I couldn’t decide whether to call this book a Memoir or not, so I put the problem to my wife: I said, “If you were working at the Library of Congress, how would you list this one?”
She said, “Nordan, Lewis.”
I said, “No, I mean—”
She said, “ISBN whatever.”
“Fiction or Nonfiction,” I said. “It seems to fall somewhere between the two.”
She said, “You made up your memoir?”
“Names mostly, you know.”
She said, “You didn’t mention my name, did you?”
“I changed your name, I changed all the names, that’s what I’m saying.”
“If all you changed was names—”
“And conversations. I made up some conversations.”
“Still—I’d say Memoir.”
“And maybe I exaggerated some stuff too. Some of the painful stuff, death, and like that.”
“Grief Therapy. Excellent! Self-Help, Popular Psychology—”
“No, no—”
“You didn’t include any recipes, did you?”
“The book’s about me, basically. Who I am, and—”
“I see where you’re going with this. A ‘How To’ Guide for Jackasses.”
“Really I’m just trying to decide between Fiction and Nonfiction.”
“Okay, okay, give me some chapter titles. That might help.”
I said, “There’s a chapter called ‘The Man I Killed.’”
“Murder mystery!”
“‘Up, Up, and Away’!”
“Comics!”
“‘Zen and the Art of Mail Order.’”
“Eastern Religions!”
“One on Emmett Till.”
“Historical!”
“‘Tell Me, Ramon Fernandez, If You Know.’”
“Poetry!”
“‘The Amazing Technicolor Effing Machine.’”
This stopped her.
“Say what?”
“There’s a chapter called ‘The Amazing Technicolor Effing Machine.’”
“Musical comedy?”
“Probably not.”
“What’s an effing machine?”
“Effing. It’s a euphemism, you know. I’m embarrassed. The f-word. Jeez.”
“That’s the title of one of your chapters? You wrote a book about you being an effing machine?”
“Nonfiction is pretty much off the table at this point.”
“Honey, listen—”
“We might be looking at Fantasy here.”
“It’s not me. I’m not the effing machine. It’s a machine. An actual machine.”
“You wrote about a machine that—”
“Right.”
“You’re telling me you’ve written a Science Fiction memoir? A Science Fiction memoir is impossible to catalog, I hate to tell you.”
“No, this part is not fiction, it’s real, the effing machine is true.”
For a long time she only looked at me.
“All right, all right,” she said at last. “Let’s move on. More chapter titles, let’s go.”
“‘The Land of Dreamy Dreams.’”
“Travel.”
“‘Violence in America.’”
“Sociology.”
It was pretty clear we were getting nowhere.
She said, “So anyway—”
I said, “Yeah.”
She said, “So about this machine.”
“The effing machine?”
“Right, right.”
I said, “Yeah?”