The World Has Changed (17 page)

 

J.S.B.: Isabel, you’ve also talked or mentioned that your books have come out of the heavier feelings in your life, not the lighter ones. Is that right?

 

I.A.: Yeah, I feel that all my books come from a very deep emotion that has been with me for a very long time. And those emotions are usually painful. It’s abandonment, pain, anger, death, violence, a lot of violence in my life. But there are also joyful emotions that go with the writing and all the senses, the sensuality of writing, the lives of the characters, the storytelling, all that is such an orgy. It’s always pornographic, those moments that I spend alone with my characters in my bedroom in solitude doing whatever we want. It’s great, almost those fantasies that I can never do with any men, I mean they are so limited. And then you find these guys, these characters in novels, that are just relentless, to say the least. So there’s a mixture of both things, the love and the pain.

And sometimes I have a great idea for a book, like now for example, I’ve been planning my new novel. I always start my books on January 8. And it’s not only superstition, it’s also discipline. And I had everything planned for January 8 to start a wonderful novel that I know will be a success, it will be wonderful, my publishers would be delighted. It has
everything in it. And I also would have a lot of help because my mom was going to help me with the research. But then when I turned on the computer on January 8, and I wrote the first sentence with an open heart, I realized that I was not going to write that book, at least not now, and maybe never. And the book that I have inside, like a pregnancy in my belly really, in my womb, not in my mind, is quite a different book from all the other books I have written before. A book that my publishers will hate, and probably, maybe, will never be published. But it’s a book that I really need to write because it comes out of so much pain that if I don’t write it I’ll die. So that’s what it is about. It’s about separation, and death, and loss. So it’s always a very heavy emotion, very deep, and very painful. However, the process of writing even if the thing is heavy is wonderful. It’s wonderful.

I was talking today to a writer who says, “I’m always terrified that I won’t be able to finish this book.”

And I said, “What are you worried about? Writing is like making love; don’t worry about the orgasm, just worry about the process. That’s what it is about.”

So just enjoy the process of writing and don’t worry about the end. Unfortunately it happens sometimes.

 

J.S.B.: Well, I have yet to write anything fictional in the sense that both of you write fiction, but it seems to me, when I hear about your process that you really live with your characters; they seem to be quite real folks that communicate and move in and out of your psyche. And I think that I’ve ended up writing in a sort of in-between place in which I write nonfiction, but because I bring so much myth and metaphor, real stories from real people inform me about the meaning of the myth. And I do in my work and in my writing have to get into the place of what I am writing, and in an imaginative way, drawing upon some familiar experience that is like what I am writing of. It’s the same process of intuitively feeling my way through my patients’ stories, is to touch in with something that is like that, that then can kind of move in and expand into an emphatic understanding. If I can’t feel what someone is telling me, I don’t get it. And so I know when I write and maybe similar in some ways to your—I’d be interested in how similar it is—but like if I am writing about a character, a myth character, whether it be, say, Brünhilde or Demeter or Persephone, I move into that archetype, so that the first time
I wrote
Goddesses in Everywoman
, every single chapter was written in the style of that particular archetype. And so Aphrodite was beautiful and flowing, and Persephone was very vague, and Athena was very mental and logical and thinking. And then I had an editorial input that said, “Well, if you’re gonna talk about how Hera is with marriage, you have to say what the other archetypes do too.” And so then it required that I move in and think about, feel about how the archetypes would be. Think about women I knew who embodied this, what it was like. And there was a weaving kind of experience so that the women who were with each archetype were sort of in the room with me, and the part of me that was like them moved into it too. And so there was a kind of fictional quality that—

 

A.W.: Something that I always wanted to ask you, though—does it bother you that they’re all separate and not all of these things in one? I always get really kind of confused when I’m thinking of this because they always feel like they’re fractured, no?

 

J.S.B.: Well, you have different characters in your books, and each character, you have to get into them in order to express them. People tell me their dreams, I think about my own dreams, getting to each character. And so it’s like through the pieces, I get what the whole story is. So I don’t end up with that feeling.

 

A.W.: But I was talking specifically about the goddesses, that if one is vague, and the other, one is the hearth keeper, I mean, what about the one who has everything?

 

J.S.B.: [laughing] That’s rather pretentious, Alice.

 

A.W.: But you know, what was interesting, I was thinking as you were talking was how when I create a character, what is always the crowning moment for me is when I am somewhere in the world and my character walks in the door. And then I think, “Well, yes, you know, I knew you were there.”

 

I.A.: In my case it works the other way around. I don’t think I make up the characters from my imagination. I’m always inspired on someone
that has walked through the door before. And somehow I relate to that character very strongly because I can—maybe I had some experience in my own life that is related to the character. And when I see the person I recognize the things that I want to write about.

 

J.S.B.: Now I’m curious, because I know in your current book, that I know is coming out in May, that you’ve written about a woman I’ve met, who inspired you, and she’s your friend. And how is it, how does that work? How does it work that you write a book and you take your character through the story and this is your friend who inspired it, and there is some of her, there must be some of her story in it; how does it feel to be one of your friends who ends up in your books?

 

I.A.: I think that you should ask her. I think she hates it, by the way. Really, I have two persons that served as models, and [from] those two lives I created the character in the book. But of course my friend is the strongest part of that, let’s say the strongest goddess in the character. And she told me her life very generously, and I told her that I was going to use her, because I tell this to all my friends, that everything they say can be used against them. I am an insatiable story hunter. So they know from the beginning, they know. And so she told me the story and I added some stuff that she didn’t like very much, and I asked her if I could use her name in the book. And at the beginning she said yes, and when she heard the details of what I was writing she said, “No, you better find another name.” So actually I did. And this person is in this room right now. I’m not going to ask her to stand up. So that’s the way it works with me; it’s always real people and real stories that I somehow transform.

 

A.W.: Well sometimes that’s true with me too, but I think there’s just a special feeling when you imagine someone so real. It’s as if you draw them out of the air, I mean it really is as if there are spirits, and that you then create them.

 

I.A.: But I think there is a prophetic or clairvoyant quality in writing, and it comes from the fact that one is alone for so many hours concentrated on something. And you start like living the story. I have found out that, I have found out years later that something that I had written that I thought was made up was true, was always true. And always the
confrontation with that thing scares me very much because I feel that there is something going out, something happening behind my back that is awful or wonderful, I don’t know, and that I can’t control. And the best example I have for this is in my second novel; my second novel is based on a political crime that happened in Chile, they killed lots of people, but this particular case is fifteen persons that were killed in a place near Santiago. And this happened in 1973 during the military coup. The bodies of these persons were hidden in an abandoned mine, and they were found five years later when I was already living in exile. I could not return to Chile. And the trials in Chile were military trials, and all the information was kept secret. So it was very difficult to research. Oh, I got some information, not a lot. And the gaps I filled with imagination. I thought it was imagination, but I was very angry, and I was very much into the story. And I spent two years really dealing with this in a very deep way. The book was published, and years later, four years later, I was able to return to my country, and I had a wonderful welcome. I was staying in my mom’s house. And then one day a man came to speak with me, and he said that he absolutely needed to ask me something. When I wrote this story one of the things that I could not explain was how the Catholic church found out about these bodies and could intervene before the police could stop them, and before they could close the mine. And I made up a story that a priest had heard this in confession, and had gone to the mine and taken pictures. And when my mom read the book—she’s my editor—she said, “This is totally unbelievable, because in a country with a dictatorship, no one would dare go during curfew to a place fifty kilometers from Santiago, driving a motorcycle, open the mine, take the pictures, and come back with the proofs to the crime. Now, you don’t do that kind of thing.”

I said, “Mom, this is a literary license, so we leave it that way.”

Four years later when this man came to talk to me, he was a Jesuit priest, and he said that he had heard in confession that the bodies were in the mine, and he went there on a motorcycle, and he opened the mine, took the photographs, wrapped them in his blue sweater as is told in the book, and drove back with photographs to the cardinal. And I had this cold thing in my stomach. And I thought “What is this?”

Like, he said, “The only person who knows about this is the cardinal, how do you know?”

And I said, “I don’t know, I suppose I had a dream.”

And he never believed me because he thought that somehow, that I had, the cardinal had spoken or something. And he couldn’t understand why he had not been caught by the police. And so I feel that there is—when you say that the character walks through the door, you’ve met the character before.

 

A.W.: Yes. You know, I’m so happy to know though that in confession there’s actually something really said. But really, seriously, I mean because I’ve often thought how much more forceful the church would be if people really told the truth in confession. And if they said something about what was really happening in this society as opposed to who they were sleeping with . . . you know, and things like that.

 

I.A.: But I think there is a lot of information that goes on in confession, but they’re not supposed to, I suppose for a psychologist, the same thing, you receive information and you can’t use it. I don’t know, I’m not a priest, and my last confession was when I was like fifteen, and it was just about sex. At that time I was the last virgin in town probably, so it was a very hard confession.

 

A.W.: But you know, the other thing I was thinking as you were speaking is that when I was writing
The Temple of my Familiar
, that whole period was so amazing for me because I felt that I had really connected with the ancient knowledge that we all have, and that it was really a matter not of trying to learn something, but of remembering. And that propelled me right through that book. And some of the things in it, honestly, I just knew them. I just knew them. I didn’t learn them. I found I knew them. And this was a great delight.

 

I.A.: I think that really we know a lot of things that come out in dreams or when we are silent, and with no noise around us. We, like, get into that knowledge somehow. And maybe that’s why writers need so much time alone. And that is so difficult to get, harder and harder.

 

J.S.B.: I think there’s something about being in the quiet and going in and seeing what comes up out of one’s innards, but I also think there’s something about how when people are with each other and speak the truth of their lives that you pick up on more than just the facts or the
story they’re telling. The book I’m writing now, in part, says something about a period of traveling with three other women on a pilgrimage. And part of the story is like
Canterbury Tales
, is that you must, as you travel to these places, tell the story of what is going on in your life to these relative strangers that are coming together to take this journey with you. And I was thinking on reexperiencing the journey, which is part of the treasure of writing . . . you get to reexperience and savor and have the experience in a different form than speeded by. And I was thinking when I was reflecting on the experience how I had learned, so I knew so much more than was ever conveyed of what the other women knew than by talk. And there was something about being in a car together, like a little car together, telling each other stories, going to sacred places, and having kind of a semipermeable ego boundary, which I think is what women often do with each other. We pick up each other’s experience. But I think there’s something about whatever the collective unconscious is that is between us and not just in our head, or not through time. We pick things up and feel them. And also I was wondering something about how writing takes being very comfortable being by yourself. It has a quality of richness and timelessness in the absorption, but it would seem to me that one of the things is that we all ethnically, you and I, Alice, in this culture are ethnically different than the majority culture.