LIFE, LOST AND FOUND

The story of how my new novel, Loss of Life, came about

In 2013, the Washington Post Sunday Magazine ran a story about a thirty-year-old woman who woke up one morning and couldn’t remember the last seventeen years of her life. She didn’t recognize her husband or her nineteen-months-old daughter. For the longest time, doctors couldn’t figure out why this had happened. I was fascinated by the article and thought maybe I’d do something with the idea at some point, but I was focused on other things at the time and put the article away.

Ten years later and nearing retirement age, I was finding that my brain occasionally engaged in some weird “auto correct,” where I’d be writing something, and when I went back to reread, I discovered a few words nothing like what I thought I’d written. I’d always had something of a photographic memory (in school I could see in my mind the page in the textbook that answered the test question), and my fiction has always contained an autobiographical strain. My wife and I have no children, and it occurred to me that in some ways, my memory was the main proof I had that I’d been alive.

What would it be like to lose that memory? I thought it might be interesting to explore. As a writing teacher, I often found myself telling students that if they wanted readers to believe their main character was forty years old, they needed to imbue that character with forty years of living – largely through memory and connections between past and present. Could one write a novel in which the main character could make no such connections? I’d also been interested for many years in the relation between fiction and fact. I used to joke that I’d mixed the two so often that I couldn’t remember which events I’d lived through in real life and which I’d dreamed up in fiction. What if someone who’d lost his memory had written fiction he hoped could tell him about his real life?

I made Matthew Winton, the main character, a forty-one year old loner: never married, no siblings, both parents dead. He was also a writing teacher at a university, who had published some short stories and – he later discovered – had been working on a book. He lost his memory due to a car accident that might not have been an accident, and in searching for his own past, he realizes that what he’s done may have been disturbing enough that he sought to end his life.

I did have fun writing this book, or at least, much of it. One thing that often surprises me about my fiction is how bits of humor find their way into even the most serious subjects. It was fun placing such limits on my main character: I decided that after the accident, Matthew would be able to remember only the first thirteen years of his life, so nearly thirty years had gone blank. The fun part came when imagining things like him walking into a grocery store and recognizing only the candy and hot dogs he used to eat as a thirteen-year-old, or entering a roomful of his colleagues at the university, knowing that all of them knew him but he knew none of them. As one mischievous acquaintance tells him, “I could tell you anything about yourself and you wouldn’t know if it was true or not.”

There were also parts of the book that were not fun to write – and may not be fun to read. It deals with some difficult subjects. It may not be the book I wanted to write, but I also tell my students that the best writing often comes from writing not what you want to write but what you need to write.

This was a book I needed to write.