For me, a novel isn’t autobiographical in “real time” – but my life is there, transfigured by fiction. I think of a novel the way analysts deconstruct a dream – the dreamer is every character in his or her dream, including the cat and the dog. Or, think of it this way: Your life is a mirror. You throw it down on the ground. It shatters into thousands of pieces. You can never recreate the mirror as it was, but each piece is still a part of the mirror, a part of the writer’s life.
For me, reality in art is a false construct. We are creating life from ink, print, paper and wanting characters to “feel” like flesh and blood. Can you fall in love with a fictional character? Absolutely. Can you detest one? Certainly. Can one renew your faith? I think so.
Here is another clue to the identity of The Third Angel.
At the edge of the woods there was a cave. No one went there. As a matter of fact, the people in my town took the long way, around the woods, just to avoid it. A monster lived inside. He was seven feet tall.
When people began to fall ill they blamed the damp weather, the ruined crops, each other, and then they blamed the monster. I was one of the people who went after him. I had a knife, a lantern, a silver star to protect me from evil. My child had fallen ill. I was filled with something I thought was righteousness. It was thick and poisonous and it led me to the woods with a hundred other righteous men.
I got lost in the dark. I stumbled and the others left me behind. They forgot me. When I called out they couldn’t hear me. But something did. The monster came out from a cave. He was a bear, seven feet tall. He had been hunted and had a fear of humans, but I had dropped my lantern, my knife, my star. I had the chance to look into his eyes before the people from town circled around. I imagined the woods without people, our lives without boundaries, the night without fear, the town without sick children, the world where we could live together. I turned to the people I had known all my life.
Imagine, I said.
Comments (2)
Alice, you are so right. Every character has a bit of the author in him or her, and every character's story is a true one, to some degree. All the little details of my life eventually end up in my stories, somewhere, usually out of context and sometimes carrying a meaning or message that is quite different from the original. My husband likes to read my work and laugh at me for the way things that he recognizes have been transformed. The hard part is when someone you know shows up as a negative character, or in a bad situation, and they recognize themselves and get mad. It's difficult to explain that you've just used aspects of the real person to give the character life.
Posted by Gail Cleare | March 2, 2008 12:30 PM
Posted on March 2, 2008 12:30
Practical Magic was the first book we chose when we first started our book club well over 7 years ago. You then became our favorite writer allowing us the pleasure and sometimes the impatience to read your next book. Needless to say we just finished The Third Angel and I must agree, even though it was a hard decision, this one is by far my favorite. The story and the characters provided us many hours of discussion, even though some of it might have been sidetracked as we offered our own insights into who or what the Third Angel was to each of us. Thank you for giving all of us the chance to escape into your written words for the past 7 years.
Posted by Mary Kay | May 3, 2008 9:12 PM
Posted on May 3, 2008 21:12