Sometimes I write memoir. Sometimes fiction. This month, I’ll publish my tenth novel, and to some readers familiar with my nonfiction writing, the connections between the life I’ve lived and the story of the family in this new novel of mine will bear a certain obvious connection to my own. Sometimes these same people ask me, “how do your children feel about your writing this book?” Well, I love my children as deeply as any parent, but here’s the truth: I do not write to please them. I write to tell the truth.
The story I chose to tell this time around is about a couple—an artist and a writer—who fall in love in the late seventies and raise three children in the country. They make a sweet, good life together in the country, but they lose sight of what they used to love about each other—high on the list, their mutual desire to raise children and make a family, their commitment to being parents.
It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been doing the thing I’m doing right now—sitting at my desk, hands on a keyboard, telling a story—for more years than I’ve done just about anything else in my life. Longer than I was my parents’ child, longer than I was married to my children’s father, longer even than I’ve been my children’s mother. It’s not simply what I do, it’s who I am. I was a writer before I married, before I had children, and I have never stopped being one.
Their family breaks apart. (They divorce, anyway. I’m not ready to say that a family in which the parents divorce is no longer a family. Just a different kind.
