Kate's post on The Happy Booker blog
July 10, 2007:
Tomorrow I'm driving South on I-95, a road I've virtually memorized
over the years, heading down to see my family in North Carolina. This
time is different. Tomorrow night, in Raleigh, I'll be giving a
reading from my new story collection, my first book of fiction. A good
part of the audience will be related to me: fifteen or twenty cousins
live in the area. We're a close clan and there's a party afterward, so
I imagine most of them will show. These are people who've known me all
my life—or all theirs—and will recognize the stories' topography. Some
will recognize themselves, or think they do. They will surely get a
good look at me.
I've been dithering all morning about what to read. There's not a
story in the book that isn't at least partly drawn from memory, memory
transformed, but these people won't be fooled. In some cases, the
memory was theirs in the first place. Shameful to say, my stories are
usually about things that happened to other people, often someone in
my family. I'm the onlooker, the thief of other people's secrets.
That's been okay as long as I was publishing in lit mags where almost
nobody I knew read them, certainly nobody kin to me. Now the book is
out; they'll know I've been spilling the beans.
I think of my closest cousin, a woman a few years older than I—still
for me the shy, musical girl I idolized in childhood. She's a widow
now. Twenty years ago her husband died without warning, dropping in
the driveway of their house while she was away playing music. Now he
dies again, in exactly the same way, on a page in my book. When the
collection was accepted by a publisher, I thought about her
immediately. How would she feel when she read that story? How would I?
We all have this worry, to the extent that we write about people we
know, invading their lives and laying them out for all to see—for them
to see, which may be worse. The issue is always coming up in
workshops. Never mind, I say to worriers. Write it! Who am I kidding?
It's not so easy to resolve this issue and frankly I'm afraid to try.
I can't do without memory in my fiction. I start with a character
wholly unknown to me; pretty soon I'm stuck; then suddenly he's got my
father's neck and a major disappointment that rules his life, and I'm
cooking. Or a mother pushes back the messy hair over her daughter's
forehead and exposes a wasteland of acne; the daughter winces, my
mother's hand drops. Now my character and I share a memory, and I can
write about her. I never know what image will spring from memory to
help me out, especially the evocative images from childhood, those
that make me want to stop the car when I think of one and pull out a
pen and write.
That's the defense I gave when I was writing my cousin's story, but
when I got the good news about publication, the excuse didn't seem
enough. I owed her an explanation. Finally, I emailed her and told her
what I'd done. Her reply was more than gracious: She didn't mind.
That's what all writers did, wasn't it? She was sure, even before
reading it, that I'd written an "exquisite" story. "I've always known
you were an exceptional writer." Total absolution.
Tomorrow night she'll be sitting in the audience listening to me read,
smiling and supportive. I won't be reading her story, needless to say.
But what will I read? I picture my cousins in the audience, their
round, pleasant faces and easy smiles—my unlikely muses. Suddenly I
know. I'll read to them about the overweight, middle-aged former May
Queen who, at the end of the story, dances naked on her lawn. I was
never a May Queen but that woman is nobody but me. In the end, all my
stories are me, only me, bare as birth, cavorting for all to see.
That's the truth that's been worrying me all morning.
So be it. Let's dance.
(Posted as a Guest Blog on www.thehappybooker.org)