About Private (Writing) Life

After readings, people usually ask me if what I read was true. And I repeat that if autobiography is, as Henry James put it, “the atmosphere of the mind”, then yes, my stories are referring to life events. In that sense, everything is true, meaning private: the desk on which I am writing this text, the curtains in front of me with their blue flowers. But what the curtains do, I have to do myself; give privacy its shades. Revealing depends on the sun, on the wind, on the story itself.

Perhaps this question about autobiography comes from the constant neurotic interest in gossip that is so contemporary. But then again, readers always wanted to know if they dealt with a reliable narrator. They needed that if they were going to agree to even a momentary suspension of disbelief. The misunderstanding here is that truthfulness, sincerity, is something like ethics. I wonder if that explains the success of autobiography in our times.

So no, novelist don’t write about their life; they could write about it only once or twice. They write about what their life could be in other circumstances, which is a completely different thing. What they do is that they usually write following the restrictions of their own life. To add a little “autobiography” here, when I was writing I’d Like in Berlin in 2004, my daughter was two years old. Back then I realized that I couldn’t write a novel, the way I had done in the past, when the whole day was there for me to grab. I only had an hour here, an hour there, and I still felt this urge to write the book. The rhythm and the form imposed themselves. The “novel” would be written in the form of short stories. It was a peculiar work, but the only one that I could have written in that period of my life. So yes, private life leads us to very important writing decisions but doesn’t dictate stories.

Copyright © 2008 Amanda Michalopoulou. All rights reserved.

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