freedom from the facts

The autobiography I had been writing was organized around certain events in my life that either a) mysteriously matched the experiences of characters in great books or b) happened to occur at a time when I was reading some novel or story and made some connection or personal application giving me the tools to deal with my immediate reality. About 175 pages in, I got stuck. It seemed I’d run out of interesting facts to share about life, and facts are everything in autobiography. So I went to work looking to live some more and to read some more, hoping to find or even manufacture more material–more experiences of literary characters that matched my own or instances in novels that I could connect with and apply. I read and I read. One morning a couple days ago I read these lines.

"Every man has within his own reminiscences certain things he doesn’t reveal to anyone, except, perhaps, to his friends. There are also some that he won’t reveal even to his friends, only to himself perhaps, and even then, in secret. Finally, there are some which a man is afraid to reveal even to himself; every decent man has accumulated a fair number of such things. In fact, it can even be said that the more decent the man, the more of these things he’s accumulated. Anyway, only recently I myself decided to recall some of my earlier adventures; up to now I’ve always avoided them, even with a certain anxiety. But having decided not only to recall them, but even to write them down, now is when I wish to try an experiment: is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth? Incidentally, I’ll mention that Heine maintains that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to lie about himself. In Heine’s opinion, Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself in his confession and even lied intentionally, out of vanity. I’m convinced that Heine is correct; I understand perfectly well that sometimes it’s possible out of vanity alone to impute all sorts of crimes to oneself, and I can even understand what sort of vanity that might be" (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground).

This was the inspiration I needed. What this was saying was that an autobiography need not be entirely free from lies. I was perfectly free to make things up. At least I think that’s what this was saying. At any rate, this is what it was saying to me.

I keep a blog, as well. A few minutes ago I stumbled upon another blog by some guy somewhere in Indiana who claims, and I quote, “all blogs are fiction.” He seemed to suggest that each blog entry begins with the creation of a narrator. I think he may be on to something. I had been confused about this in my autobiography. You see, all along, I had been thinking of the “I” in my book as actually me–the author. But the “I” is, in fact, just the narrator I’ve created to tell a story. This truth has set me free.

I must, since I can’t write dead Dostoevsky (or his narrator), send this blogger a note thanking him for setting me free from the prison of writer’s block and the hell of facts.