Writing the truth

I started working for real on my new novel, Chasing Ghosts.

When I had worked on it before, I felt as if something was missing. I realized the other day it was because I wasn't quite telling the truth.

You see, I don't want to just tell the story of a young woman trying to live in the past, as I originally thought. The truth goes far deeper than that. I want to tell the truth about me and Dave and how much I loved him, and how heartbroken I am still to have lost him.

I want to tell the truth of what its like to live with an alcoholic and to know that who he's being is not who he really is and to hang on despite the world thinking you're crazy because you love him. And of a world that puts people into categories, where all people who have addiction problems are Purely Evil and all people who are studying to get masters' degrees are Purely Good, and to whom it doesn't make any sense that a Purely Good Person and a Purely Evil Person could love each other.

I'm not writing an autobiography--I'm writing fiction. I'm writing about a fictional woman with a fictional child and a fictional alcoholic dead husband. A woman who secretly hopes she's pregnant two months after her husband's death because she wants a little part of him to be growing inside her. A woman who tells people the half truth that her husband died in a car accident, leaving out the fact that he was drunk and was lucky to have only taken himself out, so that they won't judge him-or her.

This is not my story. And yet it is my story.

I knew I was writing this story to honor Dave's memory. And there's no way I can do that without telling my truth about him. He always wanted me to write about him. It's cruelly ironic that the only way I'm able to do that is for him to die.

I have a lot of work to do before I'm even able to begin writing. This is the most complicated story I have ever written. It's three stories in one--a story of a woman's love affair with her husband, destroyed by alcohol and pain; the story of a woman trying to go on without him and yet retreating further into the past; and the story of her daughter, fifteen years later, trying to make a life for herself in the same city her mother fled following her father's death.

It spans 1985-2007, a 22 year period. Within it are many other stories I haven't even mentioned.

I will push forward and tell my deepest truth.