When I read recent reviews of Down to a Sunless Sea I feel not a few of them are so skewed that I cannot imagine what is going on in the reviewers’ minds. “Mortise and Tenon” which is essentially about a controlled and repressed young boy now leads a reviewer to say that he may turn out to be a serial killer.One reviewer repeatedly used “anal” and “oral” in a bizarre interpretation of “Herbie” that I felt subliminally she was competing with me as a therapist. A lousy shrink uses those words with a client. If you wish to see a good rendition of a cinema shrink, see Judd Hirsch in “Ordinary People” (1980, Redford). What I conclude with is a cliche, I imagine, in that we project on to stories our inner scripts, wishes and fantasies. So, the writer ultimately never owns his story. And how very curious that is.
Since I dissemble in life, others finds it hard to decipher me, which makes me lick my lips, for I abhor being packaged into categories. For those close to me, I talk straight, an arrow to the brain. I know how I present myself (or do I?) in general, and if I don’t like what is thrown back at me then I need change course or realize it is a consequence of what I put out there. Much the same with my writing. Here i do not play “games,” nor dissemble. All of me is in my writing cosmetically touched up to give it shape as a story, to make it interesting to you. I am a master of disguise, all writers worth their salt are dissemblers. We are constructors of lies, much more fascinating than truths, for in a lie there can be much truth. So Gregor Samsa is a bug or not a bug; the truth is elsewhere, go look for it.
Writers create little worlds, we are the gods of these worlds. We mean to write this, but the reader sees something else and often the great reader sees right through the author to where he or she lives. And what do I write about? I write about my pain, my cowardice, my defects, my betrayed hopes and aspirations, my depression, my frustration in this world, my frustration with myself. And I reach into a wardrobe of fake noses, funny hats, weird shirts and comical shoes that flap and curl up on the toe. It is all costumery as I make a presentation of self heavily disguised in oufits, outre and outrageous. Send in the clowns.
I feel that writing is an ordering of disparate self-shards. I’m Susan Alexander working on puzzles, inchoate pieces strewn about, some sections of the puzzle filled in, others imminent. It comes down to making sense of one’s existence, but there is no sense, there is no rational order here; that is a self-perpetuating myth. So a story is gossamer, a temporary wet web loaded with dew soon to evanesce when the sun’s rays are nigh. I write, perhaps you write, for the momentary pleasure of having one’s world subsumed in words, just for a pulsating moment.
For me, I go for the heart, although a significant part of my life expressed a passion of the mind. I am into the expression of feeling, I am into know/feel as opposed to know/think, although a happy medley of both I believe makes for a good life. I write to express my passionate feelings about many things. I write, first, for me, and then for you, if you feel you can connect up to what I am trying to say. Maybe, at the very most, a hundred people will read my two books. I will not be suckered into the mentality of marketing, the abyssmal avarice of wanting attention to be paid, I am no Willy Loman. I write for those close about me, I write to leave patrimony, and I mostly write to explain my stay on this pipsqueak of happenstance we call existence. I can be gone at any moment, at any time; I will not be remembered except for those who choose to remember me. I will become as distant to the world as a medieval serf in France. I cannot explain too well, to you, to me, why I perisist in drilling this literary hole into existence. What only comes to mind is an association to Sisyphus who realized one day that meaning was in the daily slough of despond and not the arrival at mountain’s top.
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