Karen Thompson Walker on Conceiving the Inconceivable in Fiction

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

When I was in college, my first creative writing teacher recommended a book that would change the trajectory of my life as a writer: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by the neurologist, Oliver Sacks.

That teacher was Aimee Bender, who had just published a collection of dazzlingly imaginative short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which featured girls with hands made of fire and of ice as well as a woman who gives birth to her own elderly mother. It was a little surprising to my naïve 19-year-old self that a writer with such a flair for the unreal would so strongly encourage her fiction students to read something real: a book of nonfiction by a doctor.

But it turned out that Sacks’s moving and empathetic case histories of people living with rare and uncanny brain disorders were as fantastical as Bender’s fiction, though more tragic. There was a man who believed it was the year 1945, though thirty years had passed since then. Another became suddenly convinced that his own leg was really someone else’s. There was an elderly woman, orphaned before the age of 5, who began, late in life, to hallucinate mysterious lullabies, which turned out to be the songs of her forgotten Irish toddlerhood.

In the lives of these patients, what sounded impossible was revealed to be possible. The seemingly unreal was suddenly real. Sacks’s portraits of these people shattered my own too-rigid sense of reality.

It’s hard to overstate how deeply these case histories settled into my mind.

Almost twenty years later, an idea for a novel came to me: what if a doctor a little like Sacks were to meet a patient whose symptoms were so extraordinary that they could not be explained by any of the known causes? (In my novel, The Strange Case of Jane O, a new mother seeks the help of a psychiatrist when she experiences a series of unexplained blackouts, hallucinations, and a powerful sense of foreboding.)

This is the third time I’ve written a novel that might be called speculative fiction, and I’m often asked what draws me to this territory. Here is part of my answer: the experience of having my own sense of reality temporarily demolished, the way it was when I first encountered Sacks’s work, is a feeling I’ve come to crave. There is a pleasure in being reminded that we don’t yet know all there is to know about the universe—much less about one another. All three of my novels grew out of this idea.

I get that same reality-shattering feeling whenever I try to grasp the paradoxes of quantum physics or read the mind-bending short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. This pleasurably wobbly sensation descended on me most recently when I read Zoë Schlanger’s mind-blowing nonfiction book, The Light Eaters, which is brimming with recently discovered plant facts that sound impossible but are true. (Did you know there’s a serious scientific debate about whether plants are in some sense conscious?)

In a recent New Yorker interview, the fiction writer Samanta Schweblin said something I deeply relate to: “I never pay as much attention to what’s happening or to what I’m thinking as I do when something threatens my idea of what is possible, and, therefore, threatens my own reality… as a reader and a writer, I’m interested in narratives that go straight to the heart of that rupture.”

I’m interested in that rupture, too. I like to stretch my own sense of what is possible, to conceive of the inconceivable.

I think this feeling I’m always pursuing—as a writer, a reader and maybe just as a person is a cousin of what the English Romantics would have thought of as the sublime, some overwhelming mix of terror and beauty, an astonishment so complete, so consuming and annihilating that we can momentarily transcend the borders of our own realities.

______________________________________________

The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker is available now via Random House.