High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [105]
I’m sure Silence of the Lambs had its reasons, too. Possibly its creators, who are a vastly talented lot, were trying to evoke in us a hatred of psycho-killers. But I should have exercised my right to stay away, on the grounds that I was already pretty clear about being no friend to psycho-killers. And the woman who wrote to tell me she closed the book on Hallie’s death already knew enough, too. She did the right thing.
I will not argue for censorship, except from the grassroots up: my argument is for making choices about what we consume. The artist is blessed and cursed with a kind of power, but so are the reader and viewer. The story no longer belongs to the author once it’s come to live in your head. By then, it’s part of your life. So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice. It should not make you feel numb, or bored, or demeaned, or less than human. But I think it’s all right if it makes you cry some, or feel understood, or long to eat sand for want of more, or even change your life a little. It’s a story. That’s what happens.
THE NOT-SO-DEADLY SIN
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your facts. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
Whenever I am queried about my fiction, if people want to know something in particular they nearly always want to know the same thing: How much is autobiographical? Did it all really happen, in exactly that way? Was my childhood like that? Which character is me? Commonly people don’t ask, they just assume. I get letters of sympathy for the loss of my sister (the heroine of one of my novels lost her sister) and my father (ditto, same novel). Since one of my characters adopted a Cherokee child, I get advice about cross-cultural adoptions. And so on.
My sister and parents are alive and well, thanks. I don’t have an adopted child. The mute waif named Turtle who appears in two of my novels is the polar opposite of my own Camille—a sunny, blonde child who spoke her first word at eight months and hasn’t stopped talking since. At the time I invented Turtle, I had no child at all. Mine came later, and I didn’t find her in a car, as happened in The Bean Trees. Mine was harder to produce. I never use my own family and friends as the basis of fictional characters, mainly because I would like them to remain my family and friends. And secondarily, because I believe the purpose of art is not to photocopy life but distill it, learn from it, improve on it, embroider tiny disjunct pieces of it into something insightful and entirely new. As Marc Chagall said, “Great art picks up where nature ends.”
I know, in real life, many fascinating people; every one of them has limits on what she or he can be talked into. Most, in fact, will ask for my recommendations on their love lives or vacation plans, then reliably do the opposite. When I’m writing a story, I can’t mess around with that kind of free spirit. I need characters I can count on to do what I say—take on a foundling baby rather than call the police; fall in love with my self-effacing heroine rather than the sturdy, good-looking divorcee down the street; pursue a passion for cockfighting, then give it all up at a lover’s request; die for honor; own up to guilt. What’s more, they must do it all convincingly. That means they have to be carrying in their psyches all the right motives—the exact combination of past experiences that will lead them to their appointment with my contrived epiphany. Trying to graft a plot onto the real-life history of anyone I actually know, including myself, would be as fruitless as lashing a citrus branch onto the trunk of an apple tree. It would look improbable. It would wither and die. Better to plant a seed in the good dirt of imagination. Grow a whole story from scratch.
Most people readily acknowledge the difference between