At that point, for me-especially because I’d written a non-fiction book-I couldn’t call this a memoir. I had to make up utter, absolutely fictional creations that nobody would ever associate with any living person. For example, when he goes on a rampage of promiscuity-when I go on a rampage of promiscuity-that’s pretty common in traumatic grief, and I wanted to write about it fully, but there were private lives to protect. But the grief part opened up a whole other stage, where other people’s lives were involved. Even with some of the liberties I took, I might have been able to call it a memoir. He’s trying to understand her life and his own life, as two arcs that merge, trying to understand everything that leads to that decisive moment when she jumps that wave. What is the narrator doing besides mourning? He’s telling her story. I began to write as a way of communing with Aura. But that meant: If you’re not really thinking about genre, you’re already in the terrain of a novel because you’re not imposing that strictness on yourself where everything has to be absolutely factual. Why would I invent things about Aura? I began without even thinking about genre. Obviously, what’s in the book about Aura, and about Aura and me, is true. I have my fundamental reason, my more poetic, writerly reason, and my meta reason. I’m curious about the hybrid form you used-why the “true” novel? “It’s not going to be the easiest tour,” he said.” For the next half hour, we discussed how-and why-he wrote Say Her Name. The next morning, I wake up with this lonely, empty ache.” Goldman was planning to go straight from breakfast to the train station and an appearance in DC, to be followed by events throughout the country. It’s a sugar rush and then when it’s over, I crash. “Just imitating Aura’s voice fills me with that sweetness. “It almost works in me like a drug,” he said. Over breakfast at the Tick Tock Diner, Goldman, whose face belies an unabated grief, was regrouping after having given a reading the night before. On a deeper level, the mystery engages the nature of personality, of desire, and of love itself. The reader is asked to consider whether any crime, albeit unintended, was involved in Estrada’s fatal body surfing accident while the couple was on vacation in Mexico in 2007. In many ways, Say Her Name-billed as an autobiographical novel, in which the characters are named Francisco Goldman and Aura Estrada-unfolds as a mystery. In his book, Say Her Name, he engages all of his writerly and emotional powers to chronicle the life and death of his young wife, Aura Estrada, who’d been a PhD candidate at Columbia University and a budding writer. Francisco Goldman is possessed of extraordinary gifts as both a novelist and journalist.
0 kommentar(er)
