Ghost Heart
By Bryn Greenwood | July 4, 2019 |
Photo by Aramisse
It’s right there in my author’s note at the back of the book: I’m the daughter of a drug dealer and I wrote a book about the daughter of a drug dealer. After Where did you get the inspiration for this story? this is the most common question that readers and interviewers ask me: Is this book autobiographical? The short answer is no, which tends to leave a lot of people unsatisfied. The long answer is that in some way all my stories are autobiographical, and yet not. The difference between the memoir I’ll never write and the novels I can’t stop writing is all about processing personal experience into fiction. In true writerly fashion, I struggle to describe this process without an appropriate metaphor, and happily, medical science has provided me with one.
In an astounding breakthrough in the early 2000s, Doris Taylor at the Texas Heart Institute began experimenting with decellularizing heart tissue, in hopes of replacing regular organ transplants with organs created especially for the recipient. Taking a donor heart and using common chemical detergents, researchers have successfully scrubbed all the cellular structures of the donor away. What remains looks less like a human body part and more like the ethereal chrysalis of an alien butterfly: white, bloodless, and strangely architectural.
After the heart has been decellularized, it is injected with stem cells from the future recipient and placed into a bioreactor, which functions as the heart’s artificial lungs. There it is allowed to mature into a beating heart that will be a perfect tissue match. When the technique is perfected, likely in the near future, the recipient of this type of transplant will be in no danger of rejecting the organ, and will need no immunosuppressant drugs.
This is also the method I use to turn my life experiences into fiction. First, I take the heart of the thing I have lived, always the heart. Next, I remove all the blood and tissue of my existence, and with it, all of the emotions that I’ve kept stored there. It’s not that emotions aren’t needed–they are–but that my own are not the focus of the story. Once I have stripped all of that away, I can better see the mysteries and the infrastructure of what I’ve lived. I hold the ghost heart in my hands and identify the parts of the experience that I need for the story. Then I submerse the heart into the blood of my character.
In the case of my last novel, the story of a drug dealer’s daughter, I took all those things I had seen and heard during the years I lived in the orbit of my father’s business. I focused on the details of that part of my life. The dark country roads, the small towns, the lonely people who inhabit them, the conversations and life choices that take place during long summer nights and drug binges. Then I put my characters into those places and situations. How would they react to a scene I witnessed? How would their relationship dynamics develop with other characters? What outcomes would shift when someone other than me lived in the story?
I’ve done it many times before, including mining my time as a church secretary for the conflicts and crises of a character’s life. With my new novel, I repeated the whole process, focusing on the parts of my life that intersect with my family’s long history of hoarding, and my own personal experience with mental illness and chronic pain. The main character has problematic relationships with her mother and her sister, and while there may be echoes of the relationships I have with my family, that’s all they are. It’s no more than the shape of the ghost heart under the story’s tissue, the story informed by my observations. After all, the character is not me, and her family is not my mother or my sister. The dynamics are all different, because of the way each person reacts differently to the same set of circumstances. A painful betrayal for one person tends to be a painful betrayal for another person, but the way a character responds is entirely unique to their personality.
While it’s not as neat a process as creating a ghost heart in a laboratory, the writer’s tools are similar to submerging a story in a vat of chemicals to scrub it clean. The process requires introspection and brutal honesty, not just about what kind of person a character is, but what kind of person I am. To understand how something will affect a character, I have to know how it affected me. To subtract myself from the equation, I have to be able to see the boundaries of myself. This requires a willingness to turn a scene or a piece of dialogue over and over in my mind until I see how it connects to any other piece of the story. Sometimes that’s the hard work of re-writing a chapter dozens of times. Other times it’s as simple as taking the dog for a walk and letting my mind wander.
At the end, after I’ve done all that, after I’ve submerged my lived experience in the details of my characters, the ghost heart is transformed. It is no longer a blanched white scaffolding; it is the living, beating heart of the story.
When you’re using your own experiences in a story, what techniques do you employ to transform the material from autobiographical to fiction?
BRYN GREENWOOD (she/her) is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer. She is the NYT bestselling author of The Reckless Oath We Made, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will, and Lie Lay Lain. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
What an overwhelmingly beautiful analogy. I shall carry my ghost heart on my sleeve as I work my new story. Thank you Bryn
Hi Bryn,
Happy 4th of July!
I loved All the Ugly and Wonderful Things and have the rest of your books on my to-read list. Thanks for your post.
I write very much as you do and your medical metaphor is exactly as I write. I’ve lived an eventful life (hopefully not so much anymore) and my novels, while purely fictional, grew from a seed of a real life occurrence.
I suspect many of us write this way.
This post resonates with me deeply, as it’s so much the way I approach both the world and storytelling.
I am not terribly conscious of working within a ghost-heart scenario while laying down a first draft, but when the final story crystallizes suddenly there it is: Shades of what I have lived, what I know, what I’ve spent hundreds of hours thinking about and analyzing in my own way. But different. Revealing other ways to think about that thing I spent so much time pondering. Meaning from the chaos — at least sometimes.
Having seen it twice now with my own books, I trust my subconscious to do that thing it does. That isn’t much in the way of good advice for others, but it’s the truth for this writer.
Thanks for a great post, Bryn.
Bryn–Thanks for taking up something serious: how you perceive the process you use when drawing on people and events from your life. It should encourage everyone who reads your post to do the same thing.
The metaphor you apply suggests to me that you see your writing self in clinical terms. You use the detergents of consciousness to “decellurarize” personal experience. In this way, you free it of unruly contaminants, thereby rendering experience, in terms of your analogy, “bloodless, and strangely architectural.” Now you are free to equip the sterilized heart of your story with stem cells taken from your imagination.
Given the aspects of personal life you mention–your father’s business as a drug dealer, mental illness, hoarding, chronic pain–I think I can appreciate why you see yourself taking this approach.
With me, the process you describe couldn’t apply. Again making use of your metaphor, I view imagination itself–the source of stem cells–as made up of contaminants. It’s a hoarder’s dream, a biochemical grab bag of past, present and imagined future. What comes out of it I think of as both summoned and autonomous, but, to some degree, I am free to impose order and “architecture.” If I make the right choices, the end result hasn’t got much to do with “what really happened,” but is actually more true.
That’s why I view all autobiographies as works of fiction.
Thanks again for an intriguing post.
Beautiful.
Thank you
Bryn, you use a powerful image to describe how you work. With a background in medicine, and thinking in images as my default setting, I have learned something from your process and will borrow your heart image and use it until I supplement it (or possibly even replace it) with another image, homegrown and equally powerful. Thank you for this gift.
Gorgeous analogy. Makes we want to read your books, for the characters, but also how you put them together in scenes. I hope you keep on having people to give you credit for this analogy.
Yes, beautiful and potent. Thank you, Bryn.
Brilliant analogy, beautifully expressed. Thank you, Bryn. I write both fiction and NF (including memoir) and the process of fictionalizing happens from the beginning. I start with the germ and go on.
You asked about techniques… when I want to dig up specific emotions and experiences from my past and use them in fiction, I find a song or album that evokes the mood and feelings or content I want on the page. This music (expressed by other artists) allows me to separate the event from my own life (gives it distance) so I can assign it to the lives of my fictional characters. I will listen to a particular track (or album) on repeat for hours if necessary to get a character, scene, or poem onto the page.
Such a lovely and powerful analogy!
Thank you Bryn for this terrific analogy! I loved The Ugly and Beautiful and was honored to read your new release, The Reckless Oath which is brilliant. The characters are richly written and the ghost heart is beating loudly in both novels. I used very much the same premise in my novel, The Sleeping Serpent, where I drew from people and events that effected me deeply, reducing the feeling of my experience down to its essence.