It's taken me a great many drafts to realize that this novel is of course about . . .me.
Why do the turns a novel takes end up mirroring the turns in one's own life? I suppose because we know ourselves best of all and are fascinated with ourselves, even those of us who aren't completely insufferable. I always knew that Muriel was based on my own mother, an aging woman who has had to live through multiple losses and find a reason to re-engage with the world. In my mother's case the losses came too late for her to find a compelling reason. However in my novel I practice a little wish fulfillment. I create a character who wants to live and finds pleasure in doing so.
Life is so full of loss, and as we age I think we come up against that more and more. I think the question is how to grapple with these losses and how to still look around and see all the things that compelled us to love life once. It's perhaps all in the details. I think that now as we suffer through a particularly miserable winter. Walking the streets of the city I'm more and more taken by the way strangers interact, curious about each and every one of them. I have the urge to make up stories about them, to give them histories. I think of my own mother walking these streets for years and years, she found pleasure in that. She roamed the city as did my father. Those were their streets too.
Now they're mine. And of course Amelia's.
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I think your observation that the novel is about yourself applies to non-fiction writers, too. I'm thinking specifically of biography and history. No matter how objective we try to be, it's inevitable that the writer's own needs and values will filter what he's able to perceive, and thus influence the selection of what facts to tell and how to interpret them. The finished work is to one extent or another a projection of the writer's own self. So maybe how close we come to objectivity depends on how well we know ourselves; the more aware we are of our own assumptions, the more we can label them as such.
ReplyDeleteDarn. Your posts always make me think, when I could be doing other things like working. :)
Really an interesting response. I took a non fiction class once long ago with Geoffrey Wolff. He spoke about writing memoirs and what it meant to tell the 'true' story. In memoir it's so evident that there are a number of 'true' stories. But with biography and history too, certainly the biographies of Amelia show that each author has their very specific take. I'd say that non-fiction is a loose term when it comes to some of what get's written. Is it because those writers were less aware of the self they were putting into the work? Or it because some people are just more able to separate and see others as they are, while the rest are more likely to see the world and those who inhabit it as projections of themselves?
ReplyDeleteProbably yes and yes. I tend to think that if we can see ourselves as we are, we can see others as they are without projecting ourselves on them, or with only judicious projections. (Some things just don't make sense unless you imagine yourself in the other person's shoes. But then, as one person explained to me, if you know that you're projecting, then by definition it isn't a projection. :))
ReplyDeleteEmpathy is not as common an emotion as I would hope. Nicely put.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of biographies of Amelia, have you read the most recent one, by Kathleen Winters, released in November?
ReplyDeleteI haven't, but now I have to get it! Thanks. I've been very much otherwise engaged. Last book I read and loved was a novel by David Mitchell and that was way back in September.
ReplyDeleteIt's the first AE bio to be done by a writer who is both a pilot and a woman, so should have been a fresh read ... but isn't. Also be forewarned that some of her interpretations are quite debatable.
ReplyDeleteActually as soon as you mentioned it I went online. It sounds like the same old Amelia as reckless slightly distracted pilot idea. I have no patience for that.
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