A “True” Story: What Inspired My Famous Brain
“Did you really know this person?” I think many fiction writers are asked that question in one form or another when they send a piece out into the world. It’s a great compliment. It means that the reader is so invested in your main character that she wants that character to have had an actual existence. She wants, in essence, a profile or biography, not a fictional character. It might seem to the reader, in fact, that you’d never be able to write so realistically about someone if you hadn’t known that person in real life.
But of course you can. That’s your job. If you fail, your book will be flat, clichéd, and boring, with cookie-cutter characters, and a this-happens-then-that-happens plot that rushes along without offering the reader the solace of accomplished writing. No reader will walk away from it thinking, gee, I feel like I really knew that character.
A fictional character can be a blend of people the writer has known or observed, or might be built upon one or more characteristics of a single person. Most of the characters in My Famous Brain are of the blended variety, except for the protagonist, Jack MacLeod.
He was inspired by a person I met many years ago, a person who, like Jack, had a very high I.Q., could memorize enormous amounts of reading material, and was struggling to cope with a serious health problem. I didn’t know him very long, and, looking back, maybe I didn’t know him very well, but he was a fascinating combination of brains and humor and empathy.
Long after our acquaintanceship was over, he lingered in my mind, and eventually became the inspiration for a complicated story. After I worked on it for a while, it began to move away from being his story. I invented relationships for him, a locale, and situations that would work to advance my story’s objectives. I’d say roughly 25% of My Famous Brain is “true.”
As I wrote deeper and deeper into Jack’s life, all sorts of revelatory avenues opened up to me, and I felt that my main character, having been based on such a remarkable and appealing person, was now capable of being crafted into the character I needed to navigate my story into some thought-provoking waters.
It occurred to me early on that in order to do everything I was setting out to do, Jack would have to be more than omniscient as a narrator; he’d have to be omnipotent as well. He’d have to be able to call up scenes and people in his memory and give them new life. Being deceased enabled him to look back, often selectively, on his life and loves. He didn’t need to adhere to a sequential timeline.
He says, “When I realized I had died …I expected to be privy to a great deal of knowledge, expected to have the mysteries of the universe open up to me like water lilies in the sunlight, but, alas, that isn’t what happened at all.” Jack can see everything and can control what he sees to a certain extent, but he doesn’t understand it all; he’s still, even after death, a work in progress, as imperfect as any of us.
The vastness of Jack’s memory challenges him as well; he eventually learns that perspective is all-important. “Remembering everything feels like this: imagine a photograph of about fifty beautiful sky-blue rowboats floating on a sunny day in a pretty harbor. That’s from one angle. From another angle, you can see the warships floating right next door. Everything depends on where you focus.” Even his memorization of a book by Edith Wharton drifts in and out of focus, granting him a humility that he learns to appreciate.
I wanted to use my main character to explore a repertoire of themes that could be experienced as interrelated, and I wanted him to do it with humor and compassion. My Famous Brain explores grief, illness, loneliness, a serious friendship, life after—and communication after—death, the meaning of “gifted,” and love in many of its forms. (Except for the life-after-death motif, the same themes were explored in my novella Gillyflower.) The world is still grappling with a dreadful pandemic that has forced many to reevaluate their thoughts and feelings regarding the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life and death. Maybe Jack’s story will offer a little comfort, or at least some thoughts to ponder.
So would I say that Jack MacLeod was once a “real” person, and inspired my book? I only know that he’s real to me now, and he continues to intrigue me.
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Diane Wald’s novel Gillyflower was published in April 2019 by She Writes Press, and won first place in the novella category from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, first place in the novella category from American Book Fest, first place in Fiction: Novella from International Book Awards, and a bronze medal from Reader’s Favorite.
You can read more about Gillyflower at www.gillyflowernovel.com.
She has published four print chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press, and Faustinetta, Gegenschein, Trapunto from Cervena Barva Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website.
Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her second book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. Wonderbender, her third poetry collection, was published by 1913 Press in 2011. A poetry collection, The Warhol Pillows, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A novel, My Famous Brain, is forthcoming in 2021 from She Writes Press.
MY FAMOUS BRAIN
“My brain was famous, but I was not. Not every gifted child invents a pollutant-free fuel, paints a masterpiece, or finds the cure for cancer,” Jack MacLeod tells us. “Some of us just live out our lives.” Jack died in 1974; now, he’s ready to narrate his story from beyond the grave.
Jack’s prodigious memory, which allows him to memorize books, and his penchant for psychic connections give him unusual insights into the events of his past life and make him fiercely curious about his current state of existence. Jack immerses us in interconnected tales of his childhood participation in a research study on the intellectually gifted, his dual career as a clinical psychologist and university professor, his participation in the unmasking of an unscrupulous colleague, his long-term health issues, his brief but life-changing love affair with a student, his deep friendship with another man, and his eventual acceptance and celebration of the circumstances of his fate.
How Jack dies, and how he deals with the murder of someone close to him, mirrors how he has lived and grown, and marks the significance of everyone and everything that ultimately brings him to yet another level of brilliance.
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Category: On Writing
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