2009-12-06 - 9:48 p.m.
The thing, I guess, about writing about your own life is that the people you're writing about are actual people. They've got names, and addresses, and different kinds of cereal in their cupboards above their stoves. And, oh, the different kinds of stoves they must have. And I don't much think of those stoves but it's true that sometimes I worry about what they'll think of this thing, this big monster thing, if it does get published. And it's all good and well to say, well, don't worry about that. Write from the gut or from the heart and that's all you can worry about. And I try to do just that but, you know, there are these people, and their stoves, and their cupboards with the cereal. I might even like the same kind of cereal as them.
There's my high school girlfriend, and does she deserve to get talked about like this? Does she deserve to have her pale skin talked about in the way that I do? Do my brothers? Should anyone know that one of them wet the bed and that he wasn't a kid anymore when he did it? Does my first college girlfriend deserve what's about to happen, in the last chapter? Well, she might. But, the others?
Just go go go, I guess. There's no great answer. Just go and go until all those words stop being cloudy and begin, in a little while--in just a short while, I hope--to look like some kind of small, ripe fruit, presented in a small, nice bowl as if handed to me from some place where everyone's much smarter than me, some place where beauty reigns, light and dark.
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