he rode the circuit across the praries of Illinois (building his career)- is nothing short of spiteful (at best Burlingame is dismissive and critical of her, when he doesn’t descend into real invective).*
I got to meet Dr Burlingame in Springfield last fall, and went after him about that, and he and I had an exceedingly pleasant conversation wherein he let me have my inning, and then very energetically answered me back.
By way of saying – even if a writer is sincerely and overtly attempting to tell you specifically about a real, named person – we readers are under NO OBLIGATION to ACCEPT it “as is”!!
*My main complaint was that, following his footnoted sources for this or that wild allegation about spousal abuse by Mary upon Abe, or deranged behavior by her – invariably it was from this or that magazine article or reminisence from one or another former Springfiled neighbor, in the 1880′s or ’90′s – and even into the 20th century! This is what we would call “tabloid” journalism, I say – wherein something juicy will get printed and day to day normalcy won’t sell any broadsheets. Burlingame asked who else I had read about Mary, and as soon as I mentioned Jean Baker (who I love!) he scoffed and said she doesn’t use original sources…which got me laughing!
Gotcha, Laura. Bit and pieces, here and there
Of course some characters I write are based on a compilation of people. But what I do sometimes is use real names who have nothing to do with the character. Or I’ll use a real first name with a real last name. I once wrote a transvestite and gave him a real name. Dan was furious. It’s hard to make people understand that the real name is not the character. Before my last two books I went back to my high school year book. That was fun.
I’d read somewhere that Pat Conroy’s family was very upset about THE GREAT SANTINI, which they felt gave away too many family secrets. I’d even heard that family members would picket his book signings. So it could be worse.
There are incidents in real life that make their way into my books, but only in very general form. They’re usually things that happen over and over that bug me, and what happens in the book is how such an incident usually goes down, not a reference to a specific event or person.
I think your description of how this all works for you describes my take perfectly as well, Laura. My first novel is set eighty years ago, but are there people from my life in it? Yes, of course. Kind of.
Well said. I get that question a lot about plays, especially when they’re produced locally.
In an unrelated note, because I’ve clearly been listening to too much Beatles this week (as if there were such a thing as too much), my brain is stuck on “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” but with the lyric, “You’re Watching ‘Who’s That Girl?’” I may need to finish that lyric…
Yet in later years, Conroy’s father toured with him — and signed the book! (IIRC, based on a long-ago profile of Conroy.)
I’ve used a lot of bylines over the years to inspire names. Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post, Adam Moss of the New York Times. When I finally met Abramowitz, I had the sense that he was unnerved by my decision to use his name for a murder victim — and, yes, I can see that.
By the way, I appear in a Ken Bruen-Jason Starr novel as myself. And I think it’s hilarious.
As for names, I’m fond of using District Court dockets. First name from one defendant, last name from another. I call it the “Lo-tech Redneck Name Generator.”
This is giving me an idea for tomorrow’s entry: Names.
We are pleased to be of service.
Slightly off-topic, but this reminds me of the press that Lorraine Adams is getting for her new novel THE ROOM AND THE CHAIR. The big fixation is on whether one characters is based on Bob Woodward, and whether she’s taking potshots at The Washington Post (where she worked till 2005) and somehow, lost in the quest to correlate truth with reality, is that the book speaks about much larger journalistic truths on war and terrorism and doing the wrong thing at the right time and vice versa. Or that it’s a great, albeit flawed, book that very few people could pull off.
To go back to topic, it seems to me that by definition, fiction has to beg, borrow or steal from real life because even in the process of making absolutely everything up, that’s informed by the limitations of experience and emotion of the author. But that gets into matters of the subconsciousness and subtlety which is, I guess, less “sexy” (or didactic?) than obvious parallels.
Speaking of Philip Roth and his decision to write no more books about Nathan Z., is it true no more books about Tess M.? Say it ain’t so!
Definitely not true, Charles. Tess and I are just waiting for the right moment for her return, in which her life will be markedly different than it was before.
I agree that the listener or reader or watcher has a right to decide what a work means. And I understand that an artist’s personal life can affect our relationship with the artist’s work. (I’m having trouble with Mel Gibson these days, although I still think THE ROAD WARRIOR is wonderful.)
But at the risk of being mildly schoolmarmish, those discussions, while reasonable offshoots of this topic, are quite different. Readers who get tangled up in what is “real” in fiction are moving in the opposite direction. They are not starting with the writer’s life and then using that knowledge to affect their reading of the work; they are reading the work and trying to use it as a Rosetta Stone to the writer’s life.
And when one writes crime novels, sometimes quite dark ones, that can be troubling. For example, I have often written about adulterous parents and I would be extremely upset if anyone thought those parents — Cedric Fallows, Miriam Bethany — were based on my own. Plus, what Sarah said: When we get bogged down in what is “real” in fiction, we can end up missing the bigger picture. While Lorraine Adams may seem to be inviting readers to guess her feelings about Bob Woodward, shouldn’t we be focused on her view of journalism, provided by someone who really does know how things work in a modern newsroom? Perhaps it’s impossible to imagine a Washington Post-type newsroom without a figure such as Woodward, given his long dominance there and his unusual relationship with the newspaper.
An artist’s biography can illuminate a work, no doubt. Knowledge of an artist’s life can affect how we experience that work. But writers are in the unusual position of having people assume they are writing autobiography even when they are not.