A Goodreads user asked Mary L. Tabor:

My first question, Mary, has to do with personhood. The feeling that I get by reading you is that the person that you are informs the style of your prose. If prose could be said to have values, to what degree are your prose's values also the values of Mary L. Tabor the person?

Mary L. Tabor The pro forma answer casts back to the wisdom of Flaubert who famously said, “Emma c’est moi” about Emma Bovary. But what did he mean?

Did Flaubert mean that he committed adultery flagrantly, spent money unrestrainedly? I suspect not.

What I think his famous phrase means is that a writer’s consciousness writes her prose. I am inside all the work.

But my search is not for morality, it is for discovery and a search for “the good”.

That for me means that I go places in my fiction where I am less likely to venture in my memoir (Re)Making Love that is non-fiction.

Here’s an example from my book of short stories, The Woman Who Never Cooked.. A reader, via my website, noted the coolness of the relationship in the fictional marriage inside the short story and how the burglar might be the sexuality missing there.

I saw then how in writing fiction I had indirectly discovered an “emotional truth” that surfaces in the memoir, after my marriage had indeed failed.

You know the old saw, “Truth is stranger than fiction”?

I wonder if fiction is more likely to find that so-called “truth” than non-fiction if the writer is willing to risk heart and soul on the page.

In either case though, I am sure only of this: My personal “writing values” are in search of discovery—through the good, the bad and the foolish.

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