How Writers Write Characters Who Are Writers Writing About Themselves; Or, But Is It Autofiction?

The work of writing—or, at least, my writing—often feels unstructured, additional, shoved like packing peanuts around the non-negotiables: my day job, my family, my doctor appointments, trying to stay informed in a chaotic world. It can be difficult to attach dates and figures to creative projects, to give the art we make that digs deep into our histories a clear shape.

With the publication date for my novel approaching I’ve been wondering: When did I really start writing this book? Despite the impossibility of the task, I’m looking for a beginning, so maybe I can see the shape of the book in my life.

Atomic Hearts tells the story of young woman named Gertie at two moments in time: the first at sixteen as she spends the summer with her father, who struggles with opioid addiction, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and the second at thirty-one, when her life still repercusses from her youth and the choices she and her parents made in times of upheaval.

The novel is fiction and written in first person so naturally there are people who will wonder if parts of it are true. You might say one of the book’s subjects is autofiction even if the book itself is not.

From the earliest draft, Gertie has been a writer, like I am. As I did as a teenager, she writes because writing is a chance for possibility amid precarity. She writes because she feels already defined, and spoken for, based on the lives of her parents, and through writing she can become someone else.

By making Gertie a writer, I could explore how one’s relationship with fantasy, creation, and imagination changes as we grow older. How would the writer Gertie was influence the writer she becomes?

*

My interest in how writers write characters who are writers writing about themselves started before the internet asked me to consider if autofiction is a self-absorbed endeavor; before from Anna Kornbluh I heard the term immediacy used to explain how our capitalistic culture’s interest in autofiction comes from our desire for everything to be instant and accessible and relatable and consumable.

I can’t say if that’s the experience one might have reading my book—instant, accessible, relatable, consumable—but I can say it wasn’t the experience I had writing it, which was a slow process of accumulation, imagination, and arrangement.

My father, who suffered from substance-use disorder, died in 2010, when I was twenty-two. We spoke differently of the opioid epidemic back then: I didn’t know who the Sacklers were; fentanyl hadn’t yet made its seemingly overnight entrance into the illegal drug supply; Narcan was unknown to many of us.

In fact, we didn’t call the epidemic an epidemic, at least not in a mainstream way. I was raised to believe personal accountability was what drove one to or away from addiction and so of course following my father’s death I felt guilty I hadn’t been more understanding, and for years I avoided writing fiction about him.

And when I was finally ready to, I realized I didn’t want to. The story as it really happened didn’t have the shape I thought it needed; the long stretches of existence, and then sudden nonexistence, were agonizing to me, horribly average, defined more by what we didn’t do than what we did. So instead, I asked myself: What if everything had been different?

*

To change what happened, though, first you have to live it. Living, for anyone interested in autofiction, is the first stage of writing. The writer I became, the one who wrote Atomic Hearts, was shaped by love and loss and things I saw and did and how I caught or fumbled life as it came at me. I was also shaped by what could have happened, but didn’t.

So perhaps I started writing this book on a warm late spring evening in 2010, when I was walking to my car on R Street in Sacramento after seeing a friend’s work performed at a local chapter of Stories on Stage. Lavender in the garden of the house I’d parked in front of fell onto the sidewalk, its fragrance burning clean in the air.

The car door opened to a rush of perfect warmth. Spotty sunshine dripped into the 2008 Honda Fit I still drive. I put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn on the car. First, I called my father. He hadn’t replied to an email I’d sent him earlier that week, which was unusual, so I left a message, which he wouldn’t return.

Then I drove home, leaving behind the twitch of worry I’d felt at the sound of his answering machine. It was my first spring in California and I was bewitched by the long chain of gorgeous, rainless days. At home, I might have spent the last hours of daylight in the pretty sunshine of the backyard, lying in the hammock my roommate and I had strung between two lemon trees, peaceful, because at that point in my life I thought it was more likely things would be okay than not.

By morning I would know he was dead, and I began a long cross-country drive with my boyfriend, who is now my husband, from Sacramento to Sioux Falls. Too blurry to think through all our options (such as the postal service) my sister and I decided someone should have a car to take the things of his we wanted to keep.

It was mid-May and hot in the Sacramento Valley, but by the time we reached Tahoe the sky was gray and low, and eavesdropping clouds shed wet, heavy snow. I pumped gas in shorts and flip flops, inches-deep slush squelching between my toes.

I recently dug out the Tupperware storage bin where I keep all the notebooks I’ve filled, going back to age thirteen, looking for the one I’d brought with me on my trip to South Dakota. When it was Frank’s turn driving (which, to be honest, was most of the trip), I made notes of things that I saw as California turned to Nevada, then Utah to Wyoming, then Nebraska, until in Nebraska we cut north through the low rolling dunes of the Sand Hills and into South Dakota.

Shop Deli Gifts
11 Dead on I-80 in 2009
National Cowboy Poetry Gathering—Find out what rhymes with varmint!
Snowmelt in the Salt Flats
Foggy in Wyoming + snow, wind
Dismal River, Nebraska
Cherry County—God’s Own Cow Country

We drove twelve-hour days through what felt like such big emptiness, endless skies, chains of semi-trucks, a flatbed carrying a single blade of a wind turbine. On I-90 in South Dakota, anti-abortion billboards grew out of the yellow-gold prairie, flickering along the road in a film strip of fake bloody babies.

Safe in what would become the final years of Roe, and living in a blue state, I didn’t give them much thought, but the image stuck with me. Gertie sees these billboards on a drive through South Dakota, years after I did.

*

It could have been about nine months before that that I started writing the book. I was twenty-two, and I went to see my ophthalmologist. His office was inside a Costco in suburban Michigan.

A recent college graduate, and not a Costco cardholder, I reminded the greeter you didn’t have to be a member to see the doctor, and after some convincing I made it past the gate to the chunky robotic chair where, once seated, I was asked what my post-college plans were.

“I’m getting a master’s in creative writing,” I said, a little proud of myself. “I’m moving to California.”

A puffy laugh escaped the doctor. He was a short, bearded man who’d previously bemoaned how much worse my eyesight got from visit to visit.

“Remember two words,” he said, squeezing numbing drops into my eyes. “Gainful employment.”

As he worked, he spoke about his son’s engineering degree. My eyes blurred, stiffened; they felt bandaged in cotton.

Whatever, I thought. You’re just an item on my to-do list before I leave the Midwest for my new life. Doctor’s appointments, Craigslist sales, canceling utilities, along with emailing my old landlord about the screen door I didn’t break and shouldn’t be charged for and emailing my new landlord about how to keep the koi in the backyard pond alive. (There were four; one wouldn’t make it, a casualty of the neighbor’s dog.)

But I didn’t say anything. I probably smiled, and laughed, and guarded the small hope that I might actually make it. Like me, like many writers, Gertie learns to be secretive about her work; she learns there’s shame in the presumption that she could create something beautiful. So it may have been that moment, as the doctor implied I was a silly girl with a dream that would never come to fruition, that I started writing my first novel.

*

Or I was sixteen when I started it. One weekend afternoon I met my friends at an abandoned factory on 6 Mile Road near Salem, Michigan. Next to a dormant pumpkin farm, the factory, which had once made tubing for hoses, had burned in the nineties; all that remained were four dilapidated and grafittied walls.

Saplings pushed through cracks in the concrete, spindly and touched by early green. A basement was flooded from years of collected water, murky waves lapping ambiently at the steps. A second story had only half-survived, accessed by a piecey staircase leading to a platform of burned, broken boards we dared each other to walk over.

At that time in my life, my dad had left, my mom was taking night classes, and my sister had gone to college. My friends and I were unsupervised, but (mostly) good kids with good grades, and trustworthy enough that our parents allowed themselves to sink into their own problems and not worry too much about ours. Like many teenagers, we had friends but were still lonely. I read (and wrote) Lord of the Rings fanfiction and wondered how courageous I could ever really be.

We made a firepit out of cinderblocks and roasted marshmallows over the chemical burn of the factory detritus we used as kindling, our jacket sleeves pulled down over our fingers. We had gone there to spend a few cold, peaceful spring hours in the little enclave where we liked to trespass. The fire was wet-hot, the way fires feel on a damp day.

A loud bang was a sudden puncture wound in the emptiness of the factory, bringing everything to a halt: An aerosol can, lodged in one of the cinderblocks, had exploded. Our screams followed, then our laughter.

No one was hurt, but twelve years later, when I sat down and wrote the first pages of the book that would become Atomic Hearts, I remembered the sound of the explosion and the mangled body of the can that we’d fished out of the fire and regarded with fascination. The exhilaration of a near miss.

What if Gertie experiences something similar, but instead of being fine, she was hurt? What if the explosion propelled her toward a summer that would change her life? For years, the working title of the book was Aerosol.

*

Or, another option: I started writing the book a year before that, in 2002, when I was fifteen. Bored the summer after my freshman year in high school, I spent most of my time alone, and I filled it by writing half of a novel about a girl named Jamie who gets transported to another world, where she meets (and, of course, falls in love with) an archer named Hayden in a rebel army, fighting a faceless oppressive regime I never got around to giving any dimension.

I wrote the book on the family desktop and saved it to a floppy disk that for a while I kept in a shoebox in my closet along with other things I deemed important. The desktop went with my father when he moved to South Dakota. After his death, a woman who worked in the office of his apartment complex gave us the card for a rural auction house.

“They help people out in situations like this,” she said, and so we called a man who came to my dad’s apartment and assessed what could be sold. “We’ll take everything you don’t want,” he told us, “and we won’t leave so much as a newspaper—as long as we can have the two Martin guitars.”

We agreed, and the computer—and the novel, if it hadn’t already been deleted—went with them along with all the rest.

The novel was, of course, bad. But lost novels tempt us to imagine, and so as an adult I remembered Jamie and Hayden, and the aerosol can, and what it felt like to be a girl who writes to escape what’s wrong in her life, and I thought: I don’t have the chops to write this fantasy novel, but I can write a story that asks why fantasy is appealing to readers and writers.

*

In a world that makes us fight to prove art matters, it’s no wonder we try to seek out its shape in our own creative lives.

That Tupperware storage bin, with years’ worth of notebooks, holds almost twenty-five years of beginnings. Those pages are where I go when I need inspiration; they’re where I’ve jotted down every passing idea, simile, joke, and snippet of dialogue across the years of my life. These beginnings are kept in a box, and that box has a shape.

I’ve thought about trying to digitize the notebooks and make a kind of catalog, but I think I’d rather not: I don’t want to be constrained by what I’ve already thought to look for. I want to find the things I haven’t already remembered.

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Atomic Hearts by Megan Cummins is available via Ballantine Books.