6.30.03 conflict

After going to a family wedding, and then driving around the peninsula talking about my childhood, this is what I think:

I should switch to fiction. Writing from life is too difficult when the subjects are still alive and disagree about points of fact.

There is a book called Critical Fictions that serves as my moral compass on this issue. I also have good friends I can talk to, who have published memoirs and literary nonfiction and then navigated the response of their friends and family. But when it comes down to actually writing something, I run right up against my idiosyncratic notions of justice.

James has been a close friend since we were sixteen, and knows the real stories and the real people. This is what he said when I brought up the subject:

You are stuck on truth, which is real philosophy of the ethical moral variety. Fiction is something else, namely, the ontological, metaphysical sort of contemplation and assuming. Somehow I do not think you are about possibilities. Rather this other sort of wisdom: action and experience. You really care about remembering what happened; to the point of ruinous arguments over events. The problem is, though you often do not let on, you also worry, quite deeply, about what other people might think or feel about what happened. There is always doubt, and in that doubt, there are feelings - yours and theirs. And at the end of the day, regardless of what happens, you want people to feel alright. You want people to be better. That is your conflict. It is maybe also the point of your writing.

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