Writing the World I Wanted
I was tinkering with this book off-and-on over the span of six years, I’d say. It died, came back, re-died, was about to be self-published in 2022, but then a publisher called and said, “Wait, here’s a book deal,” and I said, “Okay.”
(The Importance of the Short Story for Genre Writers.)
The advice of “write what you know” did not apply to the writing of this book. None of these stories I wrote happened to me in the way they’re portrayed. Some are real. They sort of happened here and there—facts tend to find a way of surviving—but for the most part it’s all wish-projection. A book about four “nobodies” who go to Harvard and stick together and find solace from their existential anxieties in each other and supplement the hard personal work one must do to grow, with shallow romances. It is real in that way. Everything else is made up.
For starters, I never went to Harvard proper. I went to Harvard Extension which is not the same as Harvard College—the College never considered Extension people as part of them, and they might have a point. I won’t go on about why I couldn’t go to a regular college of any kind, just know that my undocumented status didn’t help, and I blame the French. I was homeschooled and grew up undocumented.
Even while I was homeschooled, I always wanted to go to school. I wanted so badly to go to school that when I was little, about eight, I’d wear the same thing every day because it felt like a uniform. I’d also put all my books in a backpack. They wore uniforms in Dead Poet’s Society. They wore backpacks in Stand By Me. A few years goes by, you get older and taller, and life gets more complicated, but turns out the little-you is still in there, operating this bigger body pretending to be an adult. I still wanted to live that John Hughes movie, that so distinctly American experience called “high school” or “college.” But of course, I’m romanticizing school. Most people if asked would not describe high school as a John Hughes movie.
But it wasn’t the schooling I wanted—no one wishes that much misery upon themselves—it was the suffering part, suffering with people I wanted to suffer with. It was about finding people to add up all the inane memories into something called, “the good ole days” with. Like when Gordy and the boys went looking for this body together in Stand By Me and then years later realized what having friends at 12 really meant. When the same Richard Dreyfuss in a different movie in American Graffiti, sees the white Thunderbird from his plane and realizes he is leaving behind the good ole days. It never happened for me.
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I couldn’t find it, so in the end, I just made it all up. Writing is a wonderful way of escaping one’s discontent. In the words of a sperm-bank nurse, “a memory and a fantasy both come from the head.” I wrote what I wished to be true, and it came out into this book.
Writers are born from all sorts of backstories. The Hemingway style of experiencing pieces of an interesting life and then writing about it is the most tempting image of a writer we have. But what you do with what didn’t happen to you can be just as informative and important as what did happen to you. This was all a very vulnerable thing to talk about. I don’t know why I did it. I think we have this urge to confess because we need to prove we existed, and that need is greater than any consequence of being judged.
I’ll end with this. Earlier this year I was eating a meat pie overlooking Darling Harbor in Sydney with a wise Australian named Pace Randolph. I told him how often I think about the people I could have been and how I must watch them disappear right in front of me. He said, “I’ll think about that.”
And he did. The next day he came up to me and said he dreamt about it. He dreamt how he was in a stadium, running through the center of the field, and all along the way, every single person he ever could have been in his life was there, cheering him on, proud as hell. Every possibility for better or worse, they were so happy for what he became, and everything was okay. I like his version better than mine, but for now, this little book will have to do.
Check out Baron Ryan’s A Comedy of Nobodies here:
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