Truth in Fiction, Untruths in Memoir

For the epigraph of my memoir Not for Everyday Use, I quote a poem by one of the finest poets and essayists in the English-speaking Caribbean, the late Wayne Brown. The poem is entitled “A Letter from Elizabeth.” I was fortunate to have had a long, close friendship with Wayne, so I assumed the poem was meant for me and referred to a letter I had written to him, though I must add a caveat. Wayne always called me by my childhood nickname Betty and often addressed his letters, and, later, emails to me with “Dear Bets.” Still, the poem seemed totally suited to me, the words in the letter very much what I would have said, or at least thought. The poem begins with a quote from the letter: “Would you believe that I don’t like to think / back on those times, primarily / because then I feel really sad / really feel it deep down?”

If the letter was mine, if I had written it, why then did I decide to write a memoir? Why was I willing to look back on those times when I knew remembering would make me feel “sad, really feel it deep down”?

I am a novelist. I have written eight novels and am well on my way to a final draft of a ninth. So why that detour to a memoir?

Perhaps I should begin by explaining my process. I write straddling that nerve-wracking, but exhilarating, line between knowing and unknowing. I may have some sense of my story but no idea how it will turn out. I begin with a group of words that tells me everything and yet nothing. It is always a phrase or a sentence that has been rolling around in my head and when I put it to paper I know it is just right, I know it is the beginning of a novel. It tells me from whose point of view I will tell my story; it tells me tense, tone, mood, and I am both liberated and trapped. I have made my stroke on my canvas and it commits me to a design, to a creation, that I must follow, directed by every other stroke I make.

Prospero’s Daughter begins with the first line of a letter by Ariana, a character inspired by Shakespeare’s Ariel. She writes: “He tell a lie if he say those two don’t love one another.” I knew right away that “He” would be my Prospero, and that “those two” would be Caliban and Virginia, and that somehow I was on my way to creating a romantic story between them. I could tell that the novel would have multiple points of view, each character giving his/her version of what happened. What I did not know was what the characters would do or say, or what would happen to them in the end. I began Not for Everyday Use with these three sentences: “The phone rings. It is two in the afternoon. I am at home, in my house in New York.” I knew with this beginning that I would be writing a present tense story and would face the challenge of balancing a back story with the trajectory of a narrative set in the present. Because that first line established a first person point of view that was not a narrative persona, but actually me, I knew I was about to write a true story about my life. What I did not know, as I did not know when I wrote that first line of Prospero’s Daughter, was what I would discover.

The thrill of discovery is one of the main reasons I write. Of course, in order to discover something, some place, some idea, one has to be willing to travel in unchartered waters, sometimes without a guide, and to rely on faith—call it the Muses—that you will find your way to the end and to the truth. For, after all, isn’t that why writers write? They want to know the truth, the truth about our human condition, the...