Family love : a memoir and writing family love autobiographical novel to memoir, an exegesis.

When I first started thinking about writing Family Love I wanted to write it as an autobiographical novel. This meant a radical departure from my usual writing methods. For one thing, it was the first time in my writing life that I was interested in the conscious use of a period in my life as material for a novel. I had never before attempted this and felt a certain amount of apprehension in abandoning tried and true approaches for something so new and risky. Obviously there is an autobiographical basis to all my work but it expresses itself not in facts or events so much as oblique flashes, subconscious truths that arise out of the process of writing. In the creation of fictional characters in my novels, for example, I had never before set out to write about a particular person in the naturalistic sense. I have not been interested in telling someone’s story so much as becoming involved in the process of discovering and developing characters constructed from many sources including my own fantasies. A critic once described me as a method actor in the way I went about writing fiction, and, in particular, finding the voice of a character. This is an observation I find useful because there is something almost actorly about my immersion into fictional characters’ lives. It is a complete identification which results in what could be loosely described as super realism. I am writing from life but from my own intensely observed construction of a life a construction which has its own rules, logic and momentum and often bears little resemblance to the facts or the real people