An interesting reader question came today about my fiction piece The River published in the book I co-edited with Andrea Buchanan, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclinded (Seal Press, 2006). People often wonder where fiction writers get their ideas--how much is "real" and how much is "made up." So, I tried to explain that in my reply:

Question: I read one of your literary pieces entitled, The River this morning.  It truly moved me, and I am curious as to your inspiration.  It was so gripping.  My half sister is bipolar and my brother took his life at age 29.  However, my brother's death was drug related.  I can remember when, shortly before he died, he checked himself into a stress center.  He called me from the hospital and told me he didn't belong there.  He said he saw all these crazy people, which made him feel crazy and worse than ever.  As it turned out, he was allowed to go home over the weekend to wash his clothes and such but he drove straight to the woods and, well, ended it.  Was there someone close to you that motivated the piece?
 
Answer: I'm glad you liked The River. I wrote the piece because there are so many stories out there about mother poets/writers/artists who commit suicide--and real life examples like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton--that I wanted to rewrite the tale with a positive ending. I wanted to show how motherhood could potentially save the poet/writer/artist instead of destroying her.

My experience of becoming a mother was extremely positive. Somehow, as I was growing a 10 pound baby, I also grew an inch taller, became a shoe size larger, and produced a new set of synaptic pathways that helped me become more creative at the same time I became more grounded and whole. Becoming a mother changed my life so much for the better, and I wanted to write about that. I end the story with the character making the decision to live, but I don't show how motherhood changed her in other ways. If I were to write the next chapter, I would show her starting to write poetry again, or starting to paint--something creative. I would show her rebirth into a fuller and better life as she births her child.

I am not the character in the story, nor does she represent any one person that I know. Dana is an invention, and I took her name from Dana Scully in the X-Files because I see this character a lot like that one. They share a driven personality that doesn't allow much time for the creative, and they both are transformed by desire for a child. So, while the Dana I created is not me, I did take parts of my life, characteristics of people I knew who suffered from mental illness, and elements I saw in fictional characters, and then I combined them into a fictional tale that is a lie to get at an important truth--the truth that motherhood, to me, is a miracle--that I can't seem to express as clearly as I would like. Because miracles are, by definition, mysteries.

To me, literature is an attempt to get at those unsayable and unknowable mysteries, and fiction sometimes can get closer than nonfiction can. Nonfiction is controlled by my memory of what happened. In fiction, I can control who the character is, what she says, what she does. I can put her in situations where she acts in ways that prove the point I want to make. Fiction provides me more freedom, though I also enjoy writing nonfiction.