I could not write a memoir. First, I don’t find my life very exciting. After having my children later in life, at 38 and 41, a few friends said I should write about that, but what’s to say? Other than an occasion or two when people told me I had lovely granddaughters, it didn’t seem any different from what all parents go through. Second, a memoir by definition is a tell-all. I have a historian friend who would regale my husband and me with titillating tales about people he was researching, but when we encouraged him to publish these tales, he would shake his head. “I can’t write about that,” he’d say, “I know the families.” In the same way, I couldn’t write about people I know, then have to face them after the book came out. Especially if the portrayal was not 100% flattering. Third, how could I bare my soul to all the world when I get nervous even writing a comment on social media?
No, memoir writing is not for me.
On the other hand, a fictional murder mystery—now that appealed to me when I was thinking about my next writing venture. A murder mystery offers a distance between author and characters. No one I knew had ever been murdered. And if I placed the body in the heart of a Puerto Rican rainforest back in the early 1940s, discovered by a bright but conflicted teenage boy—why, that was about as far from memoir writing as I could get. I imagine authors who write about distant futures on faraway planets populated by one-eyed creatures breathe similar sighs of relief at not having to bare their souls.
And yet . . . A novel by its very nature consists of many pages. The bare-bones plot has to be fleshed out to fill those pages. And where will the author, sitting alone in a study in front of a computer, get the details needed for the fleshing out? Here’s an example: In my book, Under the Tree Ferns, the teenage boy who finds the body can learn only so much about the dead American woman. Someone else has to swoop in to tell the rest of the story from another angle, perhaps decades in the future. And why would that person be in Puerto Rico? Well, perhaps to teach. And why did I go to Puerto Rico? Hmm, to teach. Oops. Suddenly, the distance between author and characters has gotten quite a bit closer.
After I finished Under the Tree Ferns and revised it several times, I put it aside for several years. When I took it out again, I was struck by how many memories of Puerto Rico I had slipped into the book. Memories of hiking in the rainforest, walking along the cobblestoned streets of Old San Juan, interviewing gracious people in mountain villages and coastal towns, exploring Mona Island. The book had become for me, now living far away in Washington State, a memoir of sorts. Not the characters, no, they are invented. The hidden memoir appears in those fleshing-out details that came to me in my study when the day was dreary and cold and I was filled with longing for a hike in El Yunque.
Can there be a novel that has absolutely no autobiographical details slipped into the story? I doubt it.
