An enlarged context

For years I said I would never write memoir—I would not be able to shape and structure real life enough to make it story. And now, having written a memoir, I think I’ll never write another….although, having been wrong in such a prediction once, I say this less confidently than I would have in the past. In These Days Are Numbered, I had the forces of history as my editor (in addition to, eventually, an actual editor, of course), structuring the period I would write about, inserting a definite sense of suspense to many mundane events (How many people will they let into the grocery store at a time???) and winnowing down my cast of characters to very few, mostly only two. To my mind, the last point is key. I am fairly easy writing about myself—the easiest joke to make is always at my own expense because I know my own boundaries, harder to guess with other people. This applies to a lot of things: similarly, I know how much to reveal in a personal story, am aware of all the background and context, etc. I can…often do this with Mark, the person I know best in the world besides myself and also the main other person who appears in my memoir because he is the main other person who appeared in my life during the pandemic. Conveniently, when I don’t know whether Mark would be comfortable with what I’ve written about him or how I’ve written it, I can find out because he lives in my house and reads almost everything I write pre-publication. Mark is pretty easygoing but does veto or wordsmith the occasional bit from time to time. There’s almost no one else in the book, which made it pretty easy on me to feel comfortable I got it right—I ran a few things past my mom and the very few pals that appear, changed a couple names to initials, and there was little else to do in that regard. Not that it was an easy book to write but…well, it was easier than some.

I went to Teri Vlassopoulos’s lovely book launch for her new novel Living Expenses last week. During the on-stage interview, she talked with ever-wise Jessica Westhead about how the protagonist of the novel had a number of key characteristics in common with Teri herself but is not, in fact, Teri. I am going to butcher what she actually said—I should have taken notes because it was so good—but the basic idea was that she started out thinking about certain themes and ideas but wanted to write them in a novel and not memoir to give them an enlarged context, to have more space to explore and expand upon them.

Of course I bought Living Expenses and cannot wait to read it, but right now I’m just ruminating on how good this idea is, and how timely for me personally. The memoir is the context just as it was, but in a novel—it expands. I thought about this idea so much I got my words mixed up and starting thinking about the extended universe, then realized that is a Star Wars thing. Then I thought maybe that works as a metaphor. I asked Mark a bunch of questions to see if would work and such is Mark’s innocent beauty that he never once questioned why anyone would want to know a lot about the Star Wars extended universe and explained more than I could ever imagine very patiently (seriously, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy is a real fun quirky publishing legend).

But basically the metaphor I’ve come up with is sound: if memoir is canon, things that unequivocally happened or at least the author is claiming they did and not brooking argument, then autofiction is extended universe—it’s the characters we know and the universe and premises and plotlines we accept, but did every detail happen in the central continuity? Maybe not. Whereas fan fiction is just novels with some stuff loosely inspired by the author’s own life. You feel me?

That goes no where, but you see what’s on my mind lately. In addition to thinking I’d never write a memoir and then writing one, after a few very early stories, I more or less decided not to write fiction based on my own life. But recently, after a few big projects pulled to the roadside, I have been trying that too. So Teri’s comment about the expanded context came at the exact right time. Here’s a paragraph from the story I’m currently working on, although when I went back to cut-and-paste it, I discovered it was deleted in track changes so perhaps I am not keeping this bit, though I don’t remember doing that:

“Is autofiction entirely true but just a story that no one wants to take responsibility for by calling it memoir, or is it slapped together of things that happened but not in that place or with those people, and things the author heard happened but didn’t see and has now inserted themselves into, and things entirely invented but so true to the feeling of other things that did happen that they might as well have happened too?”

Obvious that paragraph is at the tail of the asymptote, where it slides closest to the “truth” axis—the story gets a lot less essay-istic, and less true (lots of metaphors in this post). But these are some things I’ve been wondering about and it’s nice that so many other things in the universe have been lining up interestingly to help me think. Any other thoughts on truth in fiction, memoir, auto-fiction, and loosely inspired fiction? Please share—I’m a little bit new to this stuff and ready to learn how to do it!