Fall 2024 | Volume 7, Issue 1

For quite some time, I’ve been fond of telling both university students and our writers residency attendees that “truth is the enemy of fiction”. Appropriately, that’s not quite true. Facts are the enemy of fiction. I always write truly; I very rarely, if ever, write factually. 

I’m currently working on a new novel that is “loosely based on my life,” which is itself a nonsense phrase given its multitude of unique definitions and vague interpretations. It seems as if people usually assume the phrase to mean a factually true story that embellishes some events or dialogue to move the narrative along. But that’s just, well, all wrong. It is mired in allegiance to an abstract ethic that has no depth of purpose or tangible virtue—factual literature is not a show or linguistic shibboleth or moral code.  For me, loosely based on my life simply means a book where the protagonist thinks a bit like me and has some overlapping experiences, and a book where every other element is rife with Olympic levels of audacious fabrication; it’s not “a lie” when the task is not to tell the factual truth. Novelists are not journalists, and even good ones are never stenographers. There is an essence to a thing that a novelist, a writer, must find. Blind devotion to factual veracity is a kind of artistic cowardice, and an abject failure of imagination.

Early in the book (though not at the very beginning; that would be gauche), my narrator proclaims, “I am an Irishman marooned in this American land of plenty.  This land of organic milk and honey. A land of inauthentic strife, derivative heartache, and no redemption.” None of that is literally accurate I suppose (as I write this, there are fresh heartbreaks happening on every street corner in this country), but it isn’t wrong either. I used to play in a poker game in a Connecticut valley town called Berlin—a Berlin with eight strip clubs and exactly zero Brandenburg Gates. There is a kind of coffee shop driven signifier of prestige within New England; the fancier towns have more Starbucks than Dunkin Donuts. This Berlin has gas station coffee served in concrete outposts on a main drag where overweight cops post up to flirt with the 19-year-old high school dropouts who work the registers. And while this iteration of Berlin doesn’t fairly represent New England (it’s just sort of a place connecting other places to one another, places with actual foliage and schools named after declaration signers), it has always struck me that this fresh new place was so terribly fond of naming places after the places it had fled from. And we allow ourselves to become a bastardized replica of places with real history, or at least with intrigues worth writing literature about. Hell, the town next door is called New Britain.

There is a kind of embalming ease to these derivations and this penchant for repetitive naming, but there is certainly no abstract truth in it. A city without seasons is not a city. It is a resort. New England is a place of seasons. It is a place of rejuvenations where people feel real weather on their brows and live and die in radically singular ways that one might never suppose from looking at the map. That is only a failure of faith. You can find it if you search in those moments between heartbeats. If you stay at the precipice one full minute longer than feels comfortable. If you forget what happened, and instead remember what it felt like, or better, what you wish it had felt like. At least I hope some of that is true

—JR.