Fiction? Or Memoir?

Every fiction is an education.
--Robert Birnbaum

I came across Birnbaum's sage quotation in his recent interview with Ian McEwan, and I couldn't agree more strongly. Even though I've read some very good novels recently which clearly were at least partially autobiographically-based (most notably The Book of Ralph and Happy Baby), I've also grown a bit frustrated with the long parade of authors who closet themselves entirely within the realm of their own personal experience. To me, the role of a fiction writer is to step outside of themselves and conjure up an entirely fictional world. Fictional relative to the writer's past, that is; I'm not advocating that everyone write sci-fi or fantasy and come up with complete alternate universes. You can create a fictional world that remains faithful to the actual world, whether past or present. But writing novels based primarily on one's one personal history is more akin to memoir than fiction. Not that there's anything wrong with memoirs, of course; plenty of people have lived fascinating lives that I'd love to read about. But if someone wants to write a memoir, or creative nonfiction based on their own lives, they should call it as such and not pretend it's fiction.

I really admire McEwan's Saturday for his ability to craft pure fiction. Although the story is the highly recognizable environs of London in 2003 against the backdrop of the looming Iraq War, McEwan could easily have taken the easy route and had his protagonist be a writer, an artistic type who could easily ponder the meaning and ramifications of world events. But Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon--about as far from McEwan's background as he could have gotten--which required McEwan to meticulously research neurology as background material for the book. His descriptions of surgical procedures are thoroughly convincing (at least to a layperson such as myself), which effectively brings across the idea that it's a man of science narrating this story, which provides a different perspective to his topical insights than if the narrator had simply been someone with a background comparable to that of McEwan himself.

Personally, as much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, my own background isn't particularly interesting, and I doubt that anyone outside of my immediate family would have much interest in reading about it at length. Thus my fictional characters come exclusively from outside of my realm of experience--a 19th Century Irish farmer, an elderly African-American home gardener, a high school biology teacher. Of course, this approach to writing requires doing a substantial amount of upfront research in order to achieve situational accuracy. But the extra work is completely worth it--my writing is more involving and colorful than if I had simply based it on my suburban middle-class upbringing and, as a bonus, I enjoy the educational aspect of the research itself.

(As a side note, David Galef supports my point rather succinctly in a fine myth-deflating essay at Poets & Writers: "Write about what you know: This dictum has brought us countless student workshop stories about dormitory life and sick relatives.")

Flannery O'Connor once said, "I write to discover what I know." I'm sure McEwan would agree.