5/7/2023 0 Comments Space by James A. MichenerI didn’t want to pin myself down and write about myself. In grad school, if anyone had told me that, “In 20 years, you’re going to be writing memoir,” I would have been horrified because the idea of writing fiction was the promise of so much freedom. So, who knows? Maybe one day I’ll go back to fiction, but in my mind, they don’t seem as separate as they once did. So, as I’m writing a memoir, I’m always aware of each little module having a kind of meaning or purpose or some kind of organizing principle holding it together. And that mask helps me decide what to put on the page and what to leave off the page. And if I didn’t hold that mask up, I think I’d be terrified. So even though the work is connected to autobiography, I’m always aware of the speaker as a constructed thing. Did it feel fundamentally different from writing fiction? I think the only way that I can write nonfiction is to imagine myself as building a “speaker” in the work. How did it feel to transition from fiction into writing specifically about your own life? You started out writing fiction, but your last two books have been memoirs.
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