While writing Drift, my collection of interlinked short stories, I did my best to shut out the ongoing clamor of imagined disapproval and alienation from my family, promising myself to write uncensored. As I got closer to the reality of publication, I realized that the shit was going to hit the fan. So I bolstered myself with the support of writers, many of who had already endured the shit/fan combination.
Autobiographical fiction? How much is true? A woman from a readers’ group I recently attended said, “Bye, Rosie,” when I was leaving, calling me by my main protagonist’s name, even after my earlier explanation:
“Everything I’ve experienced, everything I’ve read, everything I’ve imagined, it’s like it’s all in this blender, and I don’t necessarily control what’s in there or the way it comes out. But once it’s out, I reshape and rearrange things, organize it. Parts are fictionalized versions of what my life could have been or might have been—but it’s not real.”
Yet I’d be lying if I said that Rosie didn’t contain me; that I wasn’t Rosie, Rosie wasn’t me.
Fiction, I’ve explained, over and over. It’s fiction.
I warned my parents, told them that they didn’t have to read the book. In fact, my brother decided not to read Drift, possibly ever, and our relationship has subsequently strengthened.
My parents both thought that I was overreacting, until they read their galleys, months before publication. Silence. A condemning two- to three-month silence, except for rumors and statements via circuitous sources, including the involvement of Satan in the cultivation of my prose, and the pitying assurance that my two young sons would be ashamed of me, once they were old enough to read and understand the horrors that I had committed.
During this time, I leaned heavily on my writer friends, who made statements such as: “Congratulations. Now you’re a real writer because your family hates you.” And at my darkest moments, I morbidly and angrily relished the fact that my family’s rejection would give me not only more to write about, but also the motivation-propeller of needing to write.
My mom spoke up first. Swinging between pride and disappointment, she declared that I had hurt her, whether fictionalized or not, since the stories drew on a shared painful time in our lives, rekindling all sorts of troublesome memories.
Apparently, she read the stories aloud while her husband drove them to and from their two homes and various golf courses, pausing only to shed tears and mutter, “Oh, no; no, no, no, no.”
Despite my apologies (“I never meant to hurt you, that wasn’t my intention; no one wants to hurt their mother!”), and my insistence on the fictionalized nature of the stories, my mom continues to feel deeply wounded, and she vocalizes it, especially after a few glasses of wine—lashing me with guilt. Yet she keeps a file with all my reviews and articles, and has given copies of Drift to her friends.
For our mutual comfort, Drift is already becoming an off-limits topic, relegated to the Siberia of other tender subjects, such as politics.
My dad is a born again Christian who doesn’t see R-rated movies on principle. Despite our differences, we have maintained a loving relationship, and I dreaded its loss. An initial reaching out by me was followed by a blunt email that he was “still processing and not ready to talk”; and then, finally, he contacted me by phone.
His first question—“Are you okay?”—led me to wonder if he imagined that I might be injecting heroin in alleyways or having unsafe sex with multiple partners, both male and female. My parents don’t read literary stories. Drift, to its credit, crawled off the page and lodged itself in life. I scared him.
Reality, for both parents, blurred with non-reality: they read themselves and others in fiction, and the autobiographical portions of the book that I fretted over sailed over their heads.
Dad: “Remember when we had that conversation about the birds and the bees at the park? From your story? I certainly wish it had gone better.”
Me: “Dad, that never happened. It’s fiction. I made it up.”
Dad: “Well, it very well could have happened.”
That first phone conversation with my dad after he read and processed Drift was one of the most harrowing conversations of my life (and I imagine his). But we hashed out our feelings, and the subject of Drift’s content has not been brought up again, immediately and permanently landing itself in Siberia. To my great relief, we continue to have a relationship.
Aside from my parents, the most surprising and disappointing negative reaction came from a close friend, who lectured me on the nature of the creative process for writers, despite the fact that she’s not a writer. Her problem sprouted from two juicy sentences of dialogue in one of the least autobiographical of my stories, taken from a real-life conversation I had had with a mutual friend. (I had run the story by the mutual friend: she did not have a problem with the dialogue, and she loved the story.)
I was told that genuine writing does not draw on autobiographical elements; that the true mark of a gifted writer is that his or her fiction is completely fabricated, purely from the imagination. Despite my protestations, my listing of the endless well-known writers who feed off their lives, my insistence on the fictional nature of the stories (and in particular that story), she would not budge. I gave my friend the blender theory. I explained that the essential emotions and truth did come from a deep core of reality, but that the stories themselves were fictional. She disagreed, and we could not find common ground.
Mourning the change of a deeply important friendship, not once did I question her lack of authority on the subject. I may not like the negative reactions and disapproval, the guessing as to what’s true and what’s not, the labeling and blurring of fiction and nonfiction, but since I wrote Drift, I have to live with the repercussions. I can’t control how people read the stories, nor do I want to. And so far I don’t regret writing what’s important to me, even when it causes trouble.
