The Semi-autobiographical Novel

As the third book of the Shaka Reed Series goes through the revision and editing phase, I have been working on a new novel. It’s not supernatural fiction. In fact, initially it wasn’t any type of fiction, but memoir. However, the more I wrote, the more I noticed the unpleasant feelings of over exposure and self absorption. My first solution was to tone down and smooth out the events and feelings I was putting on the page, but I ended up with something that felt dull and dishonest.

At the time I was reading Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin. At some point I googled reviews of this book and though the binding said fiction, the book is often described another way: semi-autobiographical. What an intriguing idea, to take your own experiences and retell them through the screen of fictionalized characters and embellished events. Maybe this was the buffer I needed to tell my own story.

So, I rewrote the outline and plugged away at this new novel to the tune of about 6,000 words before feeling that internal nudge common to all creative endeavors that asks, “What’s the point of this? Who cares? It’s a waste of time and it sucks and you know it.” Feeling not especially resilient at that moment, I agreed. I closed my computer and vowed to take a step back from writing until I could produce something less self interested.

I instead picked up the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Well, I hate to admit this, but I didn’t finish that either! Yes, it is well written and the narrator is funny and likable, but by page 200 he’d been hit with so many blows it was hard to keep reading, and with no beauty to redeem or distract from or add meaning to the brutality of life, I wondered why I was spending my evenings reading a book that didn’t inspire me so much as frustrate me. Based on the novel’s success, I fear I missed the point. To see if this was the case, I did my thing and googled its reviews. I already knew it was based on Dicken’s David Copperfield, which despite having my favorite first line of any book, I have yet to read. That first line is as follows:

I love that!

In reading the reviews and comparisons between the two books I found that despite their titles, they are really quite different. Kingsolver’s story is an exposing look at the opioid epidemic of the nineties in Appalachia, while Dicken’s story is more about the coming of age of a poor boy in the nineteen century. Seeing as how I’ve only read half of one of these books, I’m in no position to review them, but as I traveled down the Copperhead vs. Copperfield rabbit hole I saw that word again: semi-autobiographical. This time it was in connection to David Copperfield. I went on to read that Dickens grew up in poverty and when his father was put in prison he had to drop out of school and go to work. This experience planted the seeds that would grow a great novel, even if at the time young Dickens felt he was getting delt an awful blow.

This rags to riches story, and the frequency with which the word semi-autobiographical keeps rearing itself has got me thinking about returning to my writing desk to flush out this new project. By the end it may be something unrecognizable to what it is right now, but what’s most important is that it will be given the opportunity to grow. Dicken’s hardscrabble beginnings remind us that while we don’t know which seeds will grow or what they will become, we do know that we don’t become the heroes of our own stories by giving up.