On Fathers

As I read my friends’ page today on live journal, I was struck by how many people were blogging on fathers. I’ve often thought about my own subliminal treatment of fathers in my writing. In ESCAPING INTO THE NIGHT, Halina’s father left when she was a baby and all she has is a picture and her musings. In PLAYING DAD’S SONG, Gus’s father died on September 11. And in my unpublished novels, both children’s and adult, the fathers don’t fare much better. I have a father who murdered his wife whom his children have totally disowned, a flaky musician father who leaves his teenage daughter to deal alone with her mother’s mental illness, and a father who committed suicide. I also have a couple of books where the fathers are absent or unimportant, but only one of my yet-to-be published books, LEFTIES, has a visionary father who inspires his son through his work in the civil rights movement.

So why is this? I have nothing but positive things to say about my own father, who was an active dad before it was fashionable. As a matter of fact, while I tend to write about heavy issues, I’ve had a relatively happy life. But I agree with MP Barker (see her tag on live journal), that it’s not useful to restrict yourself to writing about your own life experience, and that we often don’t choose our characters and subjects: they choose us.

So, while I’m sure that Freud might have a field day with what my subconscious says about fathers, I’ll argue that writing is more than psychological processing. As a matter of fact, the greatest challenges come when I have to step outside of my life experience and push to get to the real emotional truth behind my fiction, whether I’ve ever experienced anything remotely like what I’m writing about, or whether I haven’t.