I, NPC

or WHEN THE ABSENCE IS YOU

from grentperez's "Absence of You,"

I often say that my books have a lot of me in them, which technically speaking is accurate enough — but it’s also true that I’ve never really written about myself or my life — ever. 

Yes, there are plenty of surface similarities between me and my fiction, me and Yunior, but at the deepest level there are no correspondences, whatsoever — at the deepest level, no me. Ancestors know I’ve tried to write the real story of me since I began my writing career.  At least once a year I make a hard run at autobiography, at a true honest account of me.  

And it always implodes.

It appears that unlike some writers I know, I am exceedingly terrible at writing about my real self.  I’ve managed little pieces here and there (and one very difficult essay) but nothing protracted, nothing comprehensive.  The confessional praxis that is the chenchen y chivo of the memoir writer seems to elude me almost completely.

I suspect the problem, like many of my writerly problems, stems from my childhood.  I grew up in one of those families that wasn’t exactly orientated around helping its children develop positive self-esteem.  My parents didn’t encourage me and my siblings to take up space, to possess a healthy sense of entitlement.  Quite the opposite, actually.  In my family, we kids weren’t just admonished to put other people’s needs and interests ahead of our own, we were commanded to have no needs or interests at all, under the pain of punishment¹.  And boy was there a lot of punishment (my father really did miss the draconidad of the Trujillato), and if any of us kids were foolish enough to ask our mom for anything at all, she had a wild habit of saying, yes of course, but when it came time for the asks to come due she would just laugh at us — derisively, scornfully, mockingly.  Pero tu si eres.

You know how the Green Men laugh on Barsoom? 

Laughter like that².

(Why I fell for that shit every time — another story altogether.)

The point is: if you grew up in a family like mine, construing yourself as a main character, as a protagonist of your story, or of any story, was bound to be challenging. 

But to be fair it wasn’t my family’s fault — not entirely.  Sure they could have been kinder and less physically abusive, but considering what else was out there in the Dominican universe of the 70s and 80s they weren’t completely beyond the pale.  Child-self-suppression was just how shit was done in those days.  And there are kids who survive versions of my childhood, or worse, and yet are able to protagonize.  In fact it is precisely by protagonizing that certain folks survive these types of childhoods (whether that protagonismo is healthy or well-calibrated is another matter altogether).   

Unfortunately, that’s not how I ended up.  What stuck was the Prime Directive of my Family: One for All and All for Everyone But You. 

Wild how this injunction against protagonismo manifested itself throughout my life. 

For example:

I loved books, stories, movies — I couldn’t have survived my childhood without them — but as much as I delighted in turning these tales over in my head I could never imagine myself as their protagonist.

I could not imagine that I had the right to be their hero.

I could gaze down upon the garden, but some blazing sword within prevented me from entering. 

I was always on the edge of what I loved most: grendelized, an earth-rim-walker.  

As a teenager I was a fanatical player of roleplaying games.  Shit, before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to design roleplaying games.  But here’s the key bit: in those days RPGs were organized around a gamemaster who created the world — and the scenarios that would offer the challenges for players who were the heroes inhabiting that world. 

Take a wild guess which one I was?  Outside of a rare convention one-shot where I would be eliminated within an hour, I was always the gamemaster, never the player.  Not because I didn’t have the opportunity — I just couldn’t do it.  Every time I thought about it, my mind would go blank.  I could facilitate other people’s heroism no problem, could narrativize other people’s agencies — just not my own.    

Always the NPC, never the player.

At university I stopped playing RPGs and started writing, but the Family Directive followed me into fiction and caused me endless grief.  For a long time I didn’t even realize what the problem was. 

But now when I reflect on my writer’s block over these last decades a key component of its cement appears to be this persistent difficulty I have with imagining myself as a protagonist — especially the protagonist of the story called My Writing.    

A funny claim to make for someone who’s published three books, but what can I say?

Helps explain some things about my work. 

Why so many of my stories are almost never about the protagonist, Yunior, but about someone else in the narrative altogether. 

Why I wrote my novel, Oscar Wao, elliptically, orthogonally, from the point of view of someone outside the family.

And maybe explains why I take so much time between books.  Almost as if I’m forcing myself at an unconscious level to do penance for having the audacity to write books in the first place — for taking up so much room.  

Tolkien had it right when he wrote that there are some wounds that haunt us, Morgul injuries that not even the healing arts of the wise can easily mend.

My inability to protagonize, born of a thousand smaller blows, appears to be one of these.  

What can one do in such a situation? 

Same answer, always — the only thing one can do: you gather your fellowship of friends and allies (and therapists if you can manage one) and keep at it.  Learn everything you can about building characters in the hope that one day that knowledge will help you write you.  Write semi-you's and self-adjacent others.  Deploy estranged strategies to sidle up to your own story.  Make runs at your story, even if you always fail.  Tell yourself the truth: that our stories are always worthy, always always. Build yourself and build yourself and remember what else Tolkien got right — that you don’t need the might or valor of Gil-galad to overcome your fears or foes or Morgul injuries.  All you need is Hobbit bravery, small humble persistent everyday bravery and that will be enough. 

Work at it and work at it because there’s nothing else for it.  It’s just the way life is: sometimes the hardest character you’ll ever write is you. 

1. For my sisters, of course, this imperative was far far worse.

2. “But I was to learn that the Martian smile is merely perfunctory, and that the Martian laugh is a thing to cause strong men to blanch in horror.” “…and then I remembered what laughter signified on Mars—torture, suffering, death.” From Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars.