A Sea of Make Believe

Recently I read before an audience a passage from The Hounds of Spring in which Poppy and her brother are discussing his upcoming talk with their mother about his being gay. As I read I could feel wheels turning in the heads of some of the listeners—most of whom knew me and my brother well enough to wonder: Is this really fiction? I don’t blame them one bit, I do the same thing.  We can’t seem to help wanting to know what is “real” and what is “made up.” And it isn’t only the people who know you either, an entire sub-group of biographers busily ferret out every little morsel of writer’s lives in the futile quest to draw the line between fact and fiction.  

After the reading my nephew wasn’t buying it when I said the discussion between Poppy and Price wasn’t autobiographical.  As I looked into his skeptical eyes I forbore to remind him that had my real life brother come out at the time that this brother does in the early ’80’s, he would never have been born!     

Aspiring writers are told to use what they know which I take to mean anything from how to use a hoof pick to grieving.  I use all of it.  At least five people close to me have “come out”  over the course of my lifetime and ALL of those experiences went into that scene between Poppy and her brother.  

Still, we can’t help wanting to make that distinction. 

This is probably because we humans live and breathe in a sea of make-believe.  We make up almost everything, or rather, try to make sense out of our experiences using what we have: memory and other information we collect here and there.  Over and over again I’ve had my nose rubbed in the fact that I don’t know what goes on in the minds of even those closest to me.  And that no one else really knows me nor, when you get right down to it, do I really know myself. All we have are the daily details, the stories we have fashioned out of our memories and what we have read and heard from other people and newspapers and books. Fiction is an attempt to gather up a diverse set of details (from the most banal to the most profound) and craft them into a form from which a reader can extract something coherent and truthful, something to nourish the soul.