JAISHREE MISRA
ON THE TOP FLOOR OF MY HOUSE IN LONDON, IN A SMALL SPARE ROOM we grandly called ‘The Study’, memory and imagination shifted and blurred while something slowly took shape. The process wasn’t always slow. On certain days it was like a terrifying roller-coaster ride; uncontrolled and unstoppable. On others, the pace was halting, tentative, fearful almost. Stray conversations, scenes from an unhappy marriage, shame and anguish that were surely best left forgotten … this was the stuff of what was to become my first novel.
Several media interviews later, I often wished for a less mundane beginning with which I could enthral journalists – an epiphany or a voice pushing away inside me – but it started merely with a new desktop computer. This was the pre-laptop era when the currency of most writers was still paper and pen. I still have somewhere an old cardboard file full of handwritten short stories but even a technophobe like me could see early on the potential offered by a machine that would allow a writer to slip, waif-like, in and out of a narrative, clipping ragged edges, shifting chunks of prose around, returning over and over again to an unsatisfying beginning that kept nagging. These were all the things that the new computer would allow with one click, I was told as my husband assembled its constituent parts amidst a colourful nest of wires.
It was big and grey and seemed to be watching me, blank-faced, as I hoovered and dusted the room the following morning. Before leaving for work, my husband turned it on, opened a blank document and told me to write two pages of text. (‘Anything, even gibberish would do really.’) This was so that he could show me how to use basic Word functions when he got back in the evening. He knew I wouldn’t write gibberish and it was a ruse designed to uplift me, I figured.
I’d spent the past year training to be a broadcast journalist and had been the only student on my course to get that most glittering of prizes at the end of a truly gruelling course – a job at the BBC. Five months later, however, I’d had to throw it all in, when my mother’s visa ran out and my daughter’s care made it impossible for me to continue working in the high-pressured environment of a breakfast-shift newsroom. The gloom I tried covering up spilled over into the house and the computer was probably meant to provide ‘companionship’ in my suddenly enforced solitariness.
Obediently, I sat down to my task, observing with suspicion the blank page that didn’t look like a blank page at all, ringed as it was with a garland of hieroglyphs and icons. If I as much as touched one of them, the whole edifice would crash, I was sure, so I gingerly tapped a few keys and then used the button that I had been told would delete anything I typed wrongly. Faintly empowered by the appearance and equally obliging disappearance of letters, I started to craft my first sentences, using both forefingers and a great deal of time to search for the right keys. Curiously, I continue to use an awkward two-fingered typing style seven books on but with fortunately much better levels of speed since those early labours.
Writing, what was to become my debut novel, I had initially only the haziest notion of a short memoir. Or perhaps a love-letter to my husband which would attempt to explain the events that had propelled both our lives to the place we were in today.
What if I had been disciplined and stopped when I was meant to? What if the phone had rung and a friend had called me out for coffee? What if a book, half-read, had beckoned, or the weather had demanded that I tend to weed-choked flower beds? None of those things happened that morning and so I kept writing, and writing. I felt little need to stop for food or drink; what was happening to me was apparently nourishment enough. Writers are told to avoid clichés but I was not the first to experience that strange inability to keep from writing and others have already described that compulsion better than I could. New words are also inadequate to explain that opening of memory’s floodgates, the cathartic release that refuses to be staunched when memoirs take shape.
It was evening when I finally stopped writing that day. The toot of my daughter’s school bus and the startling sight of the sun dipping beyond the plane trees lining the neighbourhood basketball court revealed how long and how completely I’d been lost to the world while tracking memory’s shadowed paths. Anxious and guilt-ridden, I tumbled down the stairs to open the door to the child I’d temporarily forgotten while creating her fictional self. The evening sun angled a sharp brightness into the hallway as she rushed in pell-mell, strewing bag, bottle, sandwich box on the floor. The clamour of my flesh-and-blood child jolted me back to real life.
I watched my daughter, snack in hand, head straight for the TV as she usually did. After turning it on, she jumped onto her customary spot on the sofa, cushion to stomach, thumb into mouth, her gaze remaining transfixed on the screen. Despite her special needs, she loved stories too, such was their power, their utter seductiveness. I turned away, a fist clutching at my stomach. Something like that power could possibly be unleashed by the document slowly forming on the computer upstairs. If it grew into a book, as by then I knew it could, people would read it. It might influence them in the manner in which so many novels I’d read had moved me to change my perspective on things. That was an exciting thought, and yet one deeply alarming; who was I to attempt writing something as ambitious as a book?
Besides, telling my story would involve revealing my daughter’s story too. And the stories of so many other people whose lives had intersected and overlapped with ours. My daughter could not give me informed consent and all the other ‘characters’ would in all probability not offer it at all! What gave me the right to choreograph the stories of all those people into a version that only I could control?
That wasn’t all. Shaping real life into a readable narrative would involve editing out various people, collapsing inconvenient event-poor sections, shrinking timelines, expanding other incidents for dramatic effect, narrating everything from my point of view and my point of view alone. Essentially the process of writing would need to render real life less real. Did writing a memoir give me the authority to do that? I didn’t know, I’d never written anything of substance before.
One simple fact I did learn in the days that followed, however, was that I could not ignore the thing that was growing on my computer. Like a demanding lover, it cried out for my attention and I was helpless against its attractions, drawn to lavishing care on it whenever possible and brooding over it whenever not. Day would dawn and I waited to be left alone with a selfish fervour that startled me. After my husband and daughter disappeared into the world outside – a place suddenly not so alluring any more – I would dart upstairs to the blissful cocoon of my study as though on an urgent and secret assignation. When the computer came on with a gentle ping and the words I had written the previous day materialized on screen, all maternal and domestic concerns fell right away, inconsequential, trivial even in the face of this, my new love.
So my memoir grew. And, while I bared my heart, further concerns developed alongside on what might happen to this narrative. The possibility of publication was hard to resist but did I have whatever it took to display the minutiae of my life to a curious and often unforgiving world? I would be accused of being narcissistic and self-indulgent, quite deservedly. But then, I had read – and loved – Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and laughed at her famous line: Everything is copy. Apart from beginning to see the truth in that, I recalled how reading Ephron’s wry and wise account of the breakdown of her marriage had been like a salve when my own first marriage had ended. Wasn’t it worth writing something that someone (anyone!) might derive reassurance or comfort from? On the other hand, my recent journalism course had made me consider the ethics of intruding into private lives, even when arguments of public interest and social responsibility applied. Writing memoir wasn’t far off from that territory if I was to be honest. I wondered if writers like Hanif Kureishi and Philip Roth had struggled similarly while mining their own lives, over and again, for literary material. After all, Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego, did describe memoir as being the most manipulative of literary forms in The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography.
All these questions crowded my head only fleetingly because the only thing that continued to be imperative at that point was to continue to allow the story to seep out of wherever it was that I had shut away for more than a decade.
And so I wrote on in those weeks, shaping memories into a narrative that was deeply personal but also had – I have discovered since – several elements that others would recognize. A teenage romance thwarted, a hastily arranged marriage, the birth of a disabled child, the unravelling of a marriage, the search for a lost love … such experiences are not likely to be universal but the language of heartbreak and hope certainly is.
All along, I ‘fictionalized’; changing names and tweaking events, pulling them this way and that so that their shape would become unrecognizable to anyone looking to point a reproachful finger. Fear frequently loomed over my shoulder and, yet, I wrote and wrote.
Christmas was approaching when only a couple of chapters remained and I felt a new anxiety. The solitariness in which my writing had thrived would be broken by the holidays when both my husband and daughter would be around, filling the silence with their noise and their needs. Their uncomplicated joie de vivre and the easy glitter of tinsel and festive celebrations would surely damage the fragile thing that I was trying to create. I felt oddly protective of my project, and resentful at the thought of removing myself from it for what now looked like frivolities. Another rule was making itself known to me. Writers need to be selfish beings, obsessive and preoccupied by their craft. Family life ran counter to creativity. That was what Virginia Woolf had meant when she wrote: ‘Killing the angel in the house is part of the occupation of a woman writer’.
Through the blaring telly and din of rock music, I wrote on regardless. The invitations to Christmas dinners, holiday pub crawls, the compulsory shopping, they all came and went while I watched through a kind of lens that rendered everything once removed and unreal. The only thing that seemed real was the fiction that was spinning itself out on my computer, now a nearly complete story. Most of it took place in a far-off time and place – in the Delhi of my childhood and in lush, verdant Kerala that had contained my years of unhappiness. I’d virtually had to re-live a difficult period in order to write convincingly of it; a process that was punishing and yet cleansing as it drew to a close. No more did I regret having written it, however, because it was by now clear that I’d simply not had the choice to do otherwise.
And then, one day, sitting at my desk, I kept my finger pressed on the hyphen key watching with satisfaction as a line formed under the bottom of my now completed manuscript. My novel was done.
Aspiring writers ask me about that moment and now I’m glib with all the information I did not know then. ‘Never ever send an agent a first draft.’ ‘Re-write, re-write, re-write.’ ‘You simply cannot edit enough …’ Perhaps I omit to mention the qualms that kept pace with my writing for fear of putting off promising authors before they’ve even started. But, because all writers will recognize those doubts at some point or another, and because they will need to become robust in facing the many travails of a writer’s life, I do them a disservice.
Very difficult too is the other question I get asked rather a lot. How much of your novel is true? Some readers even pin me down to individual pages and experiences, pressing me for a clear-cut answer, keen to know that the sympathy they expended as they read was not wasted on a made-up character. What they forget – as I often did when I wrote – is how relative a concept truth is. There is never a sole truth, not in any story. John Berger, in his novel G., says, ‘Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one’, a line that Arundhati Roy uses as an epigraph in her own autobiographical novel, The God of Small Things. All writers know this fact, or learn it as they begin to experiment with point of view. Some, like Philip Roth, have had to accept it more painfully when their ex-spouses go on to write their own, rival, memoirs.
The only thing I can say with any certainty is that I was true to my own story and to the way in which I wrote it. By that I mean that there was no dissembling between myself as a writer and myself as the person on whose life the story had been based. The honesty that writers bring to their first books is, in fact, one of the most difficult thing to recapture later for, once an author is assured of publication, the gaze shifts outward to agents and editors and publishers and, of course, to readers who would be the first to recognize writing – fictional or otherwise – that did not ring true.