First thing this morning, I wrote a story about a girl I knew in college. I've written about her maybe twenty times in the years since then. There's probably a decent book in the year I spent with her. I've thought about it several times. More than anything, what keeps me from writing it is that it's not fiction. It would be a story telling somebody else's secrets, and I just don't know that I have the right to do that.
I haven't heard any news about this person in more than thirty years. For all I know, she could be raising goats in Parguay now. I'm ok with that. Sometimes, I like to just leave my memories the way they were. I do sincerely hope she turned out happy and healthy, far more than I did, but it's really none of my business, and it's not really part of my story.
There's this sort of myth that college girls are fun and fashion, parties and dresses, and a lot of that is true, but it's just one level in a story of many different levels. Sometimes, underneath that facade is a lot of doubt and pain and insecurity, and that's really what the story would be about.
Honestly, I just thought she was pretty. I had no idea what opening that door might lead to. My first attempt at a girlfriend after high school turned out to be far more complicated than I expected. Pretty soon, my story was enmired with her story, and it took almost a year to untangle myself.
It'd be pretty easy to fictionalize the story. Change the names, change enough of the details that she could never prove in court that it's a book about her. That doesn't always work, though. The woman who inspired the character of Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's stories complicated every attempt to film the book, even though he changed almost every aspect of her.
Jean Ross became a very different person from Sally Bowles. After leaving Berlin, she became a very remarkable person, far afield of what you might expect of the flighty Bowles. Who she became changed my perception of the Sally Bowles Isherwood created. Sometimes, I wish I'd never learned about Ross and just left her life and the fictional life of Sally Bowles very separate.
I've thought about blending together the lives of several real people into one fictional person. In my mind, I wrestle with whether or not that excuses me from my responsibility not to expose secrets that belong to someone I used to care for. If I don't, then there's no book.
Ray Bradbury wrote about dinosaurs and rocket ships. That makes the whole process a lot less complicated. I'm pretty sure I can write these stories in ways that don't hurt the people whose secrets I'm telling, but only so long as nobody else knows it's them I'm talking about.
Like most coming-of-age" stories, this one ends with sadder but wiser characters. I think that's appropriate. When you're twenty, there are no happy endings because, god willing, it's not an ending. You have another sixty years before the ending. At twenty, your stories are just the polish on the marble that becomes your life.