The (Novel?) of my life.

Anyone's life can be narrativized, in the same way you can cover anything with red paint, so long as it holds still.  Whether it's worth narrativizing a life, and what the use would be, is probably more interesting.  Red paint suits sports cars a lot better than, say, my breakfast.

What would be the use of putting my life in a novel?  Would I want to read it?  Readers would probably gain something out of reading my life.  I'm not wholly boring.  Only sometimes.  And I would gain things from reading the novel of my life.  I would relive some of my less-than-glorious moments, and perhaps prose would render them more beautiful than otherwise.  Imagine if I could live my favorite memories through the finer texture of deliberate words.  In order to read my life I would need to be patient, bored, brave, and forgiving.

That said, what beats me about this question is not so much whether my life could be made a novel, which it could, or whether I would read it, which I would, but rather -- is the novel even a suitable form for my life in the first place?  The poet Robert Creeley once wrote that "form is nothing more than an extension of content."  In other words, there exists a fine resonance frequency, a necessary complement, between a subject and the form  through which it is offered to a readership.  At their best they do not merely correspond to one another, but are so finely twined as to appear indistinguishable.  They are something of spouses, or better, fraternal twins.

With this in mind, I do not know whether the novel is a form that would complement the content of my life.  While my life is, strictly speaking, an accumulation of instances, a succession of scenes and conversations and filling, I do not know if my mind conceives of it that way; it feels like my mind only lives in some of the highlights, and a few of the interstices, and maybe it is content like this.  Perhaps verse, for instance, would simply be more suitable for my life than the novel form.  I am reminded of a poem by Jack Gilbert that accompanies this subject; namely that what is lived is not usually what is felt, and what is felt is what we remember and what we read for.  Gilbert writes,

"We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember."