Writing, Reading, and Reality

by

Lev Raphael

You’ve probably been at a reading where the fiction writer was asked, “How much of your work is autobiographical?”

I’ve never asked it myself, but I do get asked it a lot. And my final answer? All of it. Everything I write reflects who I am in one way or another, subtly or not.

Writing is by its very nature autobiographical because each writer is unique–how can you write something that’s uninfluenced by the life you’ve lived? Everything, down to the choice of subject or setting and favorite expressions, has its roots in the writer’s life, habits, concerns, obsessions, limits, taboos, fears, dreams.

However, though readers often expect a one-to-one correspondence between a writer’s life and the fiction that writer produces, the relationship is far more complicated than that. Writers are magpies and when we hear a good story, we long to possess it and make it our own. I was once at a writer’s conference where a handful of us over drinks were regaled by a very charismatic author's brief prison experiences; he’d been jailed for tax fraud and what he recounted was so colorful you could see the waves of envy radiating from every other writer listening to him. Who’d want to be in prison, but damn, what great material! I’m sure some of it wound its way into their own books, somehow.

Years ago a good friend told me about a twisted relationship she had with a man who burned her hand with a cigarette to make a sexually aggressive point–and they were at a restaurant! I was so amazed by the account that I put a scene resembling it into one of the stories I wrote for a workshop in my MFA program at the University of Massachusetts. Students in the seminar were fascinated, too, and when I revealed the source, the workshop professor stolidly declared, “Of course this has happened to you.” He didn’t believe my denial. Who would? I felt everyone looking at my hands for a scar–even I was tempted to glance down!

The original anecdote, what I did with it, and how it was received—that’s all part of my autobiography—and part of yours, too, however tangentially.

An even deeper wrinkle to the question of autobiography is not what’s there, but what’s left out. Authors are constantly making exclusions of one sort or another and what you don’t find in the authorial universe—or in a specific book—can be deeply revealing. My recently re-published first novel, Winter Eyes, is about the son of Holocaust survivors who’ve hidden their Jewish past from him and tried to bring him up in New York as a Polish Catholic. This boy is an only child. I, however, had an older brother. A brother I fought with for years, one I felt overshadowed by and jealous of for a very long time. So you could say that by not giving my character any siblings at all, I killed my brother—or at least vanquished him.

Because the book was set in New York where I grew up, it actually puzzled one friend who knew some things about me. After he finished, he said, “I didn't know your parents got divorced when you were little.” I told him they had never gotten divorced, though perhaps they should have. And there followed a series of things he said he didn’t know about me, but those were all drawn from the life of the boy in the novel, not part of my real life. In each case, I explained the difference. After a long pause, he said, “No wonder I was confused.”

This kind of confusion is especially strong with stories and books written in the first person, and people after a reading will invariably refer to “The part where you—” I have to say, “The part where he—” and they smile indulgently. It’s happened not just in America, but at readings I’ve given in Germany. Years ago, I was annoyed, but I soon learned to take it as a compliment. The narrative had seemed so real to that person that he or she automatically assumed I was transcribing something from my own life.

The main characters in my mystery series, which is told in first person, love to cook elaborate gourmet meals and I’ve often been asked, "Do you and your partner really eat like that?”

“No,” I say carefully. “They're fiction, and I’m real,” but the day I found myself cooking a dish that I had never made before, but my narrator had, I started to wonder who was who.

Anatole Broyard wrote in his memoir Kafka Was All the Rage that in post-World War II New York’s Greenwich Village, people didn’t just read books, they became those books. Maybe that’s a special occupational hazard for writers–only it’s our own books we become, given enough time.

Books mentioned in this column:
Kafka Was all the Rage by Anatole Broyard (Vintage, 1997)
Winter Eyes by Lev Raphael (available for Nook and Kindle)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.