A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing: Part 6

(This is the penultimate installment of a serialized essay on a crucial moment in gathering courage to write.)




Dinner: carpaccio, kiwi sorbet, duck a l'orange. A very good red wine. ...And Francis Ford Coppola, we finally realized, was eating only one table away. I'd thought that man looked familiar. Big and bearded, the famous screenwriter and director was supervising the dinners of the two children who were with him. He seemed to me a man who wanted his privacy, who did not want to be noticed.

Next morning: lying in bed, reflections of the water outside racing across the ceiling. I could understand Coppola's wanting to be left alone. My first novel Revelation has a bone-honesty that was painful for me. The story of a troubled minister, it is fiction; yet that minister's cast of mind is close to my own. Delicious as publication of that book was, I also came to feel as if my brain had been laid bare. As one reader said to me with a teasing grin, "we know you thought those thoughts." I've since half-consciously wanted to pull the drapes around myself.

But then I discovered it's impossible to write a memoir and maintain more than a minimal privacy. The new book would have to be far more revealing than Revelation, with its mere hints of my inner world. This made me angry, I resented it; but decided to proceed anyway. With a sense that I was doing violence to myself, I began the long work of dismantling the habits of guardedness, fearing of course, as I still do, that I might reveal myself only to find no one interested.