BIOGRAPHEMIC TRACES
Autobiography / memoir has never been my bag. Which makes me something of an outlier in this age of endless compulsive self-confession. I always find it difficult — approaching impossible — to write truthfully about my past. Mostly because I cannot long look upon those early years of impoverishment and neglect without feeling myself beginning to become undone. I lack the courage of Gandalf, of Aragorn, and would never willingly return to Moria — convinced that to return to that dark would be to perish.
Which is not to say that I don’t draw upon my past to power my fiction. There are, in all my stories, elements of autobiography, traces of the me that was — and of what that me saw, did, and felt — but the silences and distortions attending these “facts” immediately falsify them. The best fiction writer lies to tell the truth— Albert Camus’ Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth — Tim O’Brien’s Fiction is the lie that helps us to understand the truth — the best writer falsifies to produce what Foucault called truth effects. I strive to do the same — I lie to tell the truth about the world I experience, but as most artists also know: Every truth silences another. I tell the truth through my lies in order not to tell the truth about me.
The small essays on here are the closest I come to writing something like autobiography, to bearing witness, each of these anamneses an ember of the old life, escaping up from the enforced void.
Flares of remembrances forming what Roland Barthes called biographemes.