Where I’m Writing From:

The bed. The California king. In the master bedroom (not grand, but cozy, in the far bottom corner of the house). There’s nothing unseemly about the location; it just happens to be where I work these days—having to do with various developments: like, last winter I slipped on the ice in Vermont and broke my coccyx; like, my desk chair, which I’ve replaced with one of those enormous exercise balls, was lousy to begin with: but who can actually sit on a ball for any length of time (without bouncing—and bouncing isn’t actually conducive to reading or writing or thinking, not for me anyway); like, my college graduate has come home to L.A., so I can’t hole up in her room anymore. Long and short: if I were to open a fortune cookie? If it were to read, “You will finish an essay tomorrow”? Without affect, all joking aside, I’d be able to add in bed. Moreover, it turns out, though my husband is skeptical, this is as fine a place as any to get the job done. (Why is he skeptical? He’s afraid the work will interfere with my sleep, infect my dreams—and if only that were true; that’d be as good a reason as any to work here, right?) On the bed, I can spread out my papers every which way; if my feet get cold, my sock drawer is closeby; it’s quiet down here, and not dark exactly—more like a tree-house than a cave, thanks to the Chinese Elm that grows just outside the sliding glass doors—and the atmosphere, remote and isolated, promotes writerly/readerly immersion. Plus my office—my actual office—is just on the other side of the wall, if I happen to need a file or a book or an extra pencil.

But does it matter where we work? I think it must. It matters to me anyway, especially (though you might suppose it’d be the other way around) once I’m in the throes of whatever it is. This is not to say that whole paragraphs haven’t rushed me in Trader Joe’s, in line at the ATM, even at stoplights (the car is very good place to work, just ask Susan Straight, who’s written nine beautiful books, parked and waiting to pick up her daughters from here and there); goes without saying, of course, we should always carry a notebook, or, if we’re as put together (as dapper!) as New Yorker reporter Gay Talese, we might consider cutting cardboard into pieces to fit the interior breast pockets of our blazers. See and this is the sort of inside information that delights and inspires, right? Why didn’t I think to ask Aimee Bender, who read and spoke about writing to MPW students in Doheny library last Monday night, where exactly she spends that allotted two hours a day: would she be able to write those perfect stories just anywhere, or does she—like Virginia Woolf and me—need a room of her own?

“Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish,” wrote Mark Helprin earlier this week in an essay in The New York Times, celebrating not just his own work space, but the value of serendipity in a writer’s life. And last August Dani Shapiro blogged about “creating a narrative out of puzzle pieces…I have a feeling,” she went on to say, “that those of us who spend our days alone in our rooms working out stories on the page and in our heads obsess about the question of pattern and randomness.” Perhaps it’s because our work is mysterious and confounding in that way, that so many of us need the illusion, at least, of a safe, familiar reality, however impermanent it might turn out to be. And we have to believe, don’t we, that if we show up there with some regularity, we’re more likely to benefit from some wonderful ‘accident.’ Gay Talese says his “bunker,” his “subterranean think tank,” is where he can work “without any distractions.” Give yourself a treat and let him take you on a tour. And for more on where writers live and work, visit A. N. Devers’ wonderful site: http://writershouses.com/.

Hurroo, Hurroo…

Here’s a fact: I haven’t read John D’Agata’s new book, The Lifespan of a Fact. Even so, audacious as I am (obstreperous, too), I’ve been arguing about it with everyone else.

But what are excerpts for (see Harper’s) —and reviews, too—if not to whet our appetites, not just for the work, but for the subject, itself; and moreover, to involve us in the larger conversation, which, in this case, if you believe our own David Ulin, comes out of D’Agata’s “vivid and reflective meditation on the nature of nonfiction as literary art.” Except—and this is where I get hung up—John D’Agata keeps insisting he isn’t writing nonfiction: In fact, as quoted in David’s generous and smart review, he says of About a Mountain (Norton, 2010) and the excerpted article in The Believer, on which the new book is based: “I’m not calling this ‘nonfiction… and neither do I intend to call anything that I write ‘nonfiction,’ because I don’t accept that term as a useful description of anything that I value in literature.”

But that was only the most recent development (as of this writing and as far as I know), in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Before David’s even-handed endorsement, came Laura Miller at Salon, David Kois at Slate, and Hannah Goldfield at The New Yorker. And all along Dinty Moore has been keeping track of the hoopla at the Brevity Blog, where dozens of readers and writers (me too) have chimed in from various angles to say what they think about this latest stunt: And a stunt it is—a staged conversation between D’Agata and Jim Fingal, his fact checker at The Believer—which is fine, perfectly okay; almost anything’s okay in nonfiction, as long as we tip the reader off.

Look, I’m not arguing now about Montaigne or Orwell or Hazlitt or White, or any of the late greats whom we can’t actually ask about the element of truth in their work. And yes, of course, absolutely: The essay—rant, rave, or meditation—is a try, an attempt; points to nothing so much as the truth of one writer’s imaginings and the way his or her mind wanders and works. Therein lies the joy, the suspense, the sense of discovery in creative nonfiction—in fiction and poetry, too, yes?—for reader and writer alike. So what’s the difference? In nonfiction, the writer’s on the block: if she makes a wrong turn—if she conflates, compresses, alters for her own purposes, serves her own agenda—she can’t shove it off on a character, as in: He did it, he’s the one, he’s not to be trusted. No—however we riff and extrapolate, the onus is on us: We’re creating a persona, yes—that artifice is assumed—and he or she is reliable or not. Said Lawrence Weschler (interviewed by David Ulin in the L.A. Times, in 2009: “… every narrative voice — and especially every nonfiction narrative voice — is a fiction. And the world of writing and reading is divided into those who know this and those who don’t. When I report, I aspire to accuracy, fairness, all those things, but after I’ve gathered the material and I have this pile of notes on the table, that’s when the fun starts.”  I have as opposed to I change. What hubris to change them (the facts), unless we cop to it: unless we remind our readers, before or during (not after), this is the world according to me.

However, says D’Agata, in a recent interview: “I think it is art’s job to trick us. I think it is art’s job to lure us into terrain that is going to confuse us, perhaps make us feel uncomfortable and perhaps open up to us possibilities in the world that we hadn’t earlier considered.”

To make us uncomfortable? Yes. To open us up? You bet. But to trick us? Into what exactly? Into believing in a concocted version of the truth that serves an author who couldn’t make sense out of events as they happened? Who couldn’t resist the urge to come up with something better or worse or more interesting? Well, okay, but what’s the point if we’re not in on the trick? D’Agata is a fine writer and a splendid thinker; I want to know what he makes of the actual circumstances; and if he pretends he doesn’t owe them or me an authentic shake, I’ll feel duped. It’s as if I’m vegetarian and a celebrated chef decided to lie to me about the soup course; passed it off as vegetable when it’s chicken. Sure enough, it’s delicious—but this is clever? This is revelatory? Or is it a cop-out? The challenge isn’t to fool me into eating chicken, but rather to work with vegetables to make a soup that is just as astounding.

The short of it? I want my nonfiction author to evidence some respect for his subject and for me. If he intends to play with the facts, I want him to tell me so, as with Jo Ann Beard, in “The Fourth State of Matter,” who having evidently left the scene of the crime is compelled to imagine it; as with Lauren Slater, who’s straight as can be about her strategy in a memoir titled Lying; As with Samantha Dunn, who writes early on of one of her characters in Faith in Carlos Gomez: “Let’s call him Rafael, which is nowhere near his real name, and let’s say he’s from Argentina, which he’s not.”

We all understand that the truth is not just elusive but occasionally boring, confounding, or damning. But this is what we do! We essay to decode it. We are not, in pursuit of “meaning,” allowed to tweak; not unless A) we say we’re tweaking or B) we identify the work as fiction. And let’s say we go ahead and do the former, tweak for meaning: isn’t it possible we’ve therefore missed out on the real deal? Don’t we have to wonder about that? Does it not occur to John D’Agata to question himself?

Here’s D’Agata’s blurb on the back of Michael Martone’s Racing in Place (Georgia, 2008). “The thing that’s so frustrating about Michael Martone is that his wonderful mercurial tendencies don’t let those of us in nonfiction completely call him our own.” I know, I know, a blurb is only a blurb. Still it caught my eye.

But whether D’Agata has defected or not in the last four years, whether his work is nonfiction, or some fourth or fifth or sixth alternative, where’s his humility? Writing, like all performance, is a kind of seduction: as such it requires confidence, the courage of our convictions, and self-scrutiny, too. Even when we’re getting it right it behooves us to question ourselves; to wonder, to doubt, to consider the possibilities. You want to essay? By all means, it’s a fine tradition. Otherwise, call your story a story and no need to call names—for shame, John D’Agata!—you who were one of our own: When did you decide that nonfiction isn’t valuable? Isn’t art?

Where are the eyes that looked so mild,
Hurroo Hurroo
Where are the eyes that looked so mild,
Hurroo Hurroo
Where are the eyes that looked so mild
When my poor heart you first beguiled
Why did ya run from me and the child
Johnny I hardly knew ye…