Today I heard from someone I last saw more than 30 years ago. We hitch-hiked through France and into Spain. We were running out of money in the Balearic Islands. He aunt wired him a first-class ticket back to New York. I had the equivalent of $38 and bought a plane ticket to get me as close to the USA as possible, which was London, where I starved. The adventure of making it home is in the memoir.
Now, all these decades later, he wanted to know what I’d been up to. That’s not easy to do. I tried to make it short. This is how it went:
By age 38 I’d set up desks in 14 villages, towns, and cities, 24 apartments and houses and jail cells, in basements, attics, dining rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, garages, beaches, piles of leaves. Now it is a cherry wood desk I commissioned a woodworker to craft. For 23 years it has sat in a hundred year old house on the second floor in a room with windows facing south and west.
Even as a child south and west were the directions that pulled at my imagination and spellbound me the most.
Writing became my primary duty in life, not being a husband, nor father, but one promising to love someone but never promising to stay.
***
I used to be shy about saying I’m a writer. It seems too grand. People hearing that often will reply with “Have I read anything of yours?” or “Would I have seen any of your plays?” Or they want to know if I make a living at it.
Other times they will give me suggestions what to write about, as if I’m hurting for ideas.
“You should write a play about my crazy family.”
“My life would make such a great novel. Want to hear it?”
But with “You: The Final Fiction” I’m more forthcoming about telling people that I’m a writer and what I’m writing about. No more hiding. Nakedly using skills of a lifetime to tell this story that is all these years was known only to me.
The first person I told I was writing a memoir wanted to know whose it was.
“Huh? Mine.”
“And it’s not autobiography?”
“No, it is autobiography.”
“Thought you said it was a memoir. Cuz there’s a difference. Autobiography is what’s real. It’s the truth. You can’t change names unless they’ve done something really bad. With a memoir you can be less exact because it’s your memory of what happened, which might be all wrong.”
Exact truth? Okay, that means I am writing a memoir.
***
In the memoir I’ve been working on for the past two years I deal with those I’ve known who died early. One fell from a cliff while climbing, one died on his motorcycle, one was shot in the head after he cheated drug dealers.
The pain learning of their deaths was mostly theoretical—so much time they won’t have. The dying itself didn’t seem remarkable for these friends, probably because they chose to live dangerously.
Then in summer of 1999 I got the call that my friend Scott, his wife Barbara, and their two children had been killed by a drunk truckdriver in South Africa.
Scott was doing research in Mozambique. When he closed that project, and before flying home, he and Barb took the kids, 5 and 2, to South Africa to see animals they might never see again: rhinos, lions, elephants.
His previous visit home he’d given me a textile of artwork by a local. The type of gift one searches for when returning from long distance. Unique, easy to store away in luggage, no extra weight problem. I’m sure he waved it off as nothing, just a gesture, and I probably laughed at the handover—Okay, cool, thanks—and I rolled it up and left it in a closet not knowing what to do with it.
After the entire family was destroyed in an instant, I had the fabric framed and hung it in each of the houses I’ve lived in since. Something I see every day because I cannot get over the deaths of that entire family.
This is a panicky aspect of creating a memoir: knowing you will run into devastating events as you revisit your life, and you face the responsibility of using all your ability with words and sentences to give those events some lasting sense.
***
When asked what he thought of literature, Kafka said, “I am literature.” Well, he said it in German. When I mention this to others they assume he was boasting. Considering what we know of Kafka, that cannot be the case. Instead, I imagine he was explaining that because his entire life was consumed by writing he couldn’t meaningfully comment on it.
***
After two decades writing fiction and another dozen writing plays I began a memoir. My greatest success in life was surviving three assassination attempts by my older sister before I was eight. My first of many failures was the book I started to write shortly after the last attempt as if to justify the miracle of still breathing.
I’m not sure what that first book was about, though pirates were likely involved, but now, much nearer to the weapon of that assassin that gets us all, I see a theme in my life: choosing loneliness, risk, and secrecy. Late teens I was a criminal and good at it. Later a writer. Good at that too. My memoir helps me understand that criminality and writing fed similar needs in me. Both begin with mystery, in both you work alone and figure it out as you go, and the risks you take are of your own making. Failure can be catastrophic.
Might as well throw love in there too.