In February 2005, old friends, novelist Kaylie Jones and memoirist Beverly Donofrio reunited to teach together in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In the months before the workshops, they conversed with one another about their respective genres and the experience of having movies made of their books. The following is the transcript of that conversation as published in the February, 2005 edition of San Miguel’s El Petit Journal.

Beverly Donofrio
We met when we were unpublished hopeful writers at graduate school at Columbia University together, almost 25 years ago now. Although you were over a decade younger than I, we immediately hit it off, saw a kindred soul in each other. So, we started out at the same graduate school in the same workshop; we were inspired by the same teacher, Richard Price — yet when you wrote your story, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, you called it fiction, and when I wrote my story, Riding in Cars with Boys, I called it memoir. What do you think the difference between autobiographical fiction and memoir really is? What did you gain or lose by considering or calling your book fiction?

Kaylie Jones
Frankly, I never felt I really had a choice but to write fiction. I grew up in a fiction writing household. My dad was a fiction writer, and growing up around him was a strange and fascinating experience. My brother and I were always competing for attention with the characters in his books. At dinner, he’d talk about these characters of his as if they were real people who lived with him in his “office,” as he called his private writing space upstairs. I remember an ongoing battle he had with himself for weeks, when, toward the end of his life, he was trying to finish Whistle, the last book of his WWII trilogy. One of his main characters, Bobby Prell, had been badly wounded in combat, in the legs, and the government was waiting to see if he was going to lose his legs or not before awarding him the Congressional Medal of Honor. According to my dad, they never awarded the medal to “cripples”. For weeks this went on, with him agonizing over Bobby Prell’s legs, as if my dad himself had no control whatsoever over was going to happen. This was very exciting indeed. One day, he came down from his office and cried, “Everything’s going to be okay! Bobby Prell’s legs are beginning to heal! He isn’t going to lose them after all and he’s going to get his medal.” And we had a celebration.

 It was in this atmosphere that I learned about writing, and the discipline of writing. Listening to my dad and his writer friends discuss books, and discuss characters in books, the line between fic­tion and fact already seemed to me totally arbitrary, totally blurred. For me personally, when I went to Columbia at 21, I realized that writing a memoir would involve not only a certain loyalty to facts, but also an understanding of those facts — I certainly didn’t have that kind of memory, or understanding of my life when I began to try to write A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. Eventually, I became interested in the notion of writing a faux memoir, which is why I started the novel out with a paragraph about how the narrator’s memories are tinted certain colors, which do not correspond to anyone else’s memories of those same events. I was hoping to establish the unreliability of the narrator’s memoirs, the solipsism with which a child views the world.

The second reason I chose fiction instead of memoir is that I felt freed from having to be loyal to facts. I became loyal to the story’s needs instead. This is the first thing I tell my fiction writing students: Let go of the facts, your first loyalty is to the story’s needs. If you dissected A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries scene by scene, not one single scene would hold up under the scrutiny of history. Every detail is changed to fit the story. So instead of a photograph of a time and place, you end up with a kind of abstract representation of a time and place.

You were a hero to me back then (I never told you). You were so young and beautiful and full of life, on your own in your early thirties, with a teenage son to raise. And you’d done it all by yourself. I was right out of college, way overprotected, scared to death of being in New York City on my own. I was living free in my mom’s Park Avenue apartment. I never told you this either, but when I used to come visit you in your apartment in Alphabet City, I’d take a cab and then walk the last few blocks, as if I’d taken the subway! It seemed to me you already had a great deal of understanding of your life, and could see the forks in the road and the roads not taken, so to speak. The only great loss I’d ever suffered was my father’s death when I was 16. While this left me completely bereft, from you I learned that it was possible not only to survive life’s injustices, but to survive them without being a victim. Better to fight back, that’s what I learned from you.

Reading both your memoirs — and other excellent memoirs — I sense that careful thought went into the structuring, the decision of when to offer up what bit of infor­mation. So that memoir becomes an exploration of the author’s life choices, an orga­nizing of facts according to some kind of profound hindsight. Chekhov says that good fiction calls for “total objectivity,” which is meant to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. In memoir, the writer is allowed to draw conclusions for us. I may still have a memoir in me. We’ll see.

Do you disagree with my definition of the differences between fiction and memoir? Why did you choose memoir instead of fiction? As I recall, you weren’t at all sure, when you began Columbia, which way you wanted to go with your book.

Beverly
I think there can be significant differences between fiction and memoir but not so much between autobiographical fiction and memoir. I have an ex-friend who was forty during the time of life he wrote about in his memoir, but he said he was thirty, because being younger and making all those stupid mistakes made him more sympathetic. Memoir writers, too, must serve the story. I draw the line at chang­ing actual facts — at least I believe I do, but I may be fooling myself, because like many writers, I’ve been a fabricator since I could complete a sentence. Remember how we had TWO pathological liars among the twenty students in our class at Columbia? I definitely change sequencing all the time, make incidents that may have occurred in a span of three years happen in one afternoon. I think all memoirists do this, otherwise you would not be able to make a story. I considered myself a fiction writer all the way through selling the proposal for Riding. It wasn’t until I met with my editor for the first time at dinner and said, “My novel,” and he said, “Novel? I didn’t buy a novel. I bought a memoir,” that I became a memoirist. But I think it was a blessing. Outrageous things happen to me. My life is eventful. I have always loved telling my stories. And it’s true that as a memoir writer I get to say exactly what I think. That may be what I love most about writing memoir.

You know, I think I suspected you took cabs to my apartment. You reminded me of the time we were out one evening and walked over to my apartment on 12th Street and Avenue A. There were a few abandoned buildings and one was used as a crack house with a guard standing at the door. As we walked past, he lifted his shirt to display a meat cleaver tucked inside his belt. You grabbed my arm, “Oh, my God, Beverly,” you said. “Did you see that?” The guard had never showed ME his meat cleaver, and I remember thinking that you were at much greater risk walking around the city at night. You were pretty, young, and projected a vulnerability I’d turned into a hard crust long before. So, in a way what you admired in me, the toughness of a fighter, made me a survivor, for sure, but it also made me defended and cut off from certain emotions, including fear.

I remember writing a story in Richard Price’s class, all of it true, about a woman who has a date to meet up with her boy­friend on Valentine’s day; she runs into an old friend and his pregnant wife on the street, ends up in a ménage a trois, and completely blows off her boyfriend who is waiting for her with champagne in a bucket of ice. We discussed the piece in class. It was a fiction-writing class and I called the piece fiction. Richard asked, “Why did she do that?” and I had no answer. This was shocking to me that I understood myself so little, and that I couldn’t even make up an answer. I’d simply written the story because I thought it was interesting, and I’d thought that “in­teresting” had been enough. It was that story, my increasing in­ability to “feel” things, as well as some deep sadness at the time that caused me to enter psychotherapy, intensely, twice a week. How, I asked myself, can I ever be a writer if I don’t understand my own actions, motivations, neurosis.
I was in psychotherapy through all of graduate school and for three years later. Five years altogether, and it is no accident that at the same moment I graduated therapy I was awarded a contract to write Riding.

So, your observation that writing memoir becomes an exploration of the author’s life choices is true. It’s a cliché but I’ve always subscribed to the maxim that the only life worth living is the exam­ined life. Memoir requires one to do exactly that. Both of my memoirs have brought me through pain to understanding and some forgiveness — of myself and of others.

My memory of you and your work back then was first of all that you were determined, focused, disciplined and a tireless writer. I probably never told you at the time but I was filled with admiration for your stamina and your grit. I, on the other hand, was blocked most of the time and spending half of my days in bed imagining bricks falling on my head. I also remember that you were in deep pain from the loss of your father, and that you were processing that loss in your work. If I remember correctly, your first book, As Soon As It Rains, was mostly about the loss of your father. And that same theme resonates in your second book, Quite The Other Way, which took place in Russia. So, I imagine writing fiction is also a way to process one’s life, and to express one’s obsessions.

Kaylie
So, it looks like they are the same, or very similar — at least in the context of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries and Riding in Cars With Boys. In my last two novels, I believe I moved further away from autobiographical fiction, in the sense that there are substantial differences between my characters and myself. Nevertheless, we share many experiences that I’ve recreated and reinterpreted for the novels.

Do you remember the day we walked home from Columbia on 116th and Broadway, all the way to your apartment on Avenue A and Twelfth Street? It was the very first warm spring day. Five men – FIVE – exposed themselves to us along the way. That has never happened to me in that number, before or since. What do you think that said about us at the time?

When you showed the movie of Riding to my six-year-old daughter Eyrna and her friends last summer in San Miguel, she kept running into the kitchen where we were sitting and talking to ask you, “Did that really happen like that?” And mostly, your response was, “Oh, no, that’s just Hollywood.” At one point she ran in and asked, “Was your daddy really that mean to you?” The answer you gave her, in a deep, emphatic voice, was, “Oh, no. He was much meaner.”

What I wanted Eyrna to know, emphatically, was your real-life success. Which, in the film, was completely excluded. That did not make me happy, because yours is in fact a great success story. You went to college; you went to graduate school. You wrote two wonderful books. I’d like to know how you felt about the movie of your book. And why do you think Hollywood felt it necessary to take away Beverly’s success?

Beverly
I’m so glad you asked that question. But first I want to say that I completely forgot about all those men exposing themselves until you re­minded me this past summer. And that tells you a lot about how fallible memory is. I wonder why I forgot it. I do remember that you were a knockout. Good thing we didn’t make a practice of walking together all that much.

It was a crying shame they didn’t include the fact that I went to college in that movie. For personal reasons but also because I think it would have been a better movie had Beverly gone to college. My greatest motivation when I was writing Riding was to tell other working class girls, other young women who got pregnant, kids who had made a big mistake and felt like their life was ruined because of it, that their life didn’t have to be ruined, that you get other chances, that you can realize your dreams. The voice I used in the book yearned between the lines, “If only I could go to college, if only I could go to college.” My parents hadn’t graduated high school and had no great ambitions for their children, in fact, quite the opposite. They were afraid they’d lose their children if we went beyond them. I hated it in the movie when the father was so disappointed his daughter was pregnant because he’d had such great ambitions for her. My parents wanted me to get married, have a bunch of kids in wedlock, and live next door. Having ambition was actually rebellious. When I told my mother sopho­more year about my high college plans (this scene is in the book), she said, “Get real. Take typing. Get a good job when you graduate.” So the fact that the essence of my book, the essence of my experience, was eviscerated from the movie just killed me. It was a ruined opportunity to send an inspirational message to millions of kids. And as I said, I believe, objectively, that the movie would have been much improved had the very dark second act been given the grace of some hope in its final moments by rewarding Beverly for all her struggles by throwing her the bone of a college ac­ceptance letter in the mailbox.

You know how people in certain primitive cultures believe that if you take their picture it robs their soul? That’s kind of how I feel about that movie. I can’t say for certain why Hollywood de­cided against college. It could be that Jim Brooks, the producer and the artistic vision behind the movie, didn’t understand what was so hugely affirming about the college experience. I’m not sure he even graduated college, and he is one of the most successful men in the industry. Besides, he never set out to duplicate the book. He told the screenwriter, Morgan Upton Ward, from the get-go that he must make the movie his own, but the truth is Morgan never got to make the movie his own; he got to make the movie Jim wanted to make — about a relationship between a mother and son, an imperfect relationship between two people who are basically stuck with each other, but love each other anyway. And this was his right. Movies do not have to be fair representations of the books from which they are adapted.

The truth is that if I were given the choice between having no movie made or this movie, I’d choose this movie. For a Hollywood film it takes big risks, it talks about difficult subjects and is not a comfortable film to watch. It is flawed, but in many ways it’s a good movie. The process was immensely interesting to watch and be involved in; I sold lots of books; and it has opened doors in my career.

This brings me to my question to you. You told me that Eyrna was excited to meet me because I was the first person she’d ever met to have had a movie made of her life. And you said, “But Eyrna, I, your own mother, had a movie made of my life.” And she said, “But it wasn’t true.” I, however, know that the characters in the book and in the movie were at least based on your family and on you. I may be wrong but it seems that I read somewhere at the time that Merchant and Ivory were attracted to the story because it was about ex-patriots in Paris during those years, and specifically about your father, James Jones, who is an icon. Back when I saw the movie, I’d thought that I’d remembered you telling me that your father had said things his character actually says in the movie. When the girl has a series of backseat flings with crude boys, and goes to the father for help, because she realty doesn’t know why she did it, he tells her, “Backseats and drive-ins and beaches are no place to have sex, baby. Especially the beach. Ugh, I hate that sand… listen, be smart about this now. They’ll figure you’re easy and keep on trying with you. Just say no till you find someone you really like. When you find someone you really like, come talk to me.” Are you content not to claim that movie as being about your life? In general, I’m very curious to know what you think of the movie and how you’d characterize your movie-making experience? And don’t you find it really strange that we’ve both had movies made of our lives?

Kaylie
Hah! I just asked Eyrna if she remembered saying that, and she said I misquoted her. Her correction, “Mom, what I said is, your movie isn’t all true.” This is getting seriously confusing.

But seriously, I don’t claim it wasn’t autobiographical. I claim that it was fictionalized. Many things happened close to the way I wrote them, or maybe they didn’t. I can’t remember! I absolutely loved Kris Kristofferson. He reminded me in person so much of my dad that it was scary. My dad and I did have a conversation like that, not exactly that conversation, but close enough. It was shortly before he died. What struck me years later was that he knew he was dying, and was trying to squeeze in as much good advice and information about life as he could in the short amount of time left to him. He didn’t hedge, because he knew he was running out of time. When I was 16, he seemed a little brutal to me, but honest. I didn’t understand why he would allow me to have boyfriends, or drink, or smoke pot, unlike other parents. Now I see that he was trying to protect and guide me before I was left on my own. Later in life, I saw how much he helped me, and I try to be as honest with my daughter as my father was with me. Not as brutal, because as far as I know, I have all the time in the world. Anyway, that was what I was trying to show in the novel. The strangest thing about the making of the movie was this: James Ivory always saw it as a memoir. He copied, and I mean exactly, the furniture, paintings, silver, lamps, rugs, that are still in my mother’s house on Long Island, mostly Louis XIII furniture they brought back from Paris when we returned to the States in 1975. When James Ivory had this stuff made in Paris, and put on the set there, and sent me photographs (I was about to give birth to Eyrna and couldn’t go) I almost fainted. He so exactly reproduced our home, but then certain things weren’t right, were out of place, or the wrong color, that it felt like one of those weird dreams when you’re in your own bedroom, you open the door and you’re in the Sahara or something. Just too weird. Even weirder when my husband and I took five-week-old Eyrna down to the set in Wilmington, NC. We walked into a house on the water and there was all the furniture from my own child­hood home!

Funny thing, my best childhood friend, Jamie Bruce, who directs movies and TV shows, called me after he saw the movie. He was speechless. The only thing he could articulate was, “Your dad was sleeping on the wrong side of the bed.” That’s how weird it felt to him, and he was only a guest in our house. And yet. And yet, I never considered the book a memoir. I suppose I expected James Ivory to visually make it all up. But he wanted the film to be an exact replication of my Paris home in the sixties and seventies, correct in every detail, and I didn’t disabuse him of this no­tion. I just kind of went along, accepting, almost with surprise, that he and Ismail Merchant, the producer, saw it as a very slightly veiled memoir, and intended to market it that way. I guess I realized at that moment, in retrospect how much of the truth really was in that book. And then here came the problem: the public expected some kind of roman a clef, a “Daddy Dearest” story, a spilling of the dirt. There was none of that in the film. Secondly, it was not a biography of a famous writer, but a child’s view of life growing up in a foreign country with a famous writer father, and the adoption of a French child into that family. I think it made
a good story. I still do.

And yes, my friend Beverly, I think it is extraordinarily strange that we both had movies made of our lives — or at least of two people extremely similar to ourselves who lived parallel lives to ours. I think it’s even stranger that we both went to Wesleyan at the same time (though we never met there, we probably passed each other a million times) and then to Columbia, where we became good friends. And how about my visit to San Miguel, which I planned before I knew you had moved there? Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous. What’s next for you now? Are you planning to write a novel?

Beverly
How surreal that you wrote a novel and the movie people went nuts duplicating the physical world exactly, while I wrote a memoir and the movie people simply used it and the photos I gave them as inspiration for their own visions. But then Merchant and Ivory are not exactly Hollywood.

You said earlier that your last two books were not autobiographical. I am sorry to say of your five books, I missed reading your fourth, but I did read your fifth, Speak Now. It definitely is not your life, and the plot is completely made up. It seems to me that many novelists write about themselves in their first or their first few books to process their experi­ence. Eventually their demons are exorcised and that need evaporates. I think that’s happened to me, too. I am writing a third memoir, which I think of as the last in a trilogy. And when I’m done, I hope to write a novel. In fact, I’ve begun two, one historical and another vaguely autobiographical but with a plot. I hope I really do finish them. The only fiction I ever sold is a kid’s book about a mouse. And I wrote that one because my therapist told me I had a fiction block, that I was afraid of my audience, and that I might not be so intimidated if I broke the ice by writing for children. The theory is that my fiction block began when I was twelve and wrote a pretend letter to my best friend. I wrote it as though it was from a boy we both had a crush on. My father found it. When I said I made it up, he accused me of lying, slapped my face, and sent me to my room saying, “No daughter of mine…” Condemned for my first work of fiction, placed under suspicion for being a lying little hussy for the rest of my adolescent life. I take this as a challenge. I MUST write a novel.

And what about you? What next?

Kaylie
A few years ago, I got really mad at a writer I ad­mire when he wrote a New York Times column on writing saying that he didn’t trust any writer who complained that writing a novel was hard work. He just infuriated me. Not only do I find writing a novel hard work, I find it psychologically challenging. It takes over my life. I become obsessed with the book, at the expense of my family. I’m extremely grateful to be able to do it, I’ll tell you that. Writing and teaching writing is a great life. I don’t have to take a whole lot of shit from anyone. I get to go places like San Miguel de Allende!

When I’m in the process of writing a novel, I’m living in an alternate reality. I love it so much — the book, the process — that reality interferes. Now I have a seven-year-old daughter and a kind, supportive, loving husband. They need me. My little girl needs me. I grew up with a writer who let nothing and no one step in the way of his work. It was his life’s passion. While I was writing Speak Now, one day, my daughter came home from nursery school with her baby sitter, and came running to me as I sat at my computer, and I angrily pushed her away. The look of devastation on her face said it all, and I realized that I care more about her than I do about anything in the world. So I turned off the computer, and learned to meditate for twenty minutes before I see her. I finished Speak Now and decided to take a break from novels. Now I’m writ­ing short stories and articles. I have a novel in my head, but I’m resisting starting it. Eyrna will only be little once. Soon, before I know it, she’ll be away, having her own life, and I’ll have all the time in the world. I’m trying to teach myself to be less obsessed, less driven by my work. I’m gearing up to start this new book, but I’m not quite there yet. I even have a working title, The Anger Meridian. This comes from my Salvadoran massage therapist, who says that when you wake up at 4AM, it’s very hard to go back to sleep, because that’s the anger meridian. For years, I’d wake up at 4AM and have no idea why, and not be able to go back to sleep. Now I often sleep through the night. I guess I’m getting better!

Beverly
Better? You’re great! I was not such an atten­tive mother as you, and still I had the idea that I could not truly write until my son went off to college. And because I believed this was true, that’s pretty much what happened. I admire your absolute will to write. Writing is not easy, novel or memoir, and that kind of will and desire is what it takes. I am SO happy to have the opportunity to teach writing with you in San Miguel. I think we’re going to learn a few things ourselves.

****

For additional interviews by each of the authors, visit these links:

http://www.lizzymorrow.org/InterviewBeverlyDonofrio.html
http://wiredforbooks.org/kayliejones/