The Factual vs the True: A Guest Post by Ada Calhoun
There’s nothing like the blood-rushing feel of a crush — especially when you’re married. Ada Calhoun’s latest is a gripping, witty and wry exploration of modern love and marriage. Read on for an exclusive essay from Calhoun on what led her to write Crush.
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Hardcover
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Crush: A Novel
Crush: A Novel
By Ada Calhoun
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$27.00
$30.00
When a husband asks his wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible
When a husband asks his wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible
My first attempt at wrestling an overwhelming few months of my life onto the page was not a novel. At a brutally cold, Laphroaig-soaked writing retreat at a castle in Scotland, I plumbed several years of journals for material. Overcome with the emotional chaos of it all, I lay down periodically on the carpet to weep. That draft was a memoir, and it wasn’t any good. The plot was messy, with too much conflicting backstory and no narrative coherence.
Once home, I scraped the memoir and wrote a story about the ideas I wanted to consider—love, sex, marriage, fidelity. That version had a coherent arc and timeline, and it let me ask questions without having to limit myself to things that I’d personally experienced.The process was incredibly liberating. Especially after all that powerlessness, to just get to make people on the page do what you wanted them to? What a gift!
But when readers began giving feedback, I learned an occupational hazard of being a novelist: you get the question, “How much of this is true?” a lot.
In part because I didn’t want to broadcast all the details of my own, still-roiling personal life, I started trying to understand what the real question was behind that line of inquiry.
One piece of it: human curiosity. It’s fun to unlock a roman a clef. Who among us has not read a personal essay and then googled the byline?
Another layer, I think, is that we prefer clear categories. Merve Emre wrote in the NYRB about the “wobbliness of genre—not quite fact, not quite fiction” in contemporary realist novels (in that case, by Sally Rooney). I think people want to know if you’ve made up enough of the book to have it “count” as fiction—as though making up only 20% of a story as opposed to 99% were the equivalent of writing a term paper using Wikipedia.
To me, if even 1% of a book is made up, it’s fiction. You can’t be a little bit pregnant, and you can’t make up only a little bit of your non-fiction. Not everyone agrees. In a memoir, I would never, as one famous memoirist said she would, turn a scarf blue from red if that fit the sentence’s cadence better. Especially because in a novel, guess what you get to do? Make the scarf any color. Make the scarf a snake.
To me, the question “How much of this is true?” should be asked not of novelist (who have bought themselves a get-out-of-journalism-jail-free card by labeling the book as they have), but rather of people who stir fiction into their memoirs. What’s most important is whether the book feels real to a reader. And in the case of my new novel, the end result feels truer to me than it did when all the events described really happened.
