Morally passionate, passionately moral writing (Wallace again) ideally helps readers feel less alone. That may read as puffed up and kitschy. But it’s what I was trying to do here: to be faithful to the memory of Celine, and to all those generous, sharing emails. And so what had started as a personal account of an atypical recovery — basically, of my own fuck-ups and slow learning — has opened for a lot of people into a universal story of how to live with steep grief and unwarranted guilt. And with the running back and forth between shock and anguish — which is shock’s finger-pointing offspring. People find their stories easier to live through when they hear other people’s stories.
This is how my friend goes about the care of his dying mother: he rises each morning and chops the wood, and carries the water. And he’s going to be okay.
1. Please don’t take me as ungracious just because discussing these emails affects my stomach like twelve hours on a trembling airplane. I’d been warned by other novelists turned memoirists, Oh, you’ll be overwhelmed, non-fiction’s quite different, readers won’t respect boundaries, etc. All this turned out to be true. But true in a way that struck me as profound and thrilling, even beautiful. I started up email relationships with a number of readers. But because these relationships are based only on awkward personal revelations, they’re delicate. So delicate I’m afraid that, like shadows, they’ll die if I shine much light on them here.
A CONVERSATION WITH DARIN STRAUSS
Colum McCann is the author of the novels Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two story collections. He won the National Book Award in 2009, has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing program.
Colum McCann: They say all stories are the same. Of course this can’t be true. The poem doesn’t swerve and suddenly become a thriller. The playwright doesn’t necessarily know how to begin a rhyme. Can you discuss the challenges that face a novelist who switches to memoir?
Darin Strauss: My training and my inclination is to invent. Memoir was in some ways an easier form (you skip the hard, dreaming-stuff-up work) and in some ways more difficult (wait, you can’t just dream stuff up?). The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever’s interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom. So, had this been a novel, I would’ve made the court case more steeply dramatic, for example. I couldn’t, of course.
But something about the exercise feels, for lack of a better word, pure. Trying only to remember what had happened — but exactly as it happened — and being reverent to the facts: trying to make something artful of that.
The challenge is being true and respectful and stylish, at once.
CM: Which it is. It all comes down to language, the holy word put in the right place. It seems to me that when a writer is working honestly the story finds the right language for itself. It’s somewhat mystical. Yet you have to work hard to create the possibility of this happening. And so it seems to me that it’s about stamina and desire, listening for the right music.
DS: Exactly: Babel’s famous, heart-piercing period. You mention the mystical. I shy from occult descriptions of what we do at the keyboard. But a sense does come — a frizzle that says each book teaches you how to write it. It’s different every time, and always requires a mix of inspiration and ass-in-the-chair time. Writing has somehow to involve both a slow patience and a thunderbolt.
CM: This book is full of thunderbolts — wonderful subtle strikes of weather. Everybody is going to want to know if you had ever considered fictionalizing it.
DS: Thanks. But I’d never considered writing it at all. I thought the accident was going to be my lifelong secret, the past I wouldn’t let poke into the now. I told almost nobody. Writing began only when we had our twins, when I realized the accident happened half my life ago: impending fatherhood tends to focus the mind. I felt with new force that I’d never be able to feel it all — never truly comprehend just how awful the Zilkes’ loss must have been. I wrote merely as a way to take hold of my thoughts about this. (I write to figure out how I feel and what I know about something; I imagine you’re the same way.) So the book started as a little therapy project, and has ended up with me talking to you here. Which still feels strange to me — the big secret as participatory event.
CM: Do you think the accident, or your knowledge of the accident, had influenced your fiction in other ways? In the word choice, in the movement of the characters on the page?
DS: Hmm. There is something numinous about writing, something beyond craftsman-y. (We don’t discuss this when we teach.) And so I’m wary even now of exploring it. Let’s leave a few of the seven veils in place.
CM: You write, “My accident was the deepest part of my life, and the second-deepest was hiding it.”
DS: I have a lot of friends who found out about my accident — the death, the lifelong guilt — only through the book, or the excerpts in GQ or on This American Life. So it was strange; people resented my silence. But I just really wasn’t ready to talk about it.
CM: Now you’re not only talking about it, but you’re making sense of it for others. You’re deepening its meaning but also its implications. How much do you consider it to be a project that you wrote for, say, your own children when they get a chance to read it? Does that idea frighten you?
DS: Colum, I don’t know how your work intersects your family life. For me, I simply can’t wonder how they (my kids, Susannah, my parents, any one particular reader) will respond. That would trip me up at the first word. I may have in mind a Platonic audience: me but smarter, free of prejudice, open, book lovers with a lot of time on their hands, Nabokov’s dictionary by their side, etc. And — though I never thought of it before — I guess I see this perfect reader as an adult. (My sons are now three.) All the same, I am anxious for my kids to read this. When do I show it to them? Will it be upsetting? These are the unknowns.
CM: Yes, but they’re also the beauties. My guess is that your children will thank you for it. They will say you are a better father for having muscled up to tell the truth.
DS: It’s kind of you to say. But my feeling is: I spent eighteen years shrinking from the truth. Sure, I finally knocked at the door of guilt with somewhat decisive knuckles. This strikes me, in itself, as not especially praiseworthy. I don’t mean to say it’s blameworthy. It’s neither one or the other — probably it’s midway along the cowardice-bravery continuum. Now, I am proud of how the book turned out; but I’ve gotten too much public credit just for the attempt. All the same, I do feel lucky that when I knocked, the door opened.