I am terrified of writing about people. Even in my journal, where I write without fear of being read - because, really, how many people can decipher my handwriting? - my descriptions of others are filled with scratched-out lines and (maybe?)s and (I think)s and the occasional despairing ARRRGGH!
More specifically, I am terrified of getting people wrong. Like the fear of dying, this is fear of a guaranteed fact - and therefore a fear both pointless and inescapable. Obviously I will get it wrong. Of course I will get it wrong. Writing about people, to use an overwrought simile, is like trying to make a sketch of the entire earth by jumping up really high and drawing while you're in the air. There's too much to cover in too little time, and you can never see nearly enough.
Or to put it another way: all I ever know about people is the tiny portion of themselves they show me, and even that is too much to write down. So I have to choose fragments of detail from a fragment of a self. It's like - here comes another simile - trying to write about the history of America when you only have information about the year 1823, and you can only write about people whose middle name begins with M, and you only have room to write two pages. Hopelessly limited, in other words.
So there's no way to get it right, and that's terrifying. These are real people with real feelings; I don't want to be wrong about them. It gets even worse when I write outside my journal, because I try to write as though the people I write about will read anything I post with a critical, mistrustful eye. I do this based on a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and one in which I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel or critical. Being wrong, however you're wrong, can be as bad as being mean. And I do hate being mean. And I know I'm going to be wrong.
It's just overall hopeless, in other words.
But say that I try... When you write you turn people into characters. And real people aren't characters any more than characters are real people. This act of alchemy carries an intimidating sense of responsibility. What kind of character do you turn them into? What details do you pick and what shape do you give their personality? How much room do you give them to breathe - how much do you let them speak for themselves, and how much do you let their bodies and their homes and their friends speak for them? When do you let them use their own words, and when do you dive into guessing at their emotions? If you can't get it right, how can you get it less wrong?
My great-great aunt drinks scotch and soda out of a Playboy glass. She walks slowly around her house, muttering "I'm getting so damned old," but you'd never guess her real age - almost 90. And, believe it or not, she still works full-time! "People tell me I should stop working, and they're probably right," she says in a slyly subversive voice. "But what would I do? I don't play golf. I don't play bridge. I suppose I could do volunteer work, but I say, why not get paid for it?" She cackles and drinks more scotch. Her niece told me that my great-great-aunt keeps her husband's ashes in a cabinet, so that when she gets angry at something she can open the door and yell at him, which makes her feel much better.
My great-great-aunt lives up a windy tree-lined road, on the edge of a golf course. Her house is large and breezy, a gentle green on the outside and pale beige on the inside. It's filled with Japanese paper screens and elegant artwork, plush pillows and soft colors and fresh flowers. In an old woman's wavery voice, says she probably spends more money on flowers than on food - she just doesn't feel right if she doesn't have flowers in the house. She walks slowly around her house, tidying up, arranging flowers and carefully slicing vegetables for dinner.
My great-great-aunt grew up herding cattle from a shetland pony, back when she was too small to ride a horse, in a windswept land where the winters dropped to thirty below. Headstrong and independent, she later followed her sister out to Seattle, and she hated it. "The weather was just awful," she said. "The first day I got there it was beautiful," she said in an expressive voice, "the sunlight shining silvery off of everything. And then I didn't see the sun for six months." It just wouldn't do, so without the slightest idea how she'd make a living, she moved down to California. Here the sun shines more often and the winters aren't so cold, and no cattle called her out into the cold. Here she stayed. As she walks slowly around her house, she looks out her wide windows at the blue sky and green grass, and she smiles, victorious.
My great-great-aunt goes to the farmer's market every friday morning for fresh local fruits and vegetables. She walks slowly around her kitchen gathering together ingredients, and when I offer to help her she laughs. For dinner she makes broiled fish, smashed potatoes, fresh asparagus and a salad, served in a wooden bowl. It's all very healthy, elegant, delicious, local. Very California.
My great-great-aunt's bookshelves are impressively well-stocked: the guest bedroom alone features well-read copies of almost everything Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, a lot of Salman Rushdie's work, some Milan Kundera, some Italo Calvino, lots of Toni Morrison, some Nin, some Mailer, a little Pynchon, and all of the James Bond books. A massive dictionary sits on a stand near her reading chairs.
My great-great-aunt never went to college. She left her frontier hometown when she was young and went to work at the naval shipyards. Later she worked at a jeweler's shop, then ran a drive-in restaurant, and now - at the age of almost 90 - she still works full-time in retail. She's been a diligent, hard-working and focused woman all her life.
A raunchy spitfire? An elegant matriarch? A determined sun-lover? A California foodie? An intellectual? A dedicated worker?
All these things, maybe, or none of these things. And then I don't know a thing about her as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a grandmother. I don't know what she was like when she was 15 or 50. I was with her for only half a day. And I am audacious enough to want to write about her?
Even after an attempt at thorough fairness, I'm left with an inevitable lie of omission - and a niggling doubt. What if these best-guesses, these attempts at accurate and generous and multi-layered portrayals, are just plain wrong?
It's terrifying. It's just terrifying.
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