Where Fact Meets Fiction

A member of the literary establishment suggested I rework my current non-fiction project around a personal journey.

The idea troubles as much as it intrigues.

For the past year, I’ve focused on telling the stories of others. Now I’m asked to look inwards and share something about myself. These aren’t worlds colliding so much as parallel channels without intersection.

I’m writing about the lives of senior US diplomats navigating intense public pressure amid historic circumstance. The civil rights movement. The Iran hostage crisis. The Dayton Accords and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This requires distance. It requires a certain professionalism. Most of all, it requires fidelity to truth. The voice behind these stories requires formality, even if one common thread is Peace Corps service.

Meanwhile, who am I? I’m a very unserious traveler. My personal journeys work best as parody. I board the train for the potato cutlet, not the arrival in Bangaluru. I stay at the pousada for the spare surfboard, not to learn Portuguese. I lift the carpet to comment on filth, not to discover truth.

How do I merge my caprice with issues like school desegregation and wars in Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq?

My parents tell me they enjoyed my Peace Corps letters for the mystery of what was fact fact and what fiction. My wife said no matter how much she laughed reading my letters the first time, she found them uninteresting the second time through–already knowing the twists and turns (but she read them twice!).

I don’t know what any of this means for merging a personal memoir from a life like mine with those lives lived on the straight and narrow. I don’t.

One journey in particular holds promise. It has a beginning, a middle, and a sort of an end. Serious stuff happened along the way, and so did diarrhea.

Now, I have to figure out how to tell it.

##