“So, is it autobiographical?”
When you write a novel that has its inspiration in reality, I guess you have to expect that question. But I have to admit, I’m already getting tired of it. And the novel’s publication date is still almost two weeks away.
Let me be clear: the answer to the above question is “no.” Yes, there are certain characters whose roles in the fictional Mother Daughter Show correspond to the roles real people played in the real show. And yes, the main character’s role in the show is similar to the one I played. But that doesn’t mean she’s me, any more than any of the other characters are “supposed to be” real individuals.
As a consumer of literature, I understand the impulse to try to match up fiction and fact. A few weeks ago I saw a production of Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall, which was written not long after the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe. The most arresting character in the play is Maggie, a sexy, needy, ultimately self-destructive young singer who seduces and then torments the play’s narrator. Reading the program notes, I noticed that Miller denied any parallels between Maggie and Monroe, and protested that this play was no more and no less autobiographical than The Crucible.
My reaction? Yeah, right. But when I think of how I feel about The Mother Daughter Show, I realize I have to cut Miller some slack. Regardless of where he started, by the time he was done writing he may have honestly felt that Maggie was essentially a creature of his imagination. (Although I have to say, it seems to me Maggie is a lot closer to Monroe than my characters are to any real individuals I know.)
There’s a weird, mysterious alchemy that goes on when writers create fiction. You may start with some seed of reality, but then it grows and spreads and branches out in ways that in your mind bear no more resemblance to that seed than an oak does to an acorn. But you can’t control what readers will see in your oak. To them, it may still look a lot like the acorn.
For a long time, I felt inhibited about writing fiction, fearing that it would in some way be too revealing of myself. I had no problem writing extremely personal essays, because I felt I knew what I was revealing. But writing fiction seemed too much like telling people about my dreams: you never knew what they might think they were seeing.
I managed to get past that inhibition when writing my first novel, A More Obedient Wife, and it turned out not to be a problem—probably because it was a historical novel, set over 200 years ago. Nobody asked me if that one was autobiographical. And yet, there were definitely parts of that novel I drew from my own experience. I won’t go so far as to pull an Arthur Miller and protest that The Mother Daughter Show is no more and no less autobiographical than A More Obedient Wife. But I will say that it’s more complicated than most readers seem to assume.
What really bothers me is the idea that people with some knowledge of the real Mother Daughter Show will assume that my portrayals of the characters reveal what I really think about the presumed real-life models. Not that any of those portrayals are malicious—I have tremendous sympathy for all my characters, and I hope readers will as well. But, this being satire, the characters are each flawed in some way—you can’t write satire (or fiction of any kind, for that matter) with a cast of perfect people. So, for example, one character has a hard time saying no to people, and another has an impulse to exercise control over whatever situation she’s in. Were there people who worked on the Mother Daughter Show who exhibited these flaws? Of course—I was one of them. But to create an engaging and, I hope, humorous story, I magnified and exaggerated those flaws well beyond anything I actually observed or felt.
But, as Arthur Miller no doubt learned the hard way, you can protest till you’re blue in the face, and readers will still draw their own conclusions. When I showed an advance copy of the book to one friend of mine who had participated in the real Mother Daughter Show, she homed in on a detail: in describing the daughter of one of the characters, I had used an adjective that shared a syllable with the name of the daughter of one of the real-life mothers involved in the show. My friend concluded that I had done this deliberately, to signal the connection between the fictional daughter and the real one. When I finally figured out what my friend was talking about, I was appalled. I insisted that I had no intention of subliminally conjuring up this girl, whose name I had actually forgotten, but I don’t think my friend believed me.
Just to be on the safe side, I took the adjective out. But that’s no guarantee that someone else won’t see some other “clue” that I haven’t anticipated. I just hope that readers—especially those who may initially be attracted by the idea that the book is some kind of roman a clef—will ultimately look past all of that and get drawn into the story. I hope they’ll forget about who Amanda and Barb and Susan are “supposed” to be, and begin to see them as independent, three-dimensional beings who came to life in my imagination and can now take up residence in theirs.