Zahabi's Newsletter Jul/Aug 25
Life writing - with Ocean Vuong, Jerry Pinto, and more -, Iranian fiction, and the usual AI news.
Dear readers,
This month, we talk about memoir and autobiography (or life writing, or simply “novels that cut close to the bone”) with a smorgasbord of authors who touch upon this subject. There’s also a scattering of AI and short story news, and some Iranian fiction.
What’s happening with me – Iranian fiction
Talking about life writing means it feels appropriate, for once, to start with the more personal section of my newsletter. The US and Israel strikes on Iran in June were a huge source of worry for me. It’s hard to express the fear I felt as I thought of my family and loves ones, and the very real risk of a war loomed large. I find it very hard, in times like these, to know what to say. To know how to show support.
Fiction is always the place I come back to. So today I’ll share some Iranian SFF writers, as a way to share something that is close to my heart, and hard for me to put into words.
Iran +100 is an anthology of short stories by Iranian authors, and a good choice for anyone who wants a taste of different authors and genres. From hard SF to climate fiction to magical realism, there’s a nice mix of stories and styles, and a chance to see some of the themes that are common to Iranian fiction. I especially enjoyed the more surreal pieces, from the fountains of black oil, to men forever hanging suspended mid-fall. Comma Press does some really interesting short fiction, and I’d previously very much enjoyed their Book of Tehran, so it’s nice to see them come out with another Iranian anthology.
The Bruising of Qilwa is a fantasy novella by Naseem Jamnia. (They’re also a contributor to Iran+100.) The novella introduces the reader to a queernormative Persian-inspired world, in which a nonbinary refugee practitioner of blood magic discovers a strange disease that’s causing political rifts in their new homeland. It has a touch of necromancy and plague doctors about it, in a Persian setting, and Jamnia has interesting thoughts about power and culture and empire, that they explore tastefully here, in a densely-packed novella.
Heaven’s Revolution by Peter Adrian Behravesh is a good choice for people who like reading interactive fiction. In a Persian steampunk empire, with multiple factions to play off, the reader plays an alchemist’s apprentice, who needs to decide how to navigate their troubled city. I remember being particularly fond of my good-for-nothing brother, whom I had to keep getting out of sticky situations.
I’ve heard fiction being called an “empathy machine”. To me, it’s simply a way to connect with another human being. They write; I read. Words are the only thing between us. It feels like a good place to start.
What’s happening on the page – Life as Inspiration
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of stories in which the author is writing about their parents. These stories sit somewhere between fiction and memoir. I got sucked into the brilliantly-written On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and then found myself reading Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto. As serendipity would have it, I also read the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman for the first time.
What does using your life as the base material for your writing mean – for you, for your family? When and why introduce autobiographical elements? There is a rawness to all those books, a visceral side to them, because we know it’s real. The fact that a true story lurks behind the fiction makes it hit harder, if the writing is skilful. Yet writing a story based on your life is still an act of writing – scenes have to be included or excluded, details have to be unpacked or skimmed over. Memory isn’t reliable, and for the pacing and flow of the story, some small moments need to be erased. It’s an act of translation, in a way: translating what happened into a narrative.
So I found myself wondering how to write a novel that is essentially a fictionalised retelling of someone’s life. Why not just write a memoir? Why a novel? I think this is because a narrative can hit harder than the often-messy details of reality. Vuong, for example, creates a collage: by deciding which scene to put alongside each other, he creates an arc, or at least echoes, drawing attention to common themes or motifs. The scenes have most probably happened, but by choosing which ones to tell, and by placing them in a certain order, new meaning shines through. I wasn’t surprised to learn Vuong is a poet – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous feels like a novel written by a poet, where images are carefully placed next to each other. I’d say the novel has an emergent narrative, that doesn’t feel constructed (although it must have been), but that seems to rise effortlessly from the way the scenes are arranged.
Looking for a pattern is what humans do anyway. We’re primed to interpret our lives as narratives. We look at various memories and place them together, grouping them by theme to tell a story about ourselves. This is why, sometimes, a breakup or grief or love can change our inner story, can shift how we view these memories. So art imitates life, and life imitates art, by doing a curator’s work, selecting our memories in relation with each other.
Which raises a different question: how constructed should such a story be? Seeing as it’s impossible to include everything life contains, choosing what to include is already moving away from the truth. The novel will be subjective anyway, so maybe including a made-up plot makes the reality cleaner, neater, emotionally stronger?
I believe there’s a balance to be found: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart feels more like a story, and less like an autobiography. This is something to do with the way it’s constructed. It feels inspired by life events, but not based on them, maybe because it has a proper arc to it. For that reason, it does feel less raw, less urgent. The third person gives the story narrative distance – compared to the first person Vuong and Pinto use, for example – and the POV changes also help with this. The emotional ups and downs are somewhat more predictable, because they follow certain narrative structures.
I knew, when Shuggie’s mother is briefly sober and happy in the middle of the book, that it was too early for her to be healed, and therefore that she would relapse. The story demanded it. Interestingly, Stuart is aware of this – he scares the reader with a false alarm, a first temptation Shuggie’s mother resists, delaying the inevitable. We’re expecting the fall; it doesn’t happen. He immediately hits us with the fall, coming from an unexpected direction. This narrative bait-and-switch is very skilful. In a way, it’s too skilful. Life is never that clean.
Whereas a book like Em and the Big Hoom is less predictable, structurally. It’s not quite the collage Vuong puts together, but not quite the plotted story Stuart constructs, either. Even when the POV changes, going into the third person to tell Em’s story, and her relationship with her husband, the Big Hoom, still, that story feels like it’s following life’s logic, rather than a story beat.
What’s interesting to me is that in all these books, the narrator is once removed. They’re a character looking at their parents’ lives and telling it to the reader. I wonder about this, and whether there’s something about the distance being the second-gen child grants – that distance from the raw event or trauma that’s being explored – that makes it easier to tell.
But it raises a new set of problems: talking about someone else’s story is always, to a certain extent, appropriating it. When is it fair to tell your parents’ stories? When do you need to protect them? When is it processing your own pain, and when is it revealing theirs? And, of course, these relatives may read what you’ve written. What then? In Maus, Spiegelman talks about his father’s reactions to his graphic novels, to the complicated relationship he has with survivor’s guilt and imposter syndrome. Is it easier knowing that you’ll be read, or is it easier, in a way, if the person you’re trying to pay tribute to will never read your work – because they’ve passed away, or they don’t speak the language you’re writing in? Yet there is a certain strangeness to writing a tribute that won’t be read by its tributary.
It takes a lot of courage to write an honest piece cutting so close to the bone, so close to someone’s lived experience. I’ve only attempted to write about my family once, in a story called Two Siblings, Seven Fish, and I think that story was very cautious, in a lot of ways, tiptoeing around larger pains. One way to make the story work, as far as I was concerned, was by stepping into magical realism – because it allowed to create that collage, those patterns, Vuong achieves in his novel by juxtaposition. If stories can help us process complicated, often painful realities, a speculative touch can help. There is a dream logic that feels emotionally real, even if it’s not factually possible. It can also, by obfuscating fact, protect people who may need it from prying eyes.
A touch of magical realism, of magical distance, could be a great way of linking fact and fiction, to create an emotional truth.
What’s happening with the book – AI and Uncanny
As a follow-up from previous AI news, there’s now a class action lawsuit against the people who downloaded lots of pirated books from LibGen to train their AI. If you’re an author and your books were on the pirated database (which you can check here) then you can join the lawsuit by going through the Authors’ Guild.
In less dire, less AI-related news, I’m currently on submission for various short stories. Most of my life has been taken up with game-writing at the moment – who knew a full-time creative job would be hard? – so things are slower on the book front. Short stories are easier to sneak into my routine, to snatch away time for.
I always warmly recommend short stories and essays from Uncanny Magazine, who have some great work available on their website. They’ve reached their funding goal on their Kickstarter campaign, and as such are open for poetry and short story submissions. It’s one of my life goals to sell a story to them, and this open submission will be no exception.
I know a lot of authors are in the same boat, sending off stories and waiting and hoping. So good luck to everyone out there on the slush pile! (I’m sure we all need it – as much as we need to end on a photo of Sancho, to give this newsletter some much-needed goofiness!)
