Something I've only lately learned is that the act of writing about home can be dangerous. Or, at the very least, controversial. I have learned this lesson the hard way, like most of my life's lessons...sigh. And like all of those lessons, I have to test the edges, from time to time.
Narda Zacchino, past editor of the L.A. Times, once told me that she was less interested in reading my horror novels than a novel about "your childhood adventures, Minns; what went into making you who you are". I consider Narda a friend but thought she was just messing with my head. After all, at the time, I was teaching her two sons, in Orange County. Parents who knew I was a novelist, let alone a horror novelist, all probably would have preferred I wrote about childhood. I just thought, at the time, there were more rip-roaring stories to relate than a New England Irish-Catholic kidhood. Today, I'm not so sure.
After being informed that my thirty-plus year absence at all High School reunions had piqued the curiousity of not a few classmates and that raised interest was also fuelled by rumors of my literary explorations, I began to re-think the issue of writing about "home". I mean, in my published novels, the biographical trail markers are clearly visible. I'd made a promise a long time ago NOT to reveal certain intimate facts of my past, and so, I clothed those facts in fiction.
Call it purple prose or just over-the-top Goth potboilers, I tried to touch on issues that were true to my heart. I kept my promise of camouflage, but I also mined the core experiences. However, often, the results were not what I had intended.
Various people got upset. I didn't become rich and famous--or even infamous. (And I never won the girl...or at least not the girl I had hoped would read the truth and come back, looking for reconnection. ) People in my hometown were either amused; shocked; horrified or disappointed. Again and again I was told, "You clearly have talent. Why choose to fritter it away? Why not just write about your family; your home; your childhood? People would love to hear about those things!" (Which people? Not the people who were already besmirching my reputation because of past literary sins. And surely not my family, who had, indeed, recognized themselves in my fiction and were less than amused. Maybe Narda? Hmmm.)
Well, I haven't been in contact with Ms. Zacchino since she fled L.A. But, in the last year, having witnessed both parents in a physical decline, the obliteration of many childhood icons (while on a holiday visit back to New England) and the rapid aging of my blood family, I needed to capture what I could, before it was all lost. Or permanently changed. However colored my lenses are, I needed to tell what I experienced and tell it as accurately as I dared. (Dare, being the operative word.)
So, I wrote a novel of those early days, back in Massachusetts, amid four siblings and grandparents and a neighborhood bordered on one end by the same Church three previous generations of family had attended; and on the other end ,by the Catholic school that the same generations had graduated from....me being the last in line to actually go through to the eighth grade. I wrote about nuns and priests long dead or escaped from religious life; I wrote about class relations and friendships and child abuse and solidarity even among fighting Irish sibs. I wrote about being saved by a grandmother who passed on such a mystical presence that some of the sibs, even now, pray to her like a Saint--which she probably is. I wrote about drinking and fornication and loyalty and friendships that remain, still. I captured places that no longer exist in a town that is barely holding on. Yes, there are bits of horror because bits of horror are the blood of New England. (That's the truth. Always been and always will be.) Yes, the queer kid is also in there because she emerged from that soil and that's the truth, too. Names of people, though not their real names, popped out of my consciousness with precision. Street signs and odors and colors I'd forgotten... all floated up and took over my dreams. When the novel was finished, it made me sad. It was like closing a photo-album of people who have passed. People that you have loved.
I wonder if Narda (or my irate classmates back in New England ) will ever get to read this book.
I wonder if my teen-aged nieces back in Massachusetts will pull it off their shelves for insight into who "Auntie K.K." was, or what life was like back on 88 Maple Street "in those days". (Mostly, I wonder if I got it right. I mean, I know I got it down the way it plays in my head, but, that's only my side of memory.) I'm sure my sibs will be pissed. Names of characters, settings, even certain incidents will be debated. For those that I did include, as fictionalized characters in a novel, they may come looking for me with hammers and nails...I can only hope those I omitted don't join them in the hunt.
Finally, through this process, Nana's words come back to haunt me...warning me and egging me on, to be "like the girl who wrote "Peyton Place", with full knowledge that if I succeed, I probably won't be welcomed back there, again. In the meantime, like all other words spilling out of me these days, the novel's in the hands of Some Bigger Force. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to autograph the first copy to Narda, after all. Just have to wait and see.
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