Another Thing Not Autobiographical

May 7, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

Writing is… Like when you go to the beach at seven o’clock at night…  And you go with someone you know, or someone you used to know, or someone you wished you knew, or someone you thought you knew from a dream you dreamed one night while sleeping in a stuffy apartment in student housing, in Stillwater Oklahoma, where roaches climbed over the walls, in a town far far away from any beach, but while you were there, at this beach, this person you thought you knew so well turns into your mother, or your brother, or your child, or your doctor, or the third grade teacher who hated you for no reason, or the best friend you never thought you deserved.  In other words, when you write, you take everyone and everything that ever happened to you; you pull out a crazy assortment of your reminiscences, or your readings, or your flat-out lies, or things you over-heard, or things you never heard of at all, and you turn this that you know, and that which you don’t, into the big whole oily world.  That’s why there’s no such thing as an autobiographical beach.  Even when it’s Hemingway, even when he’s writing about the war, even when he’s writing about taking his son with him into the Paris cafes, even when he’s (ostensibly) writing down this very conversation word for word.  Because no one can write it all down, and so she selects, and she selects for a reason, and the reasons have to do with way more than that beach, that beach in San Francisco, near the zoo, near SF State, about which, she appears, to be, writing…

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