Real Life, Fictional Life

I didn’t base any of my characters on myself, or on any person I know, for that matter. Take my character May, for example. I don’t know anyone remotely like her. And the idea of her building a stone wailing wall in her backyard, well, I have no idea how that got started. I just knew that May was a pathologically sensitive soul who had lost the human filter that keeps one from being overloaded with the world’s pain. She needed a way to cope with suffering, so I gave her a wailing wall. And take June. I’d never heard of anyone playing the cello for dying people. It just appeared in my head one day. I’d been looking for a way to put a cello in the novel ever since I’d seen one in the Luxembourg garden in Paris propped against one of those old fashioned, dome-shaped beehives. The juxtaposition of seeing it with the hive suggested to me that it ought to be in the novel. So I invented a way to put it in.

The truth is that I conjured up most of my novel exactly in that way– inventing characters and incidents from scratch. It’s so hard for readers to believe that sometimes. Once I gave a reading of the scene where T.Ray, Lily’s awful father, makes her kneel on grits. Afterward, someone asked me if I’d based T. Ray’s character on my own father. I could understand why someone would ask this, but the truth is, T. Ray is the complete opposite of my father. It has caused me to wonder if perhaps we tend to think that the characters and events in fiction are based on the writer’s life because we don’t believe enough in imagination. Because we render the truth of myth less valuable than the truth of fact.

Now, at the risk of sounding completely self-contradictory, I will also confess that small nuggets from my actual life did sometimes pop up and insert themselves into the story. Like charm school and the salvation gloves I mentioned earlier. Like the fact that bees really did live in the walls of my house when I was growing up. There was also the similarity that I, like Lily, had a nanny. But did she ever get thrown into jail? Did I break her out? Did we run away together? Of course not. The bits and pieces of my life that did manage to slip into the novel were only little springboards that helped me to leap to much larger, more vivid ideas and visions.

Ultimately the story and the characters are not based on me and my life, but the work does reflect many of my convictions. It attempts to put forth something of what I’ve gained from being alive. It is deeply affected by my particular life in the South, by my own intimacy with Mary and the empowering bonds between women, not to mention my ideas about the transcendence of love, and what constitutes goodness. But more than anything, it is shaped by the mystery of imagination, which is fed to us through a stream of images, rising from the unconscious. The writer’s task is to keep the way open for it and pay attention. Midway through the novel, I had no idea how it would end. I kicked around ideas. None of them felt right. Then one night I had a dream. In it my wisest character, August, came to me complaining about my ideas for an ending. She proceeded to tell me what it should be. I took her advice because it came from a place within where story is choreographed by something wiser than my conscious efforts. And because what she suggested felt exactly right to me.