by IGMS
FROST: I'll pretend none of it is autobiographical, but that isn't exactly true, of course. It's just that when you're not writing stuff that is clearly memoir, or something that can be clearly pointed at and said, "Oh this is your life, this is your family," when you are writing in the fantasy genre, you are really disguising the autobiographical material. You can really cover it up with lots and lots of special effects and bandages and so forth, and no one will recognize it.
It's funny. Back to Swarthmore. A writer named Elizabeth Strout was here last eek, who has a fine novel out right now called Olive Kitteridge, and we were talking about memoirs and such, and I made the comment to her that she probably got letters and phone calls from people saying, "This must be about your life." She said, in fact, one woman had approached her at a signing and said, "That's not the way it happened." She was sort of flummoxed and she's going, "But, I made this up. There is no 'that's the way it happened.'" There was no reality attached to it. It's all fiction. It is not autobiography in any way, supposedly.
Then the other people at the table looked at me and said, "Well, you write science fiction, so what about your autobiographical stuff?" I said, "There's none whatsoever in there." Of course that's a lie. But I'm not going to tell you where it is.
SCHWEIZTER: Then you get the reader who comes up to you and says, "But magic isn't really like that . . ."
[FROST makes groaning noise.]
SCHWEIZTER: Or worse yet, they say, "Yes, you've described it accurately."
FROST: [Laughs.] It's a little more dangerous when they come up to you and say, "Yeah, you got the werewolves exactly the way they really are." Well, that's troubling. You need to get a life. You need to seek help.
There's always somebody who is going to cross the line, but I'm not worried about it. Not yet anyway. If they come up to the table and they actually have the Necronomicon with them, then I'll look for the exit.
SCHWEIZTER: Which edition? There are so many.
FROST: Is there one written in blood?
SCHWEIZTER: Well, I heard a story about something that happened to Clive Barker once. A guy came up to him at an autographing, set down a copy of The Books of Blood, got out a razor, slashed his own wrist, bled on the book, then handed Barker a pen and said, "Here, sign it."
FROST: Did Clive sign it?
SCHWEIZTER: Yes. What he said afterwards was, "When faced with a lunatic who is holding something sharp, you give him what he wants."
FROST: [Laughing.] Okay . . . No, I never had anything like that occur. In some ways I think fantasy writers may be better grounded than some of their readers are. We know that we are making this thing up. I am not sure all the people that read horror and fantasy do know that you're making it up. There's surely someone who thinks these things are possible in a way that the person writing it probably does not.
SCHWEITZER: This is probably the reason science fiction writers tend to be so skeptical about flying saucers. We can do that better.
FROST: Yes, I'll show you a flying saucer . . .
SCHWEIZTER: Getting back to the point about autobiography, maybe what you do is imagine what your life would be like if one of your family members was an alien or something. You take what might have happened in your life, then allow something to intrude that hopefully didn't.
FROST: When I wrote Fitcher's Brides, that's about three sisters, each of whom marries the Bluebeard figure in my novel. The first two of the sisters are, as much as I could make them, very much 19th century women. They have the phobias, concerns, and beliefs of the day. The third one, who is the trickster, Kate, who outsmarts the Bluebeard figure, is in a lot of ways a soapbox for me. I get to say a lot of things that I wanted to through her. So there is definitely an element of autobiography in her. There is a story I wrote called "Collecting Dust," which is in the Attack of the Jazz Giants collection, and that's about a little boy whose parents who are working themselves to death, and deteriorating, literally crumbling away to dust over time right in front of him. The relationship between him and his sister is very much based on the relationship I had with my sister growing up, except that I was the older brother, so it is not autobiography, and yet I was definitely without a doubt tapping into my real childhood with my real sister (sorry, Deb). So, yes, there are elements in there, no question. I can look around and see them.
When I finished Tain, I had gotten divorced in the midst of that, and my ex-wife, when she read the book, said she saw a lot of us, of our relationship, in the relationship between King Ailill and his wife Maeve, the king and queen and Connacht. I thought, well, that's pretty weird because I would never have put those things in. I don't know if it's true. I don't know if she was reading that into the book because of what she had gone through, or if I was embedding it unconsciously. I don't think it matters. If it works in the service of the book, that's grand. It doesn't matter if I recognize it or not.
SCHWEIZTER: Surely what the fantasy writer does is make something fantastic out of the stuff of life as it is lived. We all have the same emotions. You inevitably put the material of life, however strangely transformed, into the story.
FROST: That's interesting. I was just reading some essays about writing, and one "how to" writer, I won't mention her name, in one of her chapters in her book about writing takes science fiction to task and claims that all sf is nothing more than didactic stories, stories that have a point to make or are trying to teach you something, basically lumping sf in with parables. She's making this blanket statement that all science fiction is like "X", and a result of that is claiming that science fiction doesn't have the richness of characters, doesn't include characters that are based on life that's been lived, and I'm reading this essay and I'm going, Clearly you haven't read much science fiction, or maybe any science fiction. You've taken your impression of science fiction from TV shows or something. That struck me as unfair, to say the least. Utterly false.
I think that all the relationships and characters you are writing about are based on life lived, and the argument has been made that by the time you are five years old you have already experienced all the emotions that are necessary to write fiction anyway. You've experienced love, hate, abandonment, resentment - everything you can think of - everything you could possibly plug in as far as emotional states. You've already been through all of them. We're all human beings. Those are the only things you get to tap, regardless of whether you're writing fantastic fiction or contemporary American literature set in Poughkeepsie.
SCHWEIZTER: What are you working on now?
FROST: Well, in accordance with what I said earlier, I am writing a mystery novel, which is something I've never done. I am going in a different direction. But it has fantastic elements in it because I can't help that.
SCHWEIZTER: Is it really a mystery novel, then?
FROST: The difference is it's not a Scooby-Doo ending. It won't be that it looks like it's supernatural all the way through the book, and then we get to the end and "Oh, my goodness! It was just this robber dressed up in a clown suit." I promise not to go that way. So it's a mystery, but it's a strange mystery.
SCHWEIZTER: What you seem to be describing is a fantasy novel with mystery tropes.
FROST: Yes, that's probably true, but how they market it, I don't know. The borderlines between genres have broken down so much that I don't know which flavor of the week, sub-category this is. Mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, horror. I don't know. I don't care either. It will change by next week, as will the flavor of the week.
SCHWEIZTER: You could always claim it's Literature, but that doesn't get you out on the shelves unless you're already famous enough to be a brand name.
FROST: I am weeks away from that.
SCHWEIZTER: I hope so. Thanks, Greg.
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IGMS, IGMS Issue 13