Truth or Dare

The Historical Novel Society is an exciting group of readers and writers. The members believe you can experience the present by daring to venture into the past.

The HNS has twice invited me to be a panelist at their North American Conference, a pleasure both times.

Here's my opening statement at Historical Novel Society North America Conference's panel on "History is Character: How Historical Fiction Can Illuminate Events through Characters," where I appeared with novelist Mary F. Burns:

Thanks for coming. Red Hands is a nonfiction novel stemming from vivid, comic, bizarre historic events and real people. Think of the movie Titanic or the series The Crown. In the case of Titanic, many are in a lather about whether the fictional character Jack would have survived if he’d shared that floating door with Rose in the icy water. There’ve been detailed ‘scientific’ experiments to consider it. And this from the world that keeps saying, “But is it true?” News flash. Jack and Rose are not real people. Iordana Ceausescu and Valentin Ceausescu and their son Dani are.

Some of the events and conversations in Red Hands were recalled by Iordana 50 years after they happened, and like all memories are colored by events that have happened since. Terror is a very strong alchemist of memory.

During interviews, I kept asking Iordana what was happening as she was escaping the city while people were shooting at her car. Total wildness in Bucharest. A madhouse. Her passenger window blown out from reverberating explosions, smoke pouring in. She declined to answer me. She huddled down. Finally, after asking the question so many ways, I said, almost irritated, why didn’t you just slide away to the other side?

“Because there was blood on that seat.”

So it was back to page one.

I met Iordana while she was living in secret in Maine after she escaped the Romanian Revolution. The world was hunting her down to find her son, the sole Ceausescu grandson to the tyrant dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu.

She and I had both experienced the Cold War, from different sides. I was a Navy pilot with deployments in the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans far from home, and she was a new-wave salon communist from the glamorous and privileged Nomenclatura.

We had nothing in common! Well, we each had a son, and we both adored seagulls, so in a mythic sense we lived on the same shore. During over 800 hours of in-depth interviews with Iordana, always showing up with her sunglasses and cigarettes, I was the filter, the gatherer, the story mind.

Novelization is a delivery system, a texture that stars dialogue, the story’s skin. Regina King’s One Night in Miami is a terrific show with dialogue between real people in a hotel room after Muhammad Ali won the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. Regina King was born in 1971, but she takes us into that hotel room in 1965 and treats us to dialogue from Ali, Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, and Jim Brown.

Wikipedia’s entry on One Night in Miami never says fiction or nonfiction. They call the genre American Drama. So there’s a real sense of evolution here. Novelization takes you into that locked hotel room. It takes you where you’re not allowed to go.

Tim O’Brien is never defensive about it. “Fiction is better than the truth. I’ve worked on it!”

Let’s join Iordana and her little son Dani in a car that’s speeding through the streets of Bucharest during the Revolution of 1989. Massive crowds and shrill noises, shooting all around us, because as readers we are there. We’re racing away for our lives. The driver of the car is the international race-car driver Catalin Tutunaru, another real person who takes some dramatic turns in this nonfiction novel…