Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from author Sue Miller's essay "Virtual Reality: The Perils of Seeking a Novelist's Facts in Her Fiction" (©1999 by The New York Times Company).

Before my last, recent book tour, I made myself memorize a quotation from an interview with author John Cheever that began, "It seems to me that any confusion between autobiography and fiction debases fiction." Thus girded, armored, I hoped to silence forever the questioner who sits there in the third row waiting to ask," How much of your work is autobiographical?"

The question bothers me because I sense in it a kind of potential diminishment—yes, debasing—of the work I do. What the questioner seems to be somehow suggesting is that my writing is possibly no more than the stringing together of episodes lifted directly from my life, or from the lives of fascinating characters I have known.

Every writer has met the guy at the party who says him, too, has always wanted to write a novel, if only he had the time, because he's got such a great story to sell. And it seems to me that it's that same guy asking the question at the reading. Maybe this is why the question rises so often: because the guy really wants to know how to do it, how to make fiction from the interesting or painful or shocking things that have happened to him.

There's a way in which readers are encouraged in this by writers who embrace the cult of experience, the notion that the writer needs to have lived a certain kind of bold, engaged life, right out there on the edge of...well, something or other, in order to have anything worthwhile to write about. What's worthwhile? Well, war, for instance. Adventure on the high seas, or the highways, or the river. No wonder anyone who has even marginally partaken of any of these feels justified in thinking he must have a book in him. Somewhere.

But if experience were all, we would all have a book. As author Flannery O'Connor said, anyone who's survived infancy has enough material for countless stories. The fact is, you can make a story of anything, anything at all. What's hard—and what's interesting—about a story is not so much the thing that's in it, but what's made of that thing. And then, of course, the making itself. But there is no necessary life to have lived or scene to have witnessed.

But is the life's shape the shape of the fiction then? Is it all autobiographical? Do I write as I do because I've lived and worked primarily with children and families? Is it true that we have no choice but to echo what's happened to us and to those we know? Do we writers need to step out of our studies into the bright light of day, find jobs as laborers or executives or physicians or models in order to have something more exciting, something more relevant to contemporary life to write about?

Surely not. Surely the writer's job is to make relevant the world she wishes to write about. How? By writing well and carefully and powerfully. By using humor, or violence, or rue, to make the territory of her imagination compelling and somehow universal. And that holds true whether the territory of the imagination is close to the literal truth of her life or far from it.

Sometime the distance is minimal, minimal enough for the fiction to cause lifelong hard feelings: the use of a fictional alter ego, for example, or of changes so slight that they seem like a kind of cruel joke. Sometimes, family or friends can end up feeling misused, abused. There are certainly writers who seem nearly deliberately provocative in this way: the burning-bridges school of art.

For the true writer, though, however close the events may be to her life, there is some distance, some remove, that allows for the shaping of the work. The shaping, after all, is what it's all about. Every reader can sense the difference between a writer who embodies meaning through the events she describes and the writer who seems simply mired in those events. It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyranny of what really happened and begin to dream her fictional dream.

As to what happens in the dream, in the story, well, we all have the kinds of event we prefer, but surely this is a matter of preference, not worth. You find in the story of a quest for a while whale the embodiment of the human struggle for control, for wholeness? Fine. For me everyday life in the hands of a fine a writer seems similarly charged with meaning. When I write, I want to bring a sense of that charge, that meaning , to what may fairly be called the domestic. O.K.?

So, come on, really, how much is autobiographical?

All of it. None.