Helene Wecker

I’m late posting this to the blog, so regular readers might have seen it elsewhere, but: I SOLD THE BOOK!! Look for The Golem and the Djinni from HarperCollins, sometime in 2013. It’ll be in bookstores and everything! I’m seesawing hourly between elation and terror. Expect lots of updates about deadlines, word counts, and panic attacks.

Someone recently told me that the CIA hires fiction writers to sift through an enemy network’s communications and piece together a narrative of what’s going on. They figure out the main characters and the conflicts, and what it is they’re trying to achieve. If there’s a hole in the story, they make educated guesses based on the rest of it. I’m sure I’m simplifying this process beyond recognition, as usual. But ever since I found out about it I’ve pictured a roomful of writers, all sifting through bits of story, and organizing them the way they’re supposed to go. Frankly, it sounds like fun. I have pretty much no desire to work for the CIA, but if I had to have an office job again, I’d kind of want one like this. Preferably one where I wouldn’t be semi-responsible for killing people.

In keeping with my track record, here’s a few things I’ve discovered years later than I was supposed to:

1) A Song of Ice and Fire. Of course it’s a staple now, “the beloved fantasy saga,” etc., the kind of genre book that makes people apologize for liking it: “I normally hate all that hobbit crap, but.” Still, I didn’t want to read it. Matthew Baldwin opened his recent Tournament of Books round by saying he’s had his fill of wacky five-minutes-in-the-future dystopias, and I feel the same about fantasy bricks with maps in the front. I picked it up anyway, a few weeks ago, driven to it by Twitter blowing up every time there’s a new trailer for the miniseries. And really, I should hate it. The prose is uninspired, much of the dialogue is just awful, and Martin’s far too interested in 1) rape and incest and 2) boring descriptions of people’s clothing. But oh man, he got me good and hooked anyway. I’m halfway through the second book and show no signs of slowing down. Will Bran ever remember who pushed him out that window? Is there any more bend left for Daenerys to go around? When are the Others gonna come eat everyone?

2) Friday Night Lights. I spent four years in marching band and I still don’t get how football works. This is why, when a friend of ours gave us the FNL Season 1 DVDs, I said “uh, thanks” and put them at the back of the bookcase. We pulled them out in January, for lack of anything else to watch. Of course we devoured the first season in a week. Then we maliciously hooked our friends down the street, so they have to come over once a week and watch it with us. We’re like Ringu, but with beer and Indian takeout.

Okay, here’s my (delayed) take on the (completely hilarious) Banksy documentary. The film works if it’s 100% true to life. The film works if it’s a total put-on. But it only really, really works if its authenticity stays in question. My only interest in learning the particulars would be in a behind-the-scenes, DVD-extra kind of way, and honestly on the whole I’d rather not know. Anyone who takes the film purely at face value is missing the point; so is anyone who insists the whole thing was fabricated from the beginning. I believe this regardless of the fact that one of these two possibilities might be the actual “truth.”

(chatting with Awesome 8th-Grade Tutee at beginning of session)

Me: You’re almost back to school already.
Her: I’m so excited. I got my class schedule yesterday. One of my friends I’m in like five classes with, but the rest it’s just lunch period, so I was all [makes sad face].
Me: I remember doing that. We’d get our schedules, and then everyone would be on the phone for hours, asking who’d you get for this, who’d you get for that.
Her: It’s e-mail now.

I have a short story up at Joyland. Go read it. It’s called “Divestment.”

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Going by the numbers, I’m not exactly a prolific writer. I’ve got two short stories that are worth reading, and “Divestment” is one of them. They’re the only survivors of a linked short story project that was going to be my grad school thesis and, I dared to dream, my first book. They were based on stories from mine and Wolfgang’s families. Some were fictionalized more than others.

I started the project my first year of grad school, and by my second year I had a handful of these stories. It didn’t feel weird to be writing about family stuff, because so many of us were. And we all knew each other. It was a relatively safe space. I could anticipate my readers’ reactions. A couple of the stories, I thought, were pretty darn good. One was okay, maybe. The rest of them more or less sucked. I always had a hard time figuring out what was necessary to the story, and what was extraneous. I kept wanting to throw everything in, because, well, that was how it had happened. On top of that, I felt hinky about using Wolfgang’s family stories. My own, hey, sure. That’s my stuff, I lived it, or at least inherited it. No problems there. But Wolfgang’s? Who the hell did I think I was? I was taking advantage, trading on our relationship and the goodwill of my wonderful in-laws. Wolfgang himself was never less than encouraging, it should be said. I showed a few of the short stories to his family, and they were encouraging too. But the stories themselves were never better than okay. I was too close and too distant at the same time. I never owned them enough to break them apart and put them back together.

About six weeks into my second year, I was chatting with my friend Amanda, who was in my workshop that term. She asked me why I never submitted anything fantastical, since I was such a champion of it in other people’s work. I said, “But I can’t. I’m writing these family stories.” “I don’t care,” she said. “That’s your passion. Figure out a way to do it. The next thing I see from you, I want it to be fantastical.”

Two weeks later, I submitted the first twelve pages of The Golem and the Djinni. I think it’s a longish short story, I said. Or maybe a novella. They said, hell no. You’ve got yourself a novel.

I never really went back to the short story project. I salvaged the two good stories and worked on them on and off, with the aim of cleaning them up and making them publishable. (The other one is called “Simchas Torah, 1958,” and it still needs work.) I’ve had to go in and strip away the extraneous stuff, the connections that don’t connect to anything anymore. There are still a few artifacts left, rooted too deep to dig out. Like the granddaughter’s boyfriend in “Divestment.” Why is he Syrian? Outside the context of the now-nonexistent collection (and, erm, my life), it feels like a very specific choice. It helps facilitate the bit about Roman ruins, but the Romans built a lot of ruins, he could be anything. Turkish, Croatian, Spanish. Hell, he could be a Yorkshireman. Why Syrian? There’s no real reason why not, of course, but reading it now, it comes off as this giant blinking neon arrow: “Hey look, that’s me and Wolfgang! Did I mention that this was about me and Wolfgang? Because it totally is! And that’s my grandma and my parents and my brother and etc. etc.”

In the end, I decided not to change it. It’s a snapshot, a yearbook photo. It is what it is. I was a different writer then, I made different choices. I’m still very proud of it, and incredibly happy and grateful that it’s seen the light of day. But if I had to write it over again, it would be a different story altogether.