A hundred biographies are possible for every human being.
Olivier Todd, "Albert Camus; A Life"
It was a good day for law enforcement.
John Grisham, "The Chamber"
Wahrheit, wie immer, die erste verteidignung de freiheit.
Truth, as always, is the first defense.
Cliff Hopkinson in a Facebook reply to my post about Austrian citizenship.
Happy while writing, I thought, as I wrote the post about Austrian citizenship, and then on its heels, just days later, "Lockdown," a continuing story. Much as I would like to alternate light-hearted posts with more serious entries, there are weeks when this is not possible. As a witness, and a writer who considers herself a witness, I seize every opportunity to explore and comment upon the conundrums of contemporary life. I know that I may be exceptional in this regard, out of the mainstream, and often unmarketable, at least in the United States, but it's the way I've evolved as a writer. Here I am, as Jonathan Safran Foer would say. Here I am.
I often tell my students that they are well positioned to write about certain subjects, once they discover their subjects. Our backstories, occupations and experiences are windows—portals in current parlance—into these subjects. And many of these experiences, whether in childhood, or further along on our trajectories, shape our obsessions and point of view. There is never any way to escape these imperatives, so why try? Just get on with it. Write your heart out, I say. Move freely between subjects, move freely within your writer self. Read everything about your subject. Read voraciously. Write all the time.
This week I am reading Jonathan Lethem's "The Feral Detective," a refreshing encounter with a female protagonist written by an imaginative male writer. Even more intriguing is the language, a ricochet into a newly-fashioned dialect. It takes place in a dystopian world where truth is the only defense, if we can find it. Thank you, Cliff Hopkinson, dear Gotham Writers Workshop friend, for the self-made quotation about such truths. Your struggle to find apt words in German was entirely apt; I thought you were quoting Goethe. Well, it could have been Goethe.
I quote John Grisham here also as I return to him late at night as an anchor of reason and political common sense. "The Chamber," written some years ago, is an anti death-penalty book. I defy anyone to sustain a "belief," in the death penalty--for that is all it is-- after reading this 600-odd page genre novel. Grisham tells the story from every point of view, including the prisoner on death row. No spoilers—read the book. And then take a walk into the mountains, a park, the street where you live, and revel in what's left of the turning leaves.