When ‘I’ is me: an author in search of his character

Abstract

As a writer, I have no qualms about drawing from my life to fuel my creative practice, though I adhere to some rules: like Brien (2002), I am guided by ‘a sincere desire to tell the truth’. It is in this manner that I have sometimes used myself as a character in works of fiction, as in ‘Letter to my children’ (in Fisher 2013a) and ‘Into the light’ (Fisher 2008). In these works, I refer to the sexual assault and subsequent suicide attempt I experienced in 1973 when I was 18. Some readers have objected to my classification of these works as fiction, arguing that I was writing non-fiction, memoir or biography. My counterpoint, however, is that these stories are not recounts of what actually happened but my imagined narratives using actual events for their framework; they are my sincere attempts to tell a story I still find difficult to comprehend nearly fifty years later. Undoubtedly, some of my unconscious motivation was therapeutic. Like Gandolfo (2014), ‘there were certainly benefits at a personal level from going through the difficult process of turning that experience into fiction’. Nevertheless, consciously I was attempting to write narratives with content and themes relatively uncommon in literature when I was that 18 year old; that is, I was exploring my deviance from the norm, as my sexuality was described to 18 year old me by a well-meaning psychiatrist.