WHY WRITE?

I was sixteen when Bonjour Tristesse, the French bombshell novel of 1955, made the Detroit News. Written by eighteen-year-old Parisienne Françoise Sagan, it was a racy story about age-divided romance on the French Riviera. Immediately the novel fascinated me, as much for its story as for the precocity of its author. I wanted to write that book. And so I did. I wrote my own version of a sexy romance between a teenage boy and an older woman, though I stumbled on some very relevant issues, having had no experience, none, that mattered. I wrote my book, as Françoise had done, in notebooks tucked into my underwear drawer. But I floundered on direction, trying to avoid excessive imitation, losing my way on Grosse Ile, a glamorous island off of mainland Michigan but no match for the allure and eros of the French Riviera. The book stayed in its drawer.

I moved on to poetry in my twenties and thirties, caught by the bravado of the Beats, the mind-altered heroics of the hip love children, and the disorientation of the nouvelle vague. My poems fell along the way in hidden places.

And then I began to think of why writers write, or, rather why do people make literature and why do others read it. I think of cave paintings of the Venus of Willendorf, very early objects made to be seen, maybe studied, maybe prayed over. But the idea of art—in my case, of literature—strikes me as providing a parallel to history. By creating stories and reading them people can claim sets of histories snatched away from the lived reality of our ongoing  lives. Even written history is always partly invented. Back two or three millennials history was mostly myth or at least much invented events. The Bible is perhaps our greatest non-fiction history, woven out of passed-along memories and embellished by exigencies of fictive actualities.

So much of psychiatric practice is a review and guided editing of a person’s memories, a sustained effort not to capture absolute truth but to free memories of distortions of meaning and the accompaniment of injurious emotions. So story re-assembling and emotional re-casting is a component of psychotherapy. It’s writing in the air of above the couch.

Which, now in retirement, brings me to write. Tell stories. Beginning with one.

Follow me.