Follow Your Bliss

In the excerpt below, Kenny zooms around his small town, listening to the police scanner, seeking out crashes and calamities. From T. R. Pearson's, True Cross, p. 13:

Kenny, you see, was not an official rescue-squad employee but was instead a sort of mascot and hanger-on. He had no training to speak of in first aid or firefighting techniques, had been an unsuccessful candidate for a job with the county police, had proven inept as a wrecker driver for a salvage yard up the gap and so had little but ghoulishness to recommend him. We most of us share in a taste for misfortune as long as it's visited on somebody else, and Kenny was no different, just more vigilant and mobile, a have-rubberneck-will-travel sort of guy.

Fiction Hurts & How to Spill the Beans about Your Children

From "An Interview with Susan Cheever," daughter of John Cheever, by Roberta Brown Root. Appears in the May/Summer 2005 issue of The Writer's Chronicle. One could see these two quotes as linked, but I don't intend them to be, necessarily. I found the first one surprising and quite powerful; the second I thought was amusing.


(1)

When my father wrote a story in which a woman, very much like my mother, joined a political group and left a boy, very much like my little brother, alone in a house, very much like the house where we lived, and the little boy died of neglect -- my mother said to my father's editor, William Maxwell of The New Yorker, "But why did the boy have to die, Bill?" And Maxwell said, "It's literature."

...When writing about my children ... I prefer to write nonfiction. My father wrote the story called "The Hartleys" in which a little girl -- who's obviously me -- goes on a family ski trip -- which is in every detail the ski trip we took. The little girl gets killed in the ski tow. That, for me, was far more traumatic than if he'd written a nonfiction piece about that ski trip in which he talked about his fears for the little girl. To me, the fiction is much more dangerous, much more painful for the people who it may be based on, than nonfiction. In nonfiction, at least the writer has some obligation to tell what really happened. If my father had written nonfiction about my mother joining the League of Women Voters, well, he could have had that little boy die. He would have had to say, "I was afraid." So, in my family, being fictionalized has been ten million times more painful. That's why, when a student says to me, "If I did this as fiction, it wouldn't hurt the people so much," I say to them, "You are wrong. It will hurt them more" (39-40).

***

(2)

Root: What if your children are adamantly opposed to something that you feel is important to write?

Cheever: There have been things that I didn't have [my daughter's] permission to write and had to bribe her. For example, I thought it was so interesting that I stopped getting my period the same week she started getting hers. How could I resist that? Her reaction was, "No fucking way!" Ultimately, she settled for half the fee. $2,000 for a twelve year old that was ... right? I'm shameless! But I never would have written that without her permission. My son made a lot of money once too. I won't even tell you what it's about because that would be violating the terms of my agreement with him (42).

Working Dog

There was a nondescript brown dog parked outside Safeway. I could do shopping, it said with its eyes.

"Cleverness is not enough," said Klein as the doors opened automatically, " you need money."

-- Angelica's Grotto, by Russell Hoban, p. 253.