What was your worst experience sitting next to a angry stranger?
He was in his mid-fifties and not looking good on it. German. A little chunky. Wearing a red Chemise Lacoste and khakis and really awful tan runners. His gut hung over his belt. His face displayed world-weariness and a sense of vaguely suppressed distress. He had a wedding ring on his finger. He had a cheap briefcase full of paperwork. Like me he was awaiting the early flight from Berlin to Zurich. He spoke in a loud voice on the phone. His accent was thick, Bavarian. My German is reasonable. I followed little of what he was saying. Was he speaking to his boss, begging for another chance? To his wife or significant other, begging for another chance? To a grown child, begging for another chance? To a lover, begging for another chance? All range of possibilities – but the truth is: it could have been none of the above. I tried to listen in, to follow his deeply argot-laden German, to find out who he was, what he was… and, most tellingly, why he was in such clear distress at the moment. He saw me studying him, listening in. He looked up from his phone and barked at me: “Was mocheten Sir warten?” I apologized (“Entschuldigungen!”) and turned away. A few minutes later we were boarding the flight together. I turned to him and said:
“Ich hoffe, ihr Tag wird besser” (“I hope your day improves”).
He looked surprised by this statement. He stared down at his feet.
“Es wird nicht” he said (“It won’t), then added: “Aber… danke” (“But thank you”).
Remember when you next see someone in distress: every life is significant. Every life is its own novel. And we owe others empathy because we all so crave it ourselves. We all need to be reminded: we are not all alone in the dark morass that is so much of life. I was in one of my favorite cinemas in North America – the wonderful Lincoln Theatre in Damariscotta, Maine (a fast twelve minute drive from my house). I was watching a very interesting Spanish film, ‘The Good Boss’ with Javier Bardem (worth a look) and only about fifteen minutes from the end when someone several rows behind me got very sick. I turned and saw this man – late seventies I sensed – projectile vomiting and his wife running out to get the theatre manager and call the emergency services. Fortunately there is a very good hospital in Damariscotta, and the ambulance people were there in ten minutes. It seems the poor man was having a stroke (as the theatre manager told me later). After he was taken off by the ambulance man, and the theatre staff cleaned up the vomit, the film resumed.
Of course I couldn’t help but think about how, in the midst of life, something unexpected and grave can come out of nowhere and upend everything to do with your life – as this man discovered this afternoon… and as we all did as bystanders to such a life-altering situation. And yet again I couldn’t help but think: we’re all so damn fragile, aren’t we? I made an error last night and forgot to take my pills before climbing into bed. Yet I was certain that I had gulped them down. When I got up an hour later, unable to sleep, I found myself having mild panic as I considered: were the pills no longer effective? Was my insomnia triumphing over the pharmaceutical antidote to my chronic sleeplessness?
The discovery that I had simply sidestepped that essential step for decent sleep - putting the pills in my mouth and downing them - was reassuring. But sleep is an elusive country for me at the moment - and I find that part of me which so wants to surrender to the temporary oblivion of sleep and the other part of my psyche that cannot turn off.
Novelists are notorious insomniacs. The narrative mind rarely turns off. And there are always more pages to be written in the middle of the night when sleep is simply not part of the equation. I am used to functioning on fractured 'nuit blanches'. It is not how I prefer to live - but it is now part of my ongoing weather system. The great English short story writer and essayist VS Pritchett once noted that, in the United States, there was no concept of tragedy... 'Something just went wrong'.
There is more than a degree of truth in this comment. In the US we tend to think of life as a grand project, and one where we can bend the contours of fate to our own purposes. The truth is: life has the tendency to deal all of us deeply unexpected cards. How we grapple with life's inequities, its difficulties (and, at time, its tragedies), speak volumes about how we also confront difficulty. I have no time for people who judge others because they themselves would have reacted differently to a crisis. I have a friend who is very sick right now - and is about to undergo major surgery and is showing immense calm and control. I know someone who fell apart when a romance lasting less than a month bottomed out. Is this individual weaker than my friend facing the inequities of illness? Not at all - and I get very cross at those who believe that there is a proper way of reacting to crises. Empathy is essential - because underscoring it is the understanding: never tell another person how to react to bad news. I heard a truly first rate performance of Schubert’s Symphony No 9 by the ever-wonderful Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Most. Cleveland might not be a big metropolis but it has one of the top orchestras in the world… ranked by the New York Times as the best in the US and by Gramophone Magazine as Number 7 in the world. Not bad for a small city in Ohio. This reading of the Schubert 9 was dazzling – especially as Welser-Most (a Vienna boy to his fingernails) – conducted with a minimum of fanfare and an absolute command of Schubert’s immense orchestral architecture. It truly blindsided me – and I’m still thinking about it hours later. And by the way the performance took place in Berlin’s Philharmonie – which might just be (alongside the Musikverein in Vienna and Symphony Hall in Boston) the best acoustic in the world.
Anyway I was absolutely entranced for the hour long duration of this monumental symphony. The guy directly in front of me – bald, with a big beard and a paisley shirt – spent the entire performance staring down at the score of the symphony, following it note-by-note. I am an obsessive concert goer and
someone who especially loves watching conductors at work (maybe in the next life I will come back as a maestro… though I rather love what I do in this life). But the guy with the score… I think he looked up twice during the entire performance. I found myself thinking: instead of paying 90 euros for a seat in the
stalls of the Philharmonie you could be doing this at home, listening to it on a CD or via a streaming service.
But there he was, completely engrossed in the score, sometimes shaking his head at a certain phrasing by the other time, something nodding agreement with a metronomic choice made. My attention was fully focused on Welser-Most and his orchestra… but I occasionally stole a glance at this man deeply obsessed with the score on his lap. And I couldn’t help but think: that’s a happy man. I’m in Berlin for the Muskifest – that annual cavalcade of great orchestras and ensembles… a bit like the BBC Proms, only in far better acoustical circumstances than the cavernous barn which is the Royal Albert Hall. I’m hearing nine concerts – and last Tuesday rushed into the Berlin Festspielhaus to hear the Ensemble Moderne in a fascinating program of new German music. I forgot to buy a programme on the way in, and turned to a man sitting alone behind me and asked (in German) if I could briefly glance at his programme (which was on his lap… he was sending a text on his iPhone). His answer: ‘Nein’. I was just a little shocked by this. After all it would have cost him nothing to let me steal a fast glance at a programme which he himself wasn’t even perusing at that moment. After being taken aback I simply
shrugged and said three words: “Shame on you”. Now it was his turn to be taken aback. I turned back, dug out my notebook and scribbled down the incident. I felt someone touch my shoulder. It was a fellow sitting to my right. He handed me his programme. Staring back at the man who told me ‘Nein’, the gentleman now said to me (in German): “Please look at my programme”. I wanted to say ‘Thank you for restoring my faith in human nature”. I kept it simple: “Vielen Dank’. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who shows certitude. Or perhaps I should phrase it this way: I run from people who have the answers; who know it all. In my experience those who pronounce themselves possessing the truth, or knowing how this all works (and we really must embrace their worldview) are to
be avoided at all costs. By and large their Manichean perspective belies a lack of imagination, an absence of nuance and a deep insecurity. There is often an entrenched provincialism lurking behind certitude. Just as there is a need to control the narrative... or, more tellingly, those around them. And what is fascinating are those individuals who choose to build a life with such a person, subconsciously knowing that they are going to end up being so controlled. It’s a bit akin the way that the masses often flock towards a seemingly strong autocrat (think Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Trump) because they want to be led, want to believe that there is an all-present Poppa who will look after them. And when the totalitarian impulse is fulfilled and everyone loses their basic human rights, can anyone but ourselves be
blamed for buying into the dictator’s certainty?
Certitude is to be avoided at all costs. Walk away from it the moment you hear it being expressed. At the start of this year I ended a friendship with someone who had been part of my life for over fifteen years… something I hated doing, but concluded was necessary. And a subsection of the reason why I decided to stop calling this fellow a friend is because he was constantly, relentlessly, excessively late. The day after I had a severe bicycle accident – which saw me hospitalized and severely banged up – I managed to make it out to a local restaurant via an Uber. When I called this guy the night before from the emergency room he didn’t once offer to pick me up some food or to help get me home after I was discharged (and this is someone who’d borrowed my apartment gratis in the past).
The next night, wanting company to cheer me up, I suggested that we meet in a local restaurant. He said he would just show up for a beer… and then arrived almost an hour late.
This happened a further time – and when I wrote him about his lack of punctuality and that friendship is something that needs to be attended to, his response was flippant and arrogant. I dropped him thereafter.
I personally think that people show themselves most not just when a crisis befalls you… but when they arrogantly forget that we all have to respect each other… and six times showing up over thirty minutes late shows arrogance and a complete lack of respect. This fellow did other things to make me cut ties with him. But punctuality – which is something I practice and have instilled in my children as a crucial cornerstone of politeness. And respect for others. I was talking with a friend in Los Angeles about matters mystical. She has always been something of a spiritual surfer, whereas I have always been an ultra-rationalist who nonetheless has a cognitive soft spot for ambiguity and mystery. I told my friend a story that has haunted me for years:
While traveling in South Africa right before the onset of the Covid lockdown in 2020 I woke up at seven in the morning in a hotel in Stellenbosch and thought to myself that I owed a good friend in LA who had been battling with cancer for over a year a call. There had been radio silence from him in recent months – which I took as a sign that he wanted to be left alone… and I respected that.
Anyway on this morning in late February 2020 I woke up and thought: ‘I must write Jon [not his real name] now and see where he is in the vast terrible fight.
I sent the email. A week later I got an email from Jon’s wife, telling me that Jon had died on the same day, at the exact same moment that I had sent my email to him. Right down to the minute. Was there some sort of cosmic symmetry at work here? Was this merely extraordinary happenstance? How should this synchronistic event be interpreted? My friend with the mystical bent just smiled and said: “Embrace the mystery…” which was a very Angelino thing to say… but one which I fundamentally
agreed with.
Your thoughts? I have a friend for many decades who is married to someone I just don’t like (for reasons I will not go into here), and who has this infuriating habit of always making a slightly snide comment at a moment when all I want to hear is a bit of empathy. And yet this fellow has been a good friend to me – and is someone who I know to be an excellent father and not malevolent. Sometimes I think the gent lacks poetry in his world-view and has this undercurrent of sarcasm which he directs toward me on occasion. But I still like the guy. And I have also come to accept the fact that this is just who he is – and I can shrug off the occasional barbed comment… because sarcasm directly at someone else usually masks personal doubt. And because a long friendship is something to treasure… and we all have our attendant complexities. And rather than rail against the fact that someone has this corner of his persona which sometimes grates on me I have now come to accept it as simply part of my friend’s complex persona. And we all, in our disparate ways, have a complex persona. We read to discover that we are not alone. Over the course of twenty-four books, I have rarely written out of direct experience (outside a book of philosophy, All the Big Questions... With No Attempts At Any Answers - which was also something of a memoir). Why did I make an exception with this short story? Because I changed enough details (my narrator was a Franco-American lawyer, all the details of the woman and her background had been carefully altered to mask her true identity) to allow me to treat the events in a fictional manner. Most tellingly the very fact that the lawyer narrator of the story clearly admits that he is guilty of not seeing what was directly in front of him at the beginning of this romance - indeed what the woman herself told him she was ultimately about - made ‘the mistake’ very much his own. Was I admitting my own mistake? As it wasn’t “Douglas Kennedy Novelist” narrating the story it wasn’t a direct admission. But in another way, I was doing just that - and I wrote the story to explore how I had talked myself into such a muddle. And yet it was still a work of fiction.
In a recent fourteen-part masterclass that I gave for The Artists Academy I devote a chapter to using that which has happened to you as the basis of all fiction. Even if it is not what the French call un roman à clef (a novel lifted entirely from your life) the fact remains: all fiction is, by its very nature, autobiographical. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t lived the events in your story. You are, in some manner, always bringing the experience of your life to bear on the narrative. An example: my 2004 novel, ‘A Special Relationship’ is, among other things, about a post-natal depression and a montrous custody battle that ensues thereafter. It is narrated by the woman in the throes of this nightmare; an American living in London. Now (surprise-surprise) I have never suffered a post-natal depression. But I did spend many hours interviewing a woman who had been through such a horror show, just as I discussed the matter with several doctors. After that... well, I basically winged it... trying to think myself into the mindset of a my narrator, and also bringing to bear on the story my own experience as an American living in the UK (as I did for twenty-four years). I also used the moments when I too had struggled with despair (of a more reactive variety than that which had befallen my narrator). Many readers who’d been through a post-natal depression informed me that I’d gotten the inner landscape of this terrifying condition absolutely spot-on. Which was both pleasing and a little baffling to me at the same time - because I was just imagining what it must be like for my narrator to be trapped in this labyrinth of desperation. Yes it was crucial that I had talked extensively with someone who had weathered this horrendous experience (even using many of the details she told me - like slamming her head against the tiles in her Chelsea kitchen in an attempt to get the monstrous voices telling her to kill her infant son out of her head). But the story I told in my novel was far divorced from her own and was also infused with all my ambivalence at the time about being a Yank in London. Some years ago - eleven to be exact - I was just coming out of a twelve month period of personal and legal hell... better known as a bad divorce. Now the expression ‘a good divorce’ may be something of an oxymoron... but as the two brilliant women lawyers handling my case in London informed me once it was all done-and-dusted (to use a rather appropriate anglicism) that mine had been something of a doozy. As any professional writer will tell you (this one included) resilience and perseverance are essential components when it comes to the long slog of writing a novel. The same could be said for getting through a period when the entire foundation of your life has been upended and you find yourself in something approaching freefall. So I continued to force myself to write a minimum of five hundred words per day through this vertiginous moment - actually completing a draft of my then ninth novel, ‘Leaving the World’ just after the divorce was finally settled.
And being in a rather vulnerable state I also managed to talk myself into falling in love, She was a forty year old woman living in Paris (where I have a pied-a-terre): tall, beautiful, passionate, vastly intelligent. From the outset she seemed as smitten as I was. But she did tell me very early on in our romance (which was conducted in French):
“Avec des hommes dans le passé j’etais très difficile, très dûr. Je les ai piquè tout-le-temps. Mais avec toi tout sera different. Parce que je suis si amoroeuse de toi”.
(With all past men I was very difficult, very hard. I had to sting them all the time. But with you it will be different. Because I am so in love with you).
When it comes to matters of the heart - especially those that arrive at a difficult moment in our lives - we see what we want to see. I was guilty of such romantic stupidity. After an initial two months of true happiness the reproaches began. I was out too much in the evening, haunting cinemas, concert halls (I am a classical music junkie), jazz clubs. So too the blow-ups over nothing, followed by her tears of sorrow about having been so difficult. And then there was her need to tell me excruciating details about her past lovers. After four months I fled - and cursed my folly for getting involved with someone whom I knew from a few weeks into the relationship has some very serious pathological issues.
One of the central rules of life as articulated by the great mid-century Chicago novelist Nelson Algren (who for many years was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover) was: ‘Never sleep with someone whose problems are bigger than yours’. I had done just that. But I am also a believer in another writerly truism: everything is material. Around a year later, when a French magazine asked me to write a short story for them, I knew I wanted to confront that very human need to fall in love at a juncture when love is so desperately craved, yet with the knowledge that one was walking into the metaphoric equivalent of an empty elevator shaft.
“Ich hoffe, ihr Tag wird besser” (“I hope your day improves”).
He looked surprised by this statement. He stared down at his feet.
“Es wird nicht” he said (“It won’t), then added: “Aber… danke” (“But thank you”).
Remember when you next see someone in distress: every life is significant. Every life is its own novel. And we owe others empathy because we all so crave it ourselves. We all need to be reminded: we are not all alone in the dark morass that is so much of life. I was in one of my favorite cinemas in North America – the wonderful Lincoln Theatre in Damariscotta, Maine (a fast twelve minute drive from my house). I was watching a very interesting Spanish film, ‘The Good Boss’ with Javier Bardem (worth a look) and only about fifteen minutes from the end when someone several rows behind me got very sick. I turned and saw this man – late seventies I sensed – projectile vomiting and his wife running out to get the theatre manager and call the emergency services. Fortunately there is a very good hospital in Damariscotta, and the ambulance people were there in ten minutes. It seems the poor man was having a stroke (as the theatre manager told me later). After he was taken off by the ambulance man, and the theatre staff cleaned up the vomit, the film resumed.
Of course I couldn’t help but think about how, in the midst of life, something unexpected and grave can come out of nowhere and upend everything to do with your life – as this man discovered this afternoon… and as we all did as bystanders to such a life-altering situation. And yet again I couldn’t help but think: we’re all so damn fragile, aren’t we? I made an error last night and forgot to take my pills before climbing into bed. Yet I was certain that I had gulped them down. When I got up an hour later, unable to sleep, I found myself having mild panic as I considered: were the pills no longer effective? Was my insomnia triumphing over the pharmaceutical antidote to my chronic sleeplessness?
The discovery that I had simply sidestepped that essential step for decent sleep - putting the pills in my mouth and downing them - was reassuring. But sleep is an elusive country for me at the moment - and I find that part of me which so wants to surrender to the temporary oblivion of sleep and the other part of my psyche that cannot turn off.
Novelists are notorious insomniacs. The narrative mind rarely turns off. And there are always more pages to be written in the middle of the night when sleep is simply not part of the equation. I am used to functioning on fractured 'nuit blanches'. It is not how I prefer to live - but it is now part of my ongoing weather system. The great English short story writer and essayist VS Pritchett once noted that, in the United States, there was no concept of tragedy... 'Something just went wrong'.
There is more than a degree of truth in this comment. In the US we tend to think of life as a grand project, and one where we can bend the contours of fate to our own purposes. The truth is: life has the tendency to deal all of us deeply unexpected cards. How we grapple with life's inequities, its difficulties (and, at time, its tragedies), speak volumes about how we also confront difficulty. I have no time for people who judge others because they themselves would have reacted differently to a crisis. I have a friend who is very sick right now - and is about to undergo major surgery and is showing immense calm and control. I know someone who fell apart when a romance lasting less than a month bottomed out. Is this individual weaker than my friend facing the inequities of illness? Not at all - and I get very cross at those who believe that there is a proper way of reacting to crises. Empathy is essential - because underscoring it is the understanding: never tell another person how to react to bad news. I heard a truly first rate performance of Schubert’s Symphony No 9 by the ever-wonderful Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Most. Cleveland might not be a big metropolis but it has one of the top orchestras in the world… ranked by the New York Times as the best in the US and by Gramophone Magazine as Number 7 in the world. Not bad for a small city in Ohio. This reading of the Schubert 9 was dazzling – especially as Welser-Most (a Vienna boy to his fingernails) – conducted with a minimum of fanfare and an absolute command of Schubert’s immense orchestral architecture. It truly blindsided me – and I’m still thinking about it hours later. And by the way the performance took place in Berlin’s Philharmonie – which might just be (alongside the Musikverein in Vienna and Symphony Hall in Boston) the best acoustic in the world.
Anyway I was absolutely entranced for the hour long duration of this monumental symphony. The guy directly in front of me – bald, with a big beard and a paisley shirt – spent the entire performance staring down at the score of the symphony, following it note-by-note. I am an obsessive concert goer and
someone who especially loves watching conductors at work (maybe in the next life I will come back as a maestro… though I rather love what I do in this life). But the guy with the score… I think he looked up twice during the entire performance. I found myself thinking: instead of paying 90 euros for a seat in the
stalls of the Philharmonie you could be doing this at home, listening to it on a CD or via a streaming service.
But there he was, completely engrossed in the score, sometimes shaking his head at a certain phrasing by the other time, something nodding agreement with a metronomic choice made. My attention was fully focused on Welser-Most and his orchestra… but I occasionally stole a glance at this man deeply obsessed with the score on his lap. And I couldn’t help but think: that’s a happy man. I’m in Berlin for the Muskifest – that annual cavalcade of great orchestras and ensembles… a bit like the BBC Proms, only in far better acoustical circumstances than the cavernous barn which is the Royal Albert Hall. I’m hearing nine concerts – and last Tuesday rushed into the Berlin Festspielhaus to hear the Ensemble Moderne in a fascinating program of new German music. I forgot to buy a programme on the way in, and turned to a man sitting alone behind me and asked (in German) if I could briefly glance at his programme (which was on his lap… he was sending a text on his iPhone). His answer: ‘Nein’. I was just a little shocked by this. After all it would have cost him nothing to let me steal a fast glance at a programme which he himself wasn’t even perusing at that moment. After being taken aback I simply
shrugged and said three words: “Shame on you”. Now it was his turn to be taken aback. I turned back, dug out my notebook and scribbled down the incident. I felt someone touch my shoulder. It was a fellow sitting to my right. He handed me his programme. Staring back at the man who told me ‘Nein’, the gentleman now said to me (in German): “Please look at my programme”. I wanted to say ‘Thank you for restoring my faith in human nature”. I kept it simple: “Vielen Dank’. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who shows certitude. Or perhaps I should phrase it this way: I run from people who have the answers; who know it all. In my experience those who pronounce themselves possessing the truth, or knowing how this all works (and we really must embrace their worldview) are to
be avoided at all costs. By and large their Manichean perspective belies a lack of imagination, an absence of nuance and a deep insecurity. There is often an entrenched provincialism lurking behind certitude. Just as there is a need to control the narrative... or, more tellingly, those around them. And what is fascinating are those individuals who choose to build a life with such a person, subconsciously knowing that they are going to end up being so controlled. It’s a bit akin the way that the masses often flock towards a seemingly strong autocrat (think Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Trump) because they want to be led, want to believe that there is an all-present Poppa who will look after them. And when the totalitarian impulse is fulfilled and everyone loses their basic human rights, can anyone but ourselves be
blamed for buying into the dictator’s certainty?
Certitude is to be avoided at all costs. Walk away from it the moment you hear it being expressed. At the start of this year I ended a friendship with someone who had been part of my life for over fifteen years… something I hated doing, but concluded was necessary. And a subsection of the reason why I decided to stop calling this fellow a friend is because he was constantly, relentlessly, excessively late. The day after I had a severe bicycle accident – which saw me hospitalized and severely banged up – I managed to make it out to a local restaurant via an Uber. When I called this guy the night before from the emergency room he didn’t once offer to pick me up some food or to help get me home after I was discharged (and this is someone who’d borrowed my apartment gratis in the past).
The next night, wanting company to cheer me up, I suggested that we meet in a local restaurant. He said he would just show up for a beer… and then arrived almost an hour late.
This happened a further time – and when I wrote him about his lack of punctuality and that friendship is something that needs to be attended to, his response was flippant and arrogant. I dropped him thereafter.
I personally think that people show themselves most not just when a crisis befalls you… but when they arrogantly forget that we all have to respect each other… and six times showing up over thirty minutes late shows arrogance and a complete lack of respect. This fellow did other things to make me cut ties with him. But punctuality – which is something I practice and have instilled in my children as a crucial cornerstone of politeness. And respect for others. I was talking with a friend in Los Angeles about matters mystical. She has always been something of a spiritual surfer, whereas I have always been an ultra-rationalist who nonetheless has a cognitive soft spot for ambiguity and mystery. I told my friend a story that has haunted me for years:
While traveling in South Africa right before the onset of the Covid lockdown in 2020 I woke up at seven in the morning in a hotel in Stellenbosch and thought to myself that I owed a good friend in LA who had been battling with cancer for over a year a call. There had been radio silence from him in recent months – which I took as a sign that he wanted to be left alone… and I respected that.
Anyway on this morning in late February 2020 I woke up and thought: ‘I must write Jon [not his real name] now and see where he is in the vast terrible fight.
I sent the email. A week later I got an email from Jon’s wife, telling me that Jon had died on the same day, at the exact same moment that I had sent my email to him. Right down to the minute. Was there some sort of cosmic symmetry at work here? Was this merely extraordinary happenstance? How should this synchronistic event be interpreted? My friend with the mystical bent just smiled and said: “Embrace the mystery…” which was a very Angelino thing to say… but one which I fundamentally
agreed with.
Your thoughts? I have a friend for many decades who is married to someone I just don’t like (for reasons I will not go into here), and who has this infuriating habit of always making a slightly snide comment at a moment when all I want to hear is a bit of empathy. And yet this fellow has been a good friend to me – and is someone who I know to be an excellent father and not malevolent. Sometimes I think the gent lacks poetry in his world-view and has this undercurrent of sarcasm which he directs toward me on occasion. But I still like the guy. And I have also come to accept the fact that this is just who he is – and I can shrug off the occasional barbed comment… because sarcasm directly at someone else usually masks personal doubt. And because a long friendship is something to treasure… and we all have our attendant complexities. And rather than rail against the fact that someone has this corner of his persona which sometimes grates on me I have now come to accept it as simply part of my friend’s complex persona. And we all, in our disparate ways, have a complex persona. We read to discover that we are not alone. Over the course of twenty-four books, I have rarely written out of direct experience (outside a book of philosophy, All the Big Questions... With No Attempts At Any Answers - which was also something of a memoir). Why did I make an exception with this short story? Because I changed enough details (my narrator was a Franco-American lawyer, all the details of the woman and her background had been carefully altered to mask her true identity) to allow me to treat the events in a fictional manner. Most tellingly the very fact that the lawyer narrator of the story clearly admits that he is guilty of not seeing what was directly in front of him at the beginning of this romance - indeed what the woman herself told him she was ultimately about - made ‘the mistake’ very much his own. Was I admitting my own mistake? As it wasn’t “Douglas Kennedy Novelist” narrating the story it wasn’t a direct admission. But in another way, I was doing just that - and I wrote the story to explore how I had talked myself into such a muddle. And yet it was still a work of fiction.
In a recent fourteen-part masterclass that I gave for The Artists Academy I devote a chapter to using that which has happened to you as the basis of all fiction. Even if it is not what the French call un roman à clef (a novel lifted entirely from your life) the fact remains: all fiction is, by its very nature, autobiographical. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t lived the events in your story. You are, in some manner, always bringing the experience of your life to bear on the narrative. An example: my 2004 novel, ‘A Special Relationship’ is, among other things, about a post-natal depression and a montrous custody battle that ensues thereafter. It is narrated by the woman in the throes of this nightmare; an American living in London. Now (surprise-surprise) I have never suffered a post-natal depression. But I did spend many hours interviewing a woman who had been through such a horror show, just as I discussed the matter with several doctors. After that... well, I basically winged it... trying to think myself into the mindset of a my narrator, and also bringing to bear on the story my own experience as an American living in the UK (as I did for twenty-four years). I also used the moments when I too had struggled with despair (of a more reactive variety than that which had befallen my narrator). Many readers who’d been through a post-natal depression informed me that I’d gotten the inner landscape of this terrifying condition absolutely spot-on. Which was both pleasing and a little baffling to me at the same time - because I was just imagining what it must be like for my narrator to be trapped in this labyrinth of desperation. Yes it was crucial that I had talked extensively with someone who had weathered this horrendous experience (even using many of the details she told me - like slamming her head against the tiles in her Chelsea kitchen in an attempt to get the monstrous voices telling her to kill her infant son out of her head). But the story I told in my novel was far divorced from her own and was also infused with all my ambivalence at the time about being a Yank in London. Some years ago - eleven to be exact - I was just coming out of a twelve month period of personal and legal hell... better known as a bad divorce. Now the expression ‘a good divorce’ may be something of an oxymoron... but as the two brilliant women lawyers handling my case in London informed me once it was all done-and-dusted (to use a rather appropriate anglicism) that mine had been something of a doozy. As any professional writer will tell you (this one included) resilience and perseverance are essential components when it comes to the long slog of writing a novel. The same could be said for getting through a period when the entire foundation of your life has been upended and you find yourself in something approaching freefall. So I continued to force myself to write a minimum of five hundred words per day through this vertiginous moment - actually completing a draft of my then ninth novel, ‘Leaving the World’ just after the divorce was finally settled.
And being in a rather vulnerable state I also managed to talk myself into falling in love, She was a forty year old woman living in Paris (where I have a pied-a-terre): tall, beautiful, passionate, vastly intelligent. From the outset she seemed as smitten as I was. But she did tell me very early on in our romance (which was conducted in French):
“Avec des hommes dans le passé j’etais très difficile, très dûr. Je les ai piquè tout-le-temps. Mais avec toi tout sera different. Parce que je suis si amoroeuse de toi”.
(With all past men I was very difficult, very hard. I had to sting them all the time. But with you it will be different. Because I am so in love with you).
When it comes to matters of the heart - especially those that arrive at a difficult moment in our lives - we see what we want to see. I was guilty of such romantic stupidity. After an initial two months of true happiness the reproaches began. I was out too much in the evening, haunting cinemas, concert halls (I am a classical music junkie), jazz clubs. So too the blow-ups over nothing, followed by her tears of sorrow about having been so difficult. And then there was her need to tell me excruciating details about her past lovers. After four months I fled - and cursed my folly for getting involved with someone whom I knew from a few weeks into the relationship has some very serious pathological issues.
One of the central rules of life as articulated by the great mid-century Chicago novelist Nelson Algren (who for many years was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover) was: ‘Never sleep with someone whose problems are bigger than yours’. I had done just that. But I am also a believer in another writerly truism: everything is material. Around a year later, when a French magazine asked me to write a short story for them, I knew I wanted to confront that very human need to fall in love at a juncture when love is so desperately craved, yet with the knowledge that one was walking into the metaphoric equivalent of an empty elevator shaft.
