Flirting with nonfiction

While waiting for feedback on my idea for a second book, I’ve been working on something…different. I don’t know what it is yet, exactly. Meaning, I don’t know if it’s destined to be an essay or a book. But, I do know that it’s nonfiction, memoir-ish. I didn’t plan to work on something like this; it just kind of seemed right. It began with keeping notes, like a journal. I used to write in a journal religiously. As a little kid, I kept stacks of diaries in fire proof safes; as an adult, I confined my thoughts to Word documents that I emailed to myself for safe keeping. Then I stopped journaling all together. Life got busy, and I felt like writing and analyzing my thoughts was making me ruminate too much. In short, I started to annoy myself.

But, I can’t seem to deny that writing is my way of figuring out who I am, how I feel. It’s my way of making sense of things. In the past few years, so much has happened in my personal life that has necessitated attempts at sense-making. My husband and I have been through so many trying things together. We feel like elderly people. It’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve wanted to sit and write about it. Before then, we were in the thick of it. I had no perspective. I have some perspective now.

Writing reality is scary. There is something much safer about fiction. Fiction allows for a lot of hiding. Nobody really knows what parts of stories are rooted in truth, and which parts are completely imagined. And it’s not my responsibility to clarify. When in doubt, I can fall back on this blanket statement: “It’s fiction.”

With essays or memoirs, hiding is not possible. You’re just…out there. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately, with a different appreciation for the brave honesty of the authors. In the past, I didn’t think too much about that. The authors were strangers to me, so their deepest, darkest confessions may as well have been those of a fictional character. But, now, I realize they are real people, with family members and friends who are suddenly privy to their private lives. And, when the anonymous haters on the Internet make comments, it’s decidedly more personal.

I could tuck away the past few years’ events in fictional stories–and I probably will do that, too–but it seems necessary to write about those events directly, as a way to reach out to anyone who is going through similar things and say, “It happened to me. I’m a real person, not a character. You’re not alone.” That, to me, is the beauty of nonfiction. It’s therapy for the author and the reader, a direct communication, no beating around the proverbial bush.

I’ve written a few personal essays (here and here, most recently), and putting them out in the world made me far more nervous than putting my fiction into the world. There’s that desire to crawl under a rock. I might get cold feet tomorrow about this new project and run back to the warm hug that is fiction. It is enough, for now, to say that I’m flirting with nonfiction, with complete honesty. If the relationship develops beyond flirtation, I will let you know.

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