riters lie.
As a fiction writer, this doesn't bother me. It comforts
me. When I write fiction, I only have to be true to myself and
my imagination, to the characters I create and the events that
I, and they, cause. In fiction, I'm God, without quarreling
apostles, without competing deities, without any foot-dragging
villagers.
Characters may be slow to emerge, but they don't slam the
door in my face because they didn't like the question I asked.
I might have to research village life in 18th-century Wales,
but I don't have to worry that my presence in the National
Library of Wales might change the very story I'm trying to
understand. The changes Wales brings about in me as a fiction
writer are my problem; the rifts that arise between my
characters and their actions are mine to resolve. I can change
the character (hard), or change the action (easy), or scuttle
both and make sure that the character in question is viciously
dispatched, and by my own hand (my favorite).
But with my first book of nonfiction, "Normal," I
discovered that changes within me, especially changes of
opinion, concerned my subjects as much as, or more than, they
did me. I couldn't always create reasonable, meaningful
bridges between character and action, because the actual
people were blowing up those bridges with every anecdote they
told me.
Disturbing glimpses of unexpected traits, puzzling and even
bizarre behaviors happen all the time in real life, and I
could not just change the character or the action. In
nonfiction, one detects, one intuits, one asks — I ask, I ask
endlessly, and have found that people give persuasive, elegant
answers, or truthful answers, and very occasionally answers
that are both — but in nonfiction, one has to juggle the idea
of truth and the pursuit of it with the fact of never knowing,
even when it seems that I do, even when it's reasonable to
imagine that I do.
It's the not knowing that drew me to my first nonfiction
book, about transsexuals, cross-dressers and the intersexed. I
knew my own liberal prejudices (people who are different are
not bad, but surely they are really different); I knew my own
common sense (only crazy people and movie stars have multiple
surgeries to remove healthy tissue); and I knew my own blind
spots (surely it was ridiculous, and cruel, to suggest that
intersexed babies should not have early and transforming
surgeries).
I didn't know that exploring the truth of some people's
lives, and the stories they had to tell, would overturn my
prejudices and my common sense and poke a sharp stick into the
blind spots. I didn't know that these real people's
complexities and poignancies and humor would move me to write
a small book about them, putting aside my own stories for a
while to write theirs.
I met every kind of transsexual man: apolitical accountants
and feminist truck drivers, devoted husbands and wayward ones.
I met heterosexual transsexual Jews and bisexual transsexual
Buddhists. They all seemed to have the usual human assortment
of baggage and defenses, plus the burden of childhoods spent
in rather deeper alienation than even those of us who became
writers.
I met dozens of heterosexual cross-dressers and their
wives, many of whom struggled with unhappy or disappointing
marriages, making them a lot like most other couples. I met a
few couples in which the thing that made them most different
from other people was not the husband's cross-dressing but
their deep, shining happiness with each other. We had such a
good time over Rob Roys, that I almost forgot my notebook.
Knowing almost nothing about the intersexed, I got both a
medical and a moral education. I met people who were never
ashamed or discomfitted by being intersexed and people whose
lives were almost destroyed by shame. I met people who talked
about their medical trials with humor and confidence and
people who asked to meet with me and couldn't say a word.
And in all those conversations, all those interviews and
observations, truth trickled through, barely visible at one
corner, sparkling at the next, like a creek at the end of
summer. I chose: whom to talk to, whom to quote, whom to
describe, whom to pass over. And they chose: where we met,
what they said, who they introduced me to, which photographs
and scars and articles they showed me. I wanted to tell the
truth, and so did they, and it was impossible for us to do so
without choosing which truths to tell, and knowing that when
you leave something out, you may come pretty damned close to
lying.
When I write fiction, I close my eyes and type. I pretend I
have no parents, no spouse and no children. I tell myself that
no one will ever read what I've written, that everyone will
understand the conventions of fiction and know that the
schizophrenic sister, the indifferent mother, the adulterous
lovers are not me and not mine. With this book, I never had
that luxury. I had to look into the eyes of people I liked, as
they said things that I thought were untrue, and when people
said things that were so brave and true and terrible that I
wondered how they had found the strength not only to live but
thrive, I had to keep my own tears from cutting off theirs.
There were interviews that turned into parties, interviews
that turned into confessionals and interviews that turned into
visits to the mall. And almost all of the stories surprised
me, with the twists of fate, staggeringly long arms of
coincidence, repetition of patterns of the kind that make
great case studies and great opera, heroism in people who had
been, for most of their lives, contented doormats,
uncharacteristic acts that changed everything that followed,
all things of which fiction allows us only a little.
Fiction would have failed these people, so I chose the
other.
