What’s it got to do with God?
“Fiction writers often use autobiographical info in their books.” – Sigrid Nunez. In describing the style in which she created the worlds that exist in her novels, Sigrid Nunez also provided us with insight into her own life. As portrayed in her comment, Nunez draws ideas from both her life and from fabricated stories in order to produce her novels. This technique is present in several of her novels, such as, A Feather on the Breath of God and The Last of Her Kind. Both of which contain fragments of her life, and many more indirect references to it.
Although she revealed minor details about her life and the connections they have to the themes and characters in her novels, Nunez continually asserted that although the novels were written in memoir form, they are works of fiction. Nunez stated, “they are called novels, so in spirit, they are not meant to be closely analyzed or taken as fact.” These fragments from her life – whether they are people, events, experiences, or herself – contribute to the characters and storylines that she conjures up. Nunez announced that her characters and storyline are never planned out. Instead, once she has the basic idea of the character down on the paper, her writers’ instinct takes over and creates life for them. Once again, she reinforced the fact that she used friends and other people that she knew as inspiration for her characters, and that they did not represent the person; as illustrated in her words, “writing fiction, the author has to imagine and make up some things…You take some part of yourself or your own experience to feed the creation of the characters.” So in essence, she resorted to this method in order to “make the person a believable fiction character for the readers to accept.”
At one point, Nunez admitted that A Feather on the Breath of God was more autobiographical than any of her other works. But she was quick to rectify that by stating that if it were a memoir, “it would never have been written this way;” she would have utilized a totally different style of writing. Furthermore, Nunez mentioned that there was a certain quality that existed in this version of the book that wouldn’t exist if she had written it in the tone used for non fiction works. In turn, this lead to her declaration that, “what inspires a writer to write fiction is different from what inspires a writer to write a non-fiction;” meaning that she was inspired to write fiction because of the certain quality that she could imbue the story with. Additionally, she also stated that she didn’t want to put down exactly what happened in her life, thus, in writing under the cover of a fiction book, she was allowed to “imagine and make up some things.”
So did Sigrid Nunez blur the line between her life experiences and those which were fabricated? Till the very end, she maintained steadfast to the claim that she only drew upon her experiences to provide a basic storyline, and nothing more. In the end, Nunez commented that, “writing a novel is like life… you try not to get too attached to ideas and plans.” This is because writing has to flow from the soul, if one restricts oneself too much, the majority of creativity and novelty will be lost; there has to be a “seemingly organic flow.” In terms of advice for aspiring authors, Sigrid Nunez resorted to quoting something that a person once told her, “you enjoy the first one (published book) the most, the rest is horrible,” and she added, “it’s true.”