I’d been getting my short stories published in little magazines for many years, but friends would invariably ask, “When are you going to write that novel?” as if it was an errand I had simply forgotten, as if it was a suit I needed to pick up at the dry cleaner.  Alice Munro, by the way, was still fielding this question when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013!  I mentioned Ms. Munro’s name a lot when this issue came up.  If she could take it, then so could I.  In fact, I had written a novel some years back, a still unpublished one, a family saga set mostly in Iceland.  But even as I was writing it, I considered myself a short story writer attempting a novel, rather than the other way around.  I was probably getting too bogged down in labels, but luckily it didn’t impact my process — if that’s the word for it.  I don’t have the most conventional background for a fiction writer, at least if you look at the author bios in the lit mags where I’ve been published.  Meaning that I don’t have an MFA or teach anywhere and my jobs have never been specifically in the literary field.  However, I had been lucky enough to have signed with an encouraging agent and to possess enough energy and persistence to write at all hours, which quite often means in the middle of the night.  As for the novel vs. short story question, I honestly didn’t set out to write a novel.  Underburn started as a text.  I have close friends in California who tragically lost their home to a wildfire in 2018.  They had moved in with family temporarily.  It was a terribly sad time, but rather heroically they were trying to find some humor in their living situation ― landing with elderly parents who were somewhat challenging and set in their ways.   They told me a couple of funny stories, so I turned one of them into a microfiction piece and sent it to them as a text.  I think they were amused.  Around this same time, I had stumbled upon Nancy Sinatra from 1966, singing her hit, These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ on YouTube with some backup dancers.  I started wondering about those dancers and the lives they have led since that performance (I think about movie extras too!) and how one of them just might have been impacted by a wildfire all these years later.  That gave me Iris, my first character, and got the plot moving.  I was drawn to the idea of the past intruding on all the characters in this story and of having the action take place on both coasts.  Still, as I began writing it, I thought it would end up being a short story . . . and then a long story . . . and then a novella.  Truth be told, the characters just kept speaking to me, as pretentious as that might sound.  I knew it was turning into a novel when I started dreaming about them, when they started debating me in my sleep, and joking around, like we’d known each other forever.  The characters would pop into my head during lockdown Zoom meetings and while I was doing the laundry.  I took a lot of notes.  I’ve written stories that were difficult for me from a technical standpoint or an emotional one, however, Underburn was the most joyful of my writing experiences.  I was so grateful to lose sleep over it.  I still think about the characters, living independently, now that they have moved on without me. I catch myself wondering how they’ve managed during the pandemic, or how they’re making ends meet.  I am absolutely thrilled to see Underburn find a home at Delphinium, and for me to finally publish that novel.  Ultimately, though, it comes back to the work itself, however you choose to categorize it, and the idea of putting something out in the world that hasn’t existed before.

 

 

In the spring of 2018, as I was finishing the second year of my three-year MFA program, I came into the office of my graduate advisor and said, “For my thesis, I’d like to write a book about growing up in Soviet Russia and being an immigrant in America. Obviously, it’ll be informed by my own experience, but do you think I should make it fiction or nonfiction?”

“That’s easy,” my advisor said. “Definitely nonfiction. You have an interesting story to tell, and memoirs sell really well these days.”

It did sound pretty easy: You tell the story you already know the way you remember it, no research required, and voila—a memoir! My first book had been a biography, so I told myself I knew what I was doing. I began to outline, to write the first scenes, and immediately ran into a problem. Or rather, problems.

For one, writing a memoir is not like spilling your guts out in a therapy session. To make a book, the long, twisty, messy, connection- and contradiction-packed story we call life requires a kind of culling that will yield a dynamic, digestible plot, but when the story is yours, it’s hard to cull. Everything seems important. Everything that’s ever happened has culminated in what you are.

For two, memory—at least, my memory—is not only fickle but full of gaps, and mine was lacking quite a few crucial “plot points.” Clearly, research would be required, some of it involving interviews: with the people in my life (who may or may not be thrilled by the idea) and with the people who are no longer in my life (whom I may or may not be able to find).

It was contemplating those interviews that made me realize there existed a problem number three, and it was a doozy: How do I portray other people, real people, in a real way, without hurting, distorting, or offending them? When I put a sliver of somebody else’s messy story on the page alongside mine, will I be inevitably unfair to them? Will I by default simplify them? Will I have to—deliberately or not—reveal secrets others would rather keep hidden?

Of course, authors do this all the time. Memoirists paint their companions, friends, and enemies with ruthless color and merciless perspective. But only having plunged into my own memoir did I realize that the process requires courage, a nuanced navigation of relationships, and running the risk of destroying those relationships. It became quickly apparent to me that I didn’t have this sort of courage, and so, The Light of Seven Days was born: a novel about a woman who is not at all like me, yet whose story shares with mine everything important.

A friend once jokingly suggested that I should put a standard disclaimer at the front of the book: This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. This would not, however, be true. While all my characters are fictional, some of them are based, to a greater or lesser degree, on the actual persons I’ve encountered, loved, detested, admired, resented, and missed. As for events, while none of them are factual, almost all of them are true. The resemblance this novel bears to actuality is never coincidental.

I’m sure I don’t need to expound here on the difference between fact and truth, but writing The Light of Seven Days, I found myself reflecting on the concept again and again. I found myself looking for the permeable boundary, for the balance between the two. This fraught liaison is essentially the root and goal of literature, isn’t it? Fiction takes facts and changes them, molds them, recoats and reshapes them, cuts them to pieces and splices them together in a verbal autopsy of a human life, all so it can expose their deeper truth. Their essence. The part of a fact that matters beyond the author. The universal seed of the particular. By this logic, all literature is myth: “What happened” becomes “what happens,” and that perpetual happening causes us to feel empathy, to relate to characters who are as different from us as we can imagine, to discover ourselves in foreign settings and dramas we haven’t lived. It is our guide to the human condition.

In one sense, The Light of Seven Days is a work of historical fiction: It is partly set in the context of a collapsed civilization, a realm that no longer exists. I ended up doing quite a bit of research, after all—filling the gaps in my memory, in my understanding of the intricacies of classical ballet, and in my knowledge of several aspects of the late Soviet Union. At the same time, the book is partly autobiographical: My protagonist and I both grew up Jewish in Leningrad; lived through Chernobyl, the Afghan war, and perestroika; escaped to America from the rise of Russian neo-Nazism; and made a home here. Having both entered intensive professional training as children—she as a dancer, I as a concert pianist—we endured many of the same struggles and epiphanies. Still, in the end, what matters here is neither history nor my own story. Those are just facts. The truths I tried to mine from those facts have to do not with what happened but with what happens: How we survive in a world where love walks hand in hand with murder. How we are connected across centuries, oceans, races, and ideas. What it means to have an identity and why we crave it. What it means to have faith. What lengths we go to so as not to be alone in the world.

In Hebrew, the term for a book’s release is yetziah la’or, literally its “exit to the light.” Over the nearly four years since my first scribbled notes, As Figs in Autumn has been for me many different things, and I expect that after exiting to the light it will continue to be more. As I look back on the project, I am told that Delphinium’s readers enjoy receiving insights on the author’s process; it will be my privilege to share some window into mine.

Here I could only begin with what began the process, what required it. Any memoir, I believe, carries an aspect of restoration for its author. As distinguished from an autobiography taking on a life’s entire arc, a memoir declares a more targeted mission, addressing itself to the unfinished business of a particular time. To write on that time is a matter of self-reclamation: never, of course, by changing the past, but by reclaiming one’s voice and presence—indeed, humanity—where one was made to feel without them before. In that act alone of revisiting, renewing feeling and meaning on one’s own terms, reasserting what he earlier lacked, he restores wholeness where there was fracture before. “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage,” goes a lyric I’ve always loved, and yet I find it is not the perfect truth, for in that singing itself, there is a most un-ratlike freedom which was not yet won before he found the words.

In this view, it cannot surprise that so many memoirs focus on their authors’ times of helplessness: times of, above all, lack of agency in their own lives. Memoirs of addiction, or of grave illness, or of actual imprisonment all represent frequent themes. In the case of a soldier, who is stripped—not just by force of circumstance but by force of law—of the standing to feel and think and act of his own accord, it is a true act of restoration (and audacity) to recount these same events, yet now with a subversively human eye. This is a function served even by a soldier’s private writing, whether or not he goes on to place his words in public view. Likewise, this being the first mission of my writing, it was for me at first, then for a small circle of friends, well before its evolution to this yetziah la’or.

As Figs in Autumn is a book on identity, and on loss, and on family, and on home, though perhaps first it is a book on seeing each one of these through the soldier’s reordered world. Soldierhood, as I have written, was a place of yearning—and once ready, I found myself pouring page after page in order to record that yearning, and to make sense of what was yearned for.

Readers of the book may recall my wonder at the Hebrew language’s twinning of the words for “whole” (shalem) and “peace” (shalom), its implication that a state of wholeness and a state of peace are an identical essence, for the individual no less than for the wider world. Such a conviction—that is, retelling as a method of becoming more whole—was what carried this project from birth to its exit to the light, and I am thrilled to be retelling every word.

*Smashing Pumpkins. Lyrics to “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.” Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. 1995.

Read More about As Figs in Autumn: https://www.delphiniumbooks.com/book/as-figs-in-autumn/