Other Rooms

Using fiction to tell difficult stories

I recently finished Laura Zigman’s excellent new novel SMALL WORLD, which tells the story of two sisters in their 50s who move in together after a lifetime of estrangement. Their parents are dead, and so they are left on their own to understand how their lives were shaped by the death of a third sister, who had a severe disability, in childhood. Zigman built the story around events from her own life: she, too, had a sister with a disability who died in childhood. In an interview, Zigman said she once tried to write a memoir about her childhood, but because she was very young when her sister died, she didn’t feel she had enough to write about. But some of the writing she did for the memoir ended up in her excellent novel.

Douglas Stuart, author of SHUGGIE BAIN, has also spoken about the similarities between the events of his novel and his life. Like his protagonist, Stuart grew up queer in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic single mother. And yet he chose to tell his story through fiction. “It was too complex a story to tell from the lens of only one little boy,” he said in an interview. “I could never have been in all those rooms.” Through fiction, Stuart could explore his story by placing his childhood memories inside a global frame and incorporating an adult understanding of his mother and her addiction. Like Zigman, fiction gave Stuart the freedom to move into rooms he didn’t have access to as a child.

I am sometimes asked if my book is autobiographical, and if you know the broad outlines of my life, there are similarities. I am from New York. I went to a college not unlike the fictional Wilder, also in the 1990s. But beyond that, the book is fiction. (Frankly, if I tried to write a memoir about my college years, which I spent mostly watching people and thinking about relationships and ideas, it would be very boring.) When I started writing, I stuck closer to the truth, and the result was a not very interesting novel. But once I understood that I could construct fictional experiences and infuse them with the very real emotions behind them, the novel began to take shape.

Before writing the novel, I had spent several years writing personal essays, but after a while, I ran out of stories. I mean, not exactly—it was more that I wanted to write about things that hadn’t happened to me but had happened to people I knew. Or maybe they hadn’t happened to anyone I knew, but I could imagine them happening. In other words, I wanted the freedom to write about things I had observed, either personally or in the culture, and fiction was the tool I chose to do so.

Both Zigman and Stuart use fiction to write about a time in their lives—childhood—when they didn’t have the maturity or awareness to understand exactly what was going on around them. In my novel, which explores the dark corners surrounding consent, I have also created a fictional structure to write about experiences I don’t have the language for. Whether my inability to describe the experience of assault in a way that feels satisfying to me is due to the passage of time or the impact of trauma, I don’t know, but my attempts have often felt like writing from a preverbal state, or while looking through fathoms of dark water, except the water is time. By using fiction, I could write, as Stuart has said, “from the inside of those feelings,” inventing details that made the story come alive on the page.

The novel is, at its heart, about a young woman finding her voice, learning to speak up about the things that matter to her. It is also a novel about grey areas and the murky truths of adulthood, where black and white clarity is often elusive. I needed the freedom fiction gave me to explore those grey areas and murky truths. If Stuart and Zigman needed fiction to go to different rooms, I needed it to go back to that one.

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I’m delighted that MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR is on the March 2023 Indie Next List, along with so many exciting titles like Rebecca Makkai’s forthcoming book I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson and Ann Napolitano’s new book HELLO BEAUTIFUL. Check out the whole list here.

My daughter and I are watching “Parks and Recreation” together. She has watched it before but I never have and god I love it so much. A perfect way to unwind at the end of the day. My daughter absolutely loves sitcoms. She gave a speech at her school about how sitcoms make us better people and I think I agree.