For me, the best books are about character, not plot, so it can be tricky to say what it's about. It centers around a play and the effects it has on four main characters. It retells the story in circles, from everyone's perspective. My favorite of the four is Billy, the playwright, who struggles with the reactions of people in her life who make assumptions that the play is about her life.
It is, of course, but not always in the ways they think. "We use everything," she says at one point, describing the writing process like a hunter using every part of the animal.
The play is about a man waiting with his adult son to hear if his wife has been injured in a train accident. Childless, Billy had once lived with a man who died in 9/11.
"It wasn’t about Gus and it wasn’t about herself, but the feelings behind it were ones she understood because of Gus and herself."
Early in her career, she wrote a play that too closely resembled her childhood, and this caused a period of estrangement with her family. There are several passages where Billy wrestles with the anxiety this causes her, at times passionately defensive of her right to use things from her life in her work.
Her ruminations on writing fiction resonate for me. When asked if the main character is her, she says:
"Please give the imagination some credit. No one really does anymore. Everything always has to be autobiographical somehow."
So you’re none of them?
"No. Or, I am, but maybe about equally all of them. Which means I'm also none."
And you just imagine what it would be like? Each situation and each character?
"That’s my job. Imagining them. Imagining what they say and why they say it and how they say it."
Yes. It's this mix, this attempt to balance truth and fiction that I often describe as throwing my life in a blender. What comes out often has a connection to things that happened to me, but only people who know me really well will be able to tell which ones.
