My Slice of Life

Would I want to read a novel about myself? For sure—I’m just not certain whether I’d want anybody else to read it, but I suppose that’s also contingent on who wrote it (a mind reader or God, I’m assuming), and how deeply this novel actually looks into my life and mind.

            I’m guessing very deeply. But I’d be able to step back and see how someone else has portrayed me—see how, to the outside eye, my interactions with others are perceived (I guess I’d want to improve myself after the experience). In the same manner that I might write about something troubling in a creative nonfiction class to help me understand it better—because “myself “ will split into writer, narrator, and character (and the writer gets to evaluate and analyze the character’s past thoughts and actions)—I could read about myself from a new, completely removed perspective. When I was much younger and got mad at certain people close to me, I had a habit of threatening to record them (slightly like Panorama City, but in vengeful spirit?), so when I played back the tape they could hear what truly terrible and mean people they were. In my novel’s case, I’d not only be able to hear my words verbatim, I’d learn what the other characters think about me—and if the author was the all-knowing, omniscient writer, I’d get a much-wanted look into their interiorities as well.

            As for if a novel could be written about anybody, considering the democratization of the novel: yes, I believe so. They say you can fall in love with anybody (not necessarily romantically) if you witness them in their most intimate, private moments—as in, petting their cat, or making themselves tea and cookies, or looking out the window and into the rain—because you get to see their genuine selves, at a time when social burdens aren’t interfering. Or maybe you just feel sympathetic because they’re alone, but I believe that everyone has something in them to be written about. That’s an “in,” because I do admit that not everybody has lives that are purely externally interesting. But if you expose and explore a character’s interiority, you’re revealing vulnerabilities, and I think that’s such a fascinating thing to read about—everybody has a unique way of thinking (Oppen Porter is quite an example).

This also doesn’t mean that a good novel can be written about anything—I think that the character has to make some sort of progress (or regress) or realization by the end of the story. Oppen Porter eventually returns to Madera after a biblical forty days, but in those forty days he has learned that in trying to become “a man of the world,” he’s instead become a “provincial man.” Becoming a man of the world forever stays an ongoing process. The character of a novel must make at least an infinitesimal emotional movement, something I think is realistic for most people, on a daily basis: you’re always learning, some way or another.