I Could Go On Like This Forever

To tell the truth, all writing is fiction.
Let me explain.

Early excerpts from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf) collaged with e-mail correspondence between David Shields and Bond Huberman

David Shields is a prolific author and professor of English at the UW. City Arts' Bond Huberman studied with Shields as an MFA student. In their first class, Shields explained to a room full of creative writing students that so far as he’s concerned, the novel is mostly old news; truth in writing lies in an open-minded exploration of reality in which “facts” are beside the point. Huberman has been digesting this theory ever since and exchanged e-mails with Shields on this and miscellaneous other topics.

Book excerpts indicated with a . E-mail correspondence: .

Photography by Charles Peterson

An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as yet unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008 9:42:35 AM
Hi, David: A friend just passed along the New York Times Book Review with The Thing About Life [TAL] review. I don’t know Alex Beam, but it seems like you made him/her mighty uncomfortable. In other news...2 new memoirs, Love and Consequences by Margaret Seltzer and Misha Defonseca’s holocaust book, bite the dust in terms of their “truthfulness.” All the more reason for you to be in the launch issue of City Arts Seattle. We’ll excerpt Reality Hunger [RH] and publish a conversation we have via e-mail. It can approach a number of topics: the book, memoir’s reputation in the world right now, your favorite color, whatever. Random acts of e-mail seem in tune with your recent work. What do you think? -B

Tuesday, March 4, 2008 3:06:12 PM
Hi, Bond. I love idea of e-mail exchange, and, yes, I have been following the fates of Defonseca and Seltzer’s books – the latest scandals on the “truth by Google” axis. It’s a good sign, I think, when point of book you’ve written seems to be getting proved weekly in the world at large.

Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were.

• • •

Just as out-and-out fiction no longer compels my attention, neither does straight-ahead memoir. As soon as a book can be generically located, it seems to me for all intents and purposes dead. I want the contingency of life, the unpredictability, the unknowability, the mysteriousness, and this is best captured when the work can bend at will to what it needs: fiction, fantasy, memoir, meditation, confession, reportage. Why do I so strenuously resist generic boundaries? Because when I’m constrained within a form, my mind shuts down, goes on a sitdown strike, saying, “This is boring, so I refuse to try very hard.” I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now. Instead, it must constantly be shifting shape, itself, staying open for business way past closing time. “Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between,” my father would often advise me, but it seems to me that Mr. In-Between is precisely where we all live now.

• • •

There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that’s a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating one, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.

Thursday, March 13, 2008 11:12 AM
Hey David. Just thinking about your TAL reading this week at Elliott Bay. I was surprised by how many questions seemed to stem out of audience members’ need to connect with some authority/answers on larger issues of what? Death? Remorse? Most alarming question: “When do you think is the best time to die?” Have you encountered that at other readings?  People looking to you as a kind of guru on death and dying? -Bond

Friday, March 14, 2008 1:37:18 AM
Hi, Bond. You’re right: it’s definitely been a feature of most of the readings I’ve given so far. For whatever reason, it’s not the kind of book to which the typical readerly response seems to be, “Great metaphor.” Instead it’s “Why are we here?” I don’t have the answer, but it’s good to have the question. There’s a great Va. Woolf quote: “One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” I would never have subscribed to this notion before – in my 20s and 30s I desperately wanted to think of myself as unique—but at age nearly 52, I weirdly love this line. It makes me feel less lonely, wildly in love with life, and other human beings as fellow mortals trapped on the planet. And yet simultaneously in deep existential gloom re: the absence of any transcendental signifier or safety net. This is all there is, in other words, there ain’t no more; groove on that. David

The best illness memoirs, especially those dealing with psychiatric illnesses like depression, were written, I believe, not for the purpose of a peacock display, but to offer solace. I, for one, expect that my readers will be troubled; I envision my readers as depressed, guilty, mourning, maybe, a medication that failed them. I write to say, “You’re not the only one.” I write with the full faith that the reader I envision is hungry for my talk, because I know how hungry I am for reports from the trenches, stories that might help me map my way.

• • •

The life span of a fact is shrinking. I don’t think there’s time to save it. Sometimes a fact should just be left alone. It used to be that a fact would last as long as its people, as long as kingdoms stood or legacies lived or myths endured their skeptics. But now facts have begun to dwindle to the length of a generation, to the life spans and memories of wars and plagues and depressions. Once the earth was flat, but now we say it’s round. Once we thought we could sail west easily to the Indias; now we think that a New World is there. Once we were the center of a vast but known universe; now we’re just a speck in a vast and chaotic jumble.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 9:14 AM
Hi David. Are you still on tour? Have to say: It’s interesting that almost any time I ask you a question, you more often than not refer – or sometimes defer – to other texts. This is the nature of literary/academic/poetic discourse, I guess. But it seems like you function at this level all the time. A walking, breathing braid of texts – and always conscious of it. Additionally, I see an interesting parallel with the point you made about TAL. You get older, you realize and welcome a sense of fellowship (rather than animal competition) with people around you. RH almost makes a similar case: you get older/more experienced/more read/more committed to art/whatever – you realize that you are not alone. You and your work are not an isolated incident. Instead of denying it or trying to get around it, you cut into it and open it up. This, to me, is what RH is all about. -Bond

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:51:56 PM
Bond, this is a gorgeous connection you’ve made. Let me think about it and try to get back to you. I’m traveling, but I’ll try to match your brilliance. Give me a day, max. D.

Thursday, March 20, 2008 12:59:34 PM
Bond, as I said, I really think you’re onto something: the connections between TAL and RH. How both are about overlap between humans (bodies, texts) rather than  separations. A lot of my earlier work (eg, Dead Languages, Remote, Black Planet) is about space between people. In my decrepitude, I seem to be seeing the connections, but not, I hope, in a saccharine way. The connections are built from an existential abyss—i.e., we all die; we’re all saying the same thing, hence the absurdity of copyright. Within that, though, I seem to be arguing for the excitement of fellowship – fellowship of bodies (you share 99.99 percent of your DNA with every other human on the planet), fellowship of artistic endeavor (~42.11% of RH is quotation). I’m working on a new essay and I find myself quoting myself, quoting other people. It does seem to be the way I think now. Each of my books moves, incrementally, from my first to my 9th, more and more toward collage, boundary-blur, quotation, appropriation, hijack. D.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

• • •

I think of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama and all forms of storytelling as existing on a rather wide continuum, at one end fantasy (J.R.R. Tolkien and the like) and at the other end an extremely literal-minded register of a life, such as a guy in eastern Washington — named, as fate would have it, Shields — who has kept the longest or longest-running diary, endless accounts of everything he does all day. And in between at various tiny increments are greater and lesser imaginative projects. An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined. We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. “Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction.

• • •

“The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy,” said The New York Globe in 1851 about Moby-Dick.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 2:06:29 PM
Hi David, Sorry for slow response – I was just in Texas visiting my sister, who is about to have twins (!). While I was there, found myself taking an impromptu class in film editing from my dad [documentary filmmaker Brian Huberman]. It got me thinking: obviously there is a connection between the work of a film editor and the work you did for RH and TAL (splicing, cutting, arranging). Wondered if you had any thoughts along those lines while you were figuring out how to go about ordering all these texts you were weaving together? What informed your ear/gut when lining one quote up to the next? Bond

Thursday, March 27, 2008 3:03:20 AM
Hi, Bond. Still on road, alas. I constantly use that trope when thinking to myself about my own work: “shooting a lot of film”: producing a crazy draft; “going into editing room”: years of revision. I sometimes think of myself more of a film editor than a writer per se. James Joyce: “I’m happy to go down to posterity as a cut-and-paste man.” I’d echo that, of course; I mean, I do echo it: I quote it in my book, though of course without attribution. Someone just told me that Picasso said all art is theft, though I can’t seem to find the quote right now, can you? D. (Never mind; I found it. It’s now going to be epigraph to the book.)

During the middle of a gig, Sonny Rollins sometimes used to wander outside and add the sound of his horn to the cacophony of passing cabs.

• • •

The books that most interest me sit on a frontier between genres. On one level, they confront the real world directly — real places, real people with real names and addresses. On another level, they mediate and shape the world, as novels do. The writer is there as a palpable presence on the page, brooding over his society, daydreaming it into being, working his own brand of linguistic magic on it. What I want is the real world, with all its hard edges, but the real world fully imagined and fully written, not merely reported.

• • •

“Why do you take photographs so constantly, so obsessively? Why do you collect other people’s photographs? Why do you scavenge in secondhand shops and buy old albums of other people’s pasts?”

“So that I’ll see what I’ve seen.”

Thursday, March 27, 2008 9:51:55 AM
Hi David — I’ve been thinking about this Eckhart Tolle guy. Oprah’s latest guru. His message is how to be a happier, more successful human. Gets me thinking that the type of book he writes is the opposite (maybe even enemy) of memoir and lyric essay. Could you ever see TAL elbowing its way into this category? I’m not saying your books are “self-help.” But I could argue that your books challenge people to think (rethink) about life, living, finding peace amidst hopelessness, etc. Oprah thrives on that kind of marketplace. What do you think? Would you answer if Oprah called? Bond

Thursday, March 27, 2008 12:23:34 PM
Because of title, because of cover, because of subject, because of baby boomer mortality-obsession, book has been semi-positioned that way. It wouldn’t have become NYT bestseller if it hadn’t. Nothing like this has attended a previous book of mine. If Oprah called, I’d answer on the 1st ring; I really, really didn’t get the hissy fit Franzen threw.

Genre is a minimum-security prison.

• • •

When James Frey wrote his book, of course he made things up. Who doesn’t? He said sure, call it a novel, call it a memoir; who’s going to care? I don’t want to defend Frey per se — he’s a terrible writer — but the very nearly pornographic obsession with him reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The whole huge loud roar has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama. The culture wants both: “art” framed as “reality,” while now and then getting to pretend to worry about the frame.

• • •

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we hardly experience any.

Friday, March 28, 2008 4:35:39 PM
Hi David, The weather here sucks. Hope you’re enjoying better. I’m having problems hopping on the Obama bandwagon – despite the “unprecedented” turnout of my generation. He seems so creamy cool that I just don’t trust him. I guess I just can’t get on board with someone who isn’t difficult to get on board with. Bond

Friday, March 28, 2008 10:08:35 PM
Hi, Bond. I’m on the book tour that won’t end, so I’m a bit exhausted. I like your take on Obama. I must admit I weary sometimes of his Zen cool. I’m extremely interested in his body language. You can tell he’s always holding something back, and his powerful presence derives in large part from this withheld energy. Did you hear about the Japanese man who, trapped in an avalanche for days, was able to slow down his heart rate so much that he was able to survive until he was rescued. That, to me, is Obama. His calmness annoys people, and it’s why he’s not a good debater.

After Freud, after Einstein, the novel retreated from narrative, poetry retreated from rhyme and art retreated from the representational into the abstract.

• • •

Thirty years ago, I listened to a tour guide at the National Gallery ask his group what made Rothko great. Someone said, “The colors are beautiful.” Someone else pointed out how much people had paid for his paintings. A third person mentioned how many books and articles had been written about him. The tour guide said, “Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered.

Monday, March 31, 2008 1:23:11 PM
David: Have you seen this site? stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. The guy who developed it just received an advance for $300,000 to turn it into a book. –B

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 3:26:59 PM
What interests me about this is the reality hunger of the project. Would he have received such an enormous advance for a novel about white people? Almost certainly not. People want riffs on the real, or putatively real. Back to Obama: I touched on this in a blog posting, but it’s obviously hugely generational. McCain is the world of our grandfathers: WWII, practically. Hillary and Obama are not hugely different re: policy. She’s 60; he’s 46. The difference is hugely generational; compared to hers, his style is so casual (“didn’t mean to mess with your game”; “did a little blow”; “bust a move”), and people’s investment in their own generation is fascinatingly corporeal, physical, mortal, bodily, sexual.

Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life — that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences — related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.

• • •

Ichiro Suzuki, the first Japanese position player in the major leagues, has unusually good eyesight and hand-eye coordination and works extremely hard at his craft, but his main gift is that he’s present in reality. If he’s chasing a fly ball, he doesn’t sort of watch the ball; he really, really, really watches the ball. When sportswriters ask him questions, he inevitably empties out the bromide upon which the question is based. Once, after running deep into foul territory to make an extraordinary catch to preserve a victory, he was asked, “When did you know you were going to catch the ball?” Ichiro said, “When I caught it.”

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 5:01:51 PM
David: Speaking of your blog – do you find it a natural outlet for reality-based art/thinking? Bond

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 6:25:54 PM
Not really. My bimonthly homework assign­-ment—penance for publishing a book.

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

• • •

What I believe about memoir is that you just happen to be using the nuts and bolts of your own life to illustrate your vision. It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say. In other words, I think memoir is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.

Monday, April 7, 2008 4:56:12 PM
Hi David. I’ve just seen some reviews of TAL that are the most mule-headed I’ve read so far. Would you agree that at the heart of your work’s most unfriendly criticism there is almost a religious resistance to new or loosely defined form? How does it make you feel to see some readers so uncomfortable with what you’re doing, which you’d think would excite people who are excited about art?

Monday, April 7, 2008 11:56:36 PM
Hi, Bond. I think that’s right: to me, the handful of negative reviews seem to me really, really uncomfortable with messiness: my ambivalent feelings toward my father; the book hovering between genres; the strange brew of data, quotation, and memoir. The thematic rather than narrative braid of it. It’s all about a certain untidiness, which, uh, last I heard, life is kinda like that. d

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it’s achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer isn’t what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that, the power of a writing imagination is required.

• • •

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we’re in need of at the time we’re reading.

• • •

You adulterate the truth as you try to write. There isn’t any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I’m striving for is authenticity; none of it is real. •