How could you write something so personal??
A few months before my book, An Italian Affair, was published, I took a hike with a friend who asked how my novel was going.
"Fine," I told her, "but it's a memoir."
She stopped and stared at me. "You're crazy," she said--somewhat, I thought, uncharitably. And she wasn't even finished. She launched into a series of high-pitched questions: How could you write something so personal, about an affair? How could you describe having sex, when people know it's really you? Why would you lay yourself completely bare like that? What are people going to think? Why would any guy ever ask you out again? Why didn't you just change the names and hair colors and call it fiction?
Why indeed, I thought, starting to panic. I tried to calm down, did a little deep breathing, and answered her.
For one thing, I told her, it's too late. The book was nearly done--a little too far along in the publishing process to slap "fiction" on the cover and shove it out the door. For another, if I'd written the book as fiction, everyone's first question--and assumption--would be that it was autobiographical anyway. They'd just think I made all the details a little juicier than real life, when part of the point of the book is that real life--no matter what series of heartbreaks or disappointments you've been through--can be pretty juicy on its own. Who knows--maybe even better than fiction.
But I did have to wonder how I came to write such a revealing book. In real life, only my closest girlfriends hear those kinds of details about my romantic life, and only after a few glasses of red wine. My hiking friend certainly wasn't going to be the last to ask me how I could write something so darn personal.
An Italian Affair began simply as something I wrote for myself, for my journal. I've always kept a journal, to blow off steam, tell my secrets, sort through personal conundrums, and to try to get to the heart of matters I'm muddling through in my ever-vexing romantic life. I've always thought it was a little strange, and even sad, that for the most part, I've considered the writing I've done for myself to be better than the writing I've done for magazines, where often you can't use your true voice--or heart. In my journal, I write with a stripped-down emotionalism that isn't very useful in the world of investigative journalism.
So, after my divorce, when I accidentally spent four of the most magical days of my life with a stranger I met on the Italian island of Ischia, I naturally came home and wrote about the experience. Those days of dining, swimming, watching sunsets and making love had cracked open my hard shell of depression and let some of the juiciness back inside again. After I wrote about my experience, I realized I had what writers are always looking for, and rarely stumble across--a story. So I polished it up a little and sent it off to Don George, the travel editor at Salon.com, who likes travel stories that go beyond places to stay and eat and into the realm of the human heart. That way, I could write off my trip as a tax deduction--and I figured hardly anyone would read the thing on the Internet anyway.
It turned out a lot of people did read the story--it got, in Internet parlance, a lot of "hits"--but they weren't people I knew, so what did I care? It felt safe, after I had my second rendez-vous with the professor, six months later in Milan, to write about that weekend, too. The Internet was a vague and amorphous place; as far as I could tell, I was just sending my stories into the deep, dark void. The only people I knew who actually read them were friends I might have told about my little adventures anyway. And I was having fun--for the first time, publishing stories in my real, formerly-secret journal voice.
I also felt a bit detached from the stories because I wrote them in the second person. I started writing that way--"you go to an Italian island, you meet a sexy professor over breakfast"--because I think I needed a little distance from my emotions and experiences. I couldn't quite grasp that those adventures had happened to me--they seemed like fantasies in the midst of my otherwise humdrum life--so I wrote that they happened to "you." The second person seemed to give the stories qualities of dreaminess and fantasy that pulled people in, that let you think that it had happened to you.
As I had more encounters with the professor, wrote more stories, and someone suggested I turn them into a book, the second person "you" became problematic. After "how could you write something so personal?" the next question I came to expect was, "why did you write this in the second person?" There were a lot of nay-sayers--the second person, said one creative writing teacher, is "High Eighties Minimalism," which I gathered wasn't such a good thing. Other people said it just bugged them. So I tried writing the book in the third person, and in the first person--I even considered doing a version in the royal "we"--but somehow, it didn't work. When the book was written in the "I," I started thinking that I wasn't nearly interesting enough a person to warrant all this writing about me. I was extremely fortunate to have a brilliant editor at Pantheon, Dawn Davis, who recognized that in some ways, the book wasn't really about me, it wasn't a traditional memoir, but it was a kind of fantasy that any woman like me--you--could experience after a divorce or loss. And that made it even more real.
The uncomfortable fact remains, however, that even though the book is about "you," people are going to ask about me. I've thought about going back to an island and just waiting for the whole thing to blow over. I told an aunt of mine, who is a writer, that I was nervous about how personal the book is, especially the sexy parts. She shrugged. "Everyone assumes that everyone else is having sex, except your parents," she said. "It may make your parents uncomfortable, but they'll get over it."
My parents, in fact, more or less hated the book. "I'm sure glad there weren't more details in certain parts," said my mom. "Why do you think people are going to be interested in this?"
Hard to say. They're interested--I hope--because it's a true story, and a romantic one. They're interested because maybe they, too, have had their hearts broken, their dreams dissolved, and they, too, have found something inside themselves that they didn't know about before, something that allows them to laugh again, to love, to eat lunch after a refreshing ocean swim and really taste those sweet tomatoes.
