Interview with Author David Vann - Page 2

In keeping with the Legend form, each piece in Legend of a Suicide is written in a different style, setting up what Vann calls a “stylistic debate.” Indeed, the last piece “Higher Blue” is a “repeat of the first, but told in a different mode.” According to Vann, this story “comes closer to the truth, but the story becomes more unrealistic in its mode as it comes closer to the circumstances.”

Using the medieval format of legend, Vann was able to construct a whole truth from the fragments of memory. “I feel that the fiction is more true than any memoir could be. Everyone in my family had a different story about who my father was and what his suicide meant. None of them matched up. There was no one story.” Vann describes his process as “writing at a slant. Together the pieces gain full meaning.”

Thus, though the stories draw from fact, the events are twisted, in some cases, such as in the central novella “Sukkwan Island,” turned inside out. The protagonist, Roy Fenn, “is similar to me, but he is going through events that I never went through.” “Sukkwan Island,” while “entirely made up,” is a powerful, shocking piece of writing that accomplishes even more than its creator realized at the time. A single event at the end of the first half of the novella turns the entire piece inside out, shaking the reader’s conception of reality. This event differs so dramatically from what one knows of real events, and even from what has been revealed in the preceding stories, that even the author was thrown at first. “I hadn’t seen [the turning point of the novella] coming until I wrote that sentence. Then I thought, ‘now what am I going to do with the second half?’”

What Vann does with “the second half” delves deeply into the core of suicide, stripping away the layers of grief, guilt, and shame that are left to the survivors. “I had to carry my father’s body around for years [metaphorically]; now, the father had to carry the son.” Vann’s father killed himself a few weeks after the author, at thirteen, had declined to spend a year in Alaska with him. Vann acknowledges that he had a lot of “guilt for refusing my father.” “Sukkwan Island” is an imagining of events in which the son says "yes" to the visit. “Sukkwan Island” also accomplishes a more concrete goal. Vann had found himself unable to write a direct description of his father’s body, of the violent conditions inherent in death by a large caliber gunshot to the head. This piece permitted him to “write indirectly about the discovery of the body.”

Article Author: Christy Corp-Minamiji

Christy Corp-Minamiji is a livestock veterinarian, writer, and mother living in Northern California. She writes fiction and blogs on the eclectic range of topics that interest her.

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