Your piece in this week’s issue, “A Mistake,” is adapted from parts of your forthcoming novel, “Family Life.” “Family Life” itself grew out of a story that ran in The New Yorker in 2001, “Surrounded by Sleep.” All three things are based on real incidents that happened in your family. Can you talk a bit about the process of turning that reality into fiction?
My experience of taking so directly from life is that all my artistic instincts got thrown off. I found even simple things hard. I was vested in what was factually true more than I should have been, and so even small things, like how much physical description to provide, became more complicated than they should have been. I also found that my own interpretation of events kept changing, because these characters are based on people I love. Events that made me angry one day could fill me with compassion the next.
The story and the book as a whole capture moments of extreme crisis and emotion in your family. Were these things very difficult to write? Or did the process of fictionalizing allow you some distance?
Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.
Writing the book changed my interpretation of events, but what has really changed it is growing older. In the twelve and a half years since I began the book, I have got to know enough people who have had troubles in their lives—a woman whose mother committed suicide, a man whose child is a drug addict—that I can now see my own suffering as ordinary, just part of what it means to be a human being. I no longer think, Why me? Instead I think, Why not me? The one thing that I gained from writing this book is that it made me intolerant of unhappiness. When I am unhappy now, I often think, How much more of your life can you spend being sad? Go and find some joy.
Why did you choose to write this as fiction instead of memoir?
I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir. For me, memoir, because it claims to be factually true, restricts my ability to use dialogue, since I remember only a few things that were said. It also hampers my ability to collapse time, because collapsing time takes events out of context. And I wanted to focus on only certain aspects of the experience; in a memoir, I would have felt obligated to include things, such as boredom, that don’t interest me artistically but were an important part of the experience.
In “A Mistake,” you tell a story about immigration—one family’s attempt to adapt to a new culture and society. Do you think this family has a typical experience?
We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don’t act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true. To think of whether certain events are typical or atypical is to take our eye off what is truly important. When I read Stendhal, I’m not thinking of him as a French writer.
“Surrounded by Sleep” was told in the third person. “A Mistake” is told in the first. At what point did you decide that this should be a first-person narrative? Why?
I made the change seven or eight years into the project. I made the change based on the nature of the story. In both first and third person, something always has to be at risk. But third-person narration consumes plot at a faster rate than first-person. This novel doesn’t have a great deal of plot, and so I needed to direct the reader’s attention to the aspect of the story that was most volatile and most in danger, and that was the protagonist.
Your narrator seems to think of himself as often failing, emotionally, to do the right thing: he doesn’t cry when Birju is first injured. When his father takes an interest in him, he feels as if he has been touched inappropriately by a distant relative. He even, for a time, thinks of his father as someone who has been assigned by the government to live with him. Why do you think he is emotionally removed in this way? Or is it just a defense mechanism?
I think that children reason things out in strange ways. When the narrator’s brother is injured, he doesn’t know what this means, and so he thinks about it in the way a child would: is my brother going to get treats from our mother to make him feel better? And then, as children do, when he begins to appreciate the gravity of what has occurred, he wonders if the way he experienced it was proper. Was I as loyal as I should have been? Did my not crying mean that I am a bad person?
Also, children, because they are so powerless, are often afraid, and so they watch their environment very carefully, and this creates a certain distance.
Only at the very end of the piece, when Birju is, in a sense, gone, does the narrator realize how much his brother matters to him. Is this revelation progress for him, or a way of setting himself up for perpetual guilt?
Nothing is truly perpetual. I know that my view of my life has changed over time. Things that used to make me feel guilty, I now feel compassion for. I used to feel bad that I was glad not to have been the one who was injured. Now I think that that feeling is understandable.
We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don’t know how profoundly we love them.
You mentioned to me that you have become fascinated by the life of Abraham Lincoln. What intrigues you so much about him? Does your interest connect, in some way, to your vocation as a fiction writer?
I began reading about Lincoln because I wanted to be a better person and he is so admirable. I also find that I can relate to many of the strange things in his life. Wanting to understand him and how he chose to construct himself, I find my imagination responding, and this response—filling in where the historical record is empty—is very much like what it means to be a fiction writer.
