Maybe it's just me but there seems to be a contradiction between the above statement and then the book being separated into those stories "real" and "imagined." Was that an intentional clarification between fact and fiction or a difference between you and the publisher or what?
As the book went into production, I freaked just a bit, and thought for someone unfamiliar or uncomfortable without at least a few simple signposts, they might get lost and frustrated. And so I re-ordered the stories into “imagined” and “real.” To clarify, the imagined stories are fictionalized versions of similar events that I’d experienced in real life. And the Real is pretty damn real. In hindsight, I may have made it worse. Now that it’s in book stores and selling, even the marketers don’t know where to place it, which was my original point about trying to point out the problematic of increased rationality. Certainly there is little financial remuneration in aesthetic subversion. Why do you resist letting the reader know what is fact and what is fiction? Is that something you would encourage or discourage if done by some of the students you teach?
The best writers I’ve had in my classes are the iconoclasts, the authentic antiheroes who just don’t care about external validation. I’d encourage both readers and writers to first, temporarily forget what they were taught in high school about structure, plot, character, setting, etc., and to approach a text from that place that moves them - existential tectonic shifts, if you will. The challenge is to find that place to begin with. A lot of us have allowed our minds to be filled with sound bite temporality and nothing really resonates because we’re rarely alone with our thoughts and our struggles. I resist all types of labels as they can prevent us from finding that cohesion, that communitarian ethos that exists when we approach language as the one true human thing. The comment about the "responsibility of the reader" sounds like you are placing the onus on the reader rather than the writer. Is that your intention? If so, why?
Any text, regardless of its form, can be an opportunity for communicative action. In writing a very personal book such as this, I’ve felt like I’ve done my part in sharing. But I would not ask a reader to, as I said, to “compare, contrast or critique.” That misses the point of reader response theory. The beauty of plurality in reading is that the text can take you where you let it, not where it’s supposed to take you. The best example in the book is the last chapter, a very true story, a letter to my daughter as she left home for college. I’ve had numerous parents write and tell me it just broke them up. And I’ve had students respond with, “How could you embarrass your daughter like that?” They’ve allowed the story to both reflect on their own circumstances but also create a political site; a momentary struggle within their own psyche. This reminds me of what Dave Eggers has done with What Is The What, which he calls an autobiographical novel, meaning he wrote about a "Lost Boy" he worked with, but some elements, and it's not clear which, are fictional. Have you read it?
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