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Super I
J'écrirai ce que je veux !
I had a lot of people offer me material during that time -- stories of bitter divorces and battles with cancer, tales of wartime starvation and midnight border crossings. Write what you know -- my nonwriter and even nonreader friends had all heard it, and they were trying their best to quickly fill my cup of experience. I'd heard the credo, too, in almost every writing class I'd ever taken, but had never liked it. Learning to "write" seemed a lot easier than sorting out "what you know." What did I know? The question seemed so cosmic, so utterly deathbed. All I knew was that I had no interest in writing autobiographically, partially because nothing in my past seemed to demand representation, and partially because I'd never been comfortable exploring my personal life in a public forum. So I crossed my fingers and thought: If I know anything -- about people, about emotions, about life -- surely it will seep, or at least trickle, into whatever material I choose. [...] In the end, I would spend two years writing a novel set entirely before I was born, in a place I'd never set foot.
I was a bit daunted, knowing, as I toiled away in my research, that so many great writers had begun their careers with semi-autobiographical novels: Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Men wrote their first books about, well, younger men in similar hometowns; women wrote of girls who looked and talked like them. And if they didn't use autobiography, most of my literary idols had at least used familiar places. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway drew on his knowledge of Paris and Spain; Styron set Lie Down in Darkness in his native Newport News, Va.
It seemed a rite of passage, a corner I was cutting that I would eventually have to justify.
The result of this long tradition of autobiographical debuts is that journalists and readers love connecting the literature-and-life dots. You wrote a novel about immigrants and your parents are immigrants? Your hero journeys to Poland where you, yourself, traveled several years ago? Aha! With me, interviewers get stuck asking why I chose to write about two women: I guess because I am a woman? (Saying it's a simple 50-50 choice would really be raining on the autobiographical fiction parade).
Et c'est ainsi que l'autofiction est devenue un rite de passage...
