Real Life as Fiction

Susan Cheever, daughter of the late John Cheever and a well-respected memoirist, is interviewed in the new issue of The Writer's Chronicle. For a non-fiction writer, she has some very interesting thoughts on the merits of fiction writers drawing upon real life for their subject matter, most notably the effect on the writer's family.

My father and his generation of writers absolutely stonewalled that question. They said, "This is fiction. Anytime you connect with so-called real life, you're diminishing it. This is my transcendent vision. This is my dream which I created." If you say, "Yes, but my mother has that shirt," you shatter the dream. You're doing a terrible thing.

...

When I was writing fiction, I was pretty careful of the people who might have thought that I was writing about them. Much more careful than my father was. But again, he came from a generation where you were allowed to say, "Hey! It's art!" In my generation you're not allowed to say, "Hey, It's art." They say, "Yes, but that is my shirt." I don't want to take credit for the moral high ground here, but I wouldn't have done what he did; but then, I couldn't have--so it's easy for me to say, right?

When writing about my children...I prefer to write nonfiction. My father wrote the story called "The Hartleys" in which a little girl--who's obviously me--goes on a family ski trip--which is in every detail the ski trip we took. The little girl gets killed in a ski tow. That, for me, was far more traumatic than if he'd written a nonfiction piece about that ski trip in which he talked about his fears for the little girl. To me, the fiction is much more dangerous, much more painful for the people who it may be based on, than nonfiction. In nonfiction, at least the writer has the obligation to tell what really happened. If my father had written nonfiction about my mother joining the League of Women Voters, well, couldn't have let that little boy die. He would have had to say, "I was afraid." So, in my family, being fictionalized has been ten million times more powerful. That's why, when a student says to me, "If I did this as fiction it wouldn't hurt the people so much," I say to them, "You are wrong. It will hurt them more. Because you as a fiction writer have more power."

It was a rather interesting coincidence to read Cheever's thoughts when I did, because just a few days before I let Julie read my latest story, "The Fixer." It involves a struggling cartoonist and his live-in girlfriend, and his being tempted to stray from her and be unfaithful. I asked Julie what she thought of the story, and her response was, "Yeah, about that. Do you have something to tell me?" I assured her, absolutely, unequivocally, that this was not the case. Pure, complete fiction. I also vowed to never work our relationship into my fiction. Our relationship is ours and ours alone, and I would never exploit it for the sake of my writing. As much as I love writing, I love her infinitely more.

Cheever has taken the approach of getting her family's prior permission before publishing nonfiction accounts of their lives. Which, as a memoirist, she has no choice but doing, if she wants to keep her family intact. It's not as if she's intimately involved with a vast array of people that she can write memoirs about.

Fortunately, as a fiction writer I have the advantage of being able to write about any one of the hundreds of characters who are rattling about in my imagination, without resorting to writing about my family life under the thin guise of fiction, as John Cheever apparently did on a regular basis, to Susan's chagrin. I can write about the imaginary Mahalia Hopkins or Barton Falkner, without permanently damaging my relationship to them.

Susan Cheever doesn't have that luxury. Her family is her stock in trade. They are her characters.