Here We Go Again

I’m in all my books.
How could I not be?

There I am, in the corners of my first book, which is about Hugh MacLennan’s “novel of Canada,” Two Solitudes.

I may seem to be more present in my first novel, Birds of Passage (1993), which is a novel set in Budapest, and more present still in Marrying Hungary (2008), a memoir of my first marriage, but then I’m always present, in everything I’ve written, in whatever genre.

This doesn’t mean that what happens to the fictional characters I write about has happened to me. It doesn’t work like that.

It doesn’t mean I am any of those characters. There are similarities, yes, but you have no way of knowing what those are, exactly. I myself am unsure about that.

Something I thought obvious in one book turns out in the next one to have been misleading or insufficient or wrong. It’s hard to see me. I’m somewhere over there, in the shadows, making things up as I go along. Revealing so much and no more, discovering so much and no more, in a lifelong game of hide-and-seek.

The Girl from Dream City (2021), features so many different versions of me that I seldom recognize myself.

I catch glimpses of a girl and then a woman who is a stranger to me, like a friend I lost touch with many years ago. Occasionally, I’ll glimpse a character who looks familiar enough, like someone I think I know, but then she turns around and does something I would never do, like marry.

The question I wrestled in the years when I was writing Dream City, is how to turn all this into a narrative. I wrestled with this question, for I did have to find a way of creating that narrative.

If I knew the answer to that question, I might never write again. Much of what you can read in the pages of Dream City explores what I discovered as I was writing. For writing is a process of discovery, of becoming, and of change. The change was in me.

Someone new emerges whenever I break the silence, and the woman who picks up the finished book is a different woman from the one who started it. Necessarily different.

I’m the one who’s hiding, despite all my efforts, and I’ll always be the one who’s seeking.

Besides, I’m wiser now, and I still wonder about calling it a memoir. Every time I check something, I see I got something wrong, that I always get something wrong. I get dates wrong and misspell the name of a school I went to for three years. I change people’s names and mix up what happened when and who said what to whom. I don’t mean to be difficult. I’m doing my best, fixing everything I can, in the interests of truth and in the interests of the story. I know for sure it’s not all true. Why pretend otherwise?

So, I always thought of Dream City as an essay: an attempt at approximating what really happened. A prose work, certainly. It has an uncertain basis in what really happened to someone who resembles the girl, the adolescent, the young woman, the older woman — all the characters I might have been, once upon a time.

Dream City — which my publisher calls a memoir — ends with my resignation from Blue Metropolis in 2010, but it introduces a new subject, late in the book, and as I’d already had to cut almost 15,000 words, that new subject was beyond the scope of that book.

I didn’t want to let that subject go, so this is the focus of the work I’ve been focusing on ever since, a book that will be called a memoir by many, and as autobiographical fiction by others.

I think of it as a sequel to Dream City.

This new book, too, is about change. Yet another book about change.

So, on to something new: The Nobel Prize in Love: A Living Memoir of Starting Over.