The notion of autobiography in one’s work is big, I think, and big to the point that it warrants a frequent turning over in an author’s head.
I’ve been careful to stay away from bingeing on Ellis recently, because I don’t want his voice to inform my work - we’re already naturally too close, I think. While I’ve completely ignored my own caveat and had my nose in both Glamorama and Less Than Zero recently, I’ve also spent a lot of free time lately canvassing the wealth of information about his all-too-interlinked personal life that resonates through his stories.
Through the profile-reading, the detail about which I can’t seem to stop thinking is that Ellis had to get a couple of novels out of the way first to ostensibly shake the autobiography out of him. His characters and plots were so closely tied to his life that he had to send the details into long hand and flush them out of his system before being able to compose what ended up as the final incarnation of Zero. Ellis is a special writer, yes, whose topical exploits and characterisation narrate the life in which he was so engrossed for decades. So, I suppose it’s natural to have such inextricable ties in his work, no matter what amount of autobiography he purged.
But if one hasn’t defined the voice of the hip, rich, young MTV party generation, is there a finite limit one should not push?
It’s caused me to think about my own work in such a context. Of course, the ubiquitous “they” say that one’s first novel is essentially a work of autobiography. While one does write what she knows, I think I’d be wary to pin this novel as such. I’d also like to think that I’m too spread out, too mutil-faceted to create a single character that emulates the core of me. Instead, the more I reflect and reread my own writing, it seems I’ve constructed each character with so many little pieces of me, they’re almost unrecognisable as my identity. It’s more about tendencies, and in the case of this book, fantasies or secret inclinations and desires that have bubbled to the top.
If I succeed in sending this to print, I wonder if my mother, my boyfriend, and my best friends will pick it up and be able to throw a finger to a line exlclaiming, “You!” I don’t doubt that they would in certain places, but it’s odd to think that I’ve created a set of brand new lives potentially bred from the set of my own characteristics, and perhaps others that haven’t consciously floated to the surface.
M
