Where to go with the autobio? Can I imagine being a woman? A businessman? A teenager? Buddha? A terrorist? A track coach? A tree? An ant hill? A marathoner? A puppy?
Probably only my real memories are worth writing, otherwise I’m just recycling received or second-hand ideas.
Coming back to the Dylan Memoir Model, I’m thinking it might be best to pick, say, five limited time periods, and to delve into each of these fairly deeply.
(1) Larva. A chapter during my year (age 12) in Germany where I realized I wasn’t weak or dull. I learned to cope on my own. Imagining the pine pollen in the rain puddles in Germany to be fallout from an atomic war. Worrying that I had worms. Painting myself brown with cocoa to play the black boy in the Huck Finn skit. The annoyingly insistent carpentry teacher, Brueder Rezas, wanting me to be licking the cocoa off my skin, urging me, “Ami: schlecken!” (“American: lick yourself!”)
(2) Artist. The marriage to Sylvia, our dual view. The grad school years. Discovering math, Zap Comix, Pynchon, hippiedom. Gödel. The night that Zappa record Chunga’s Revenge seemed to speak to me, 1971. Hearing whole Zappa songs in my head the car, no harder than understanding set theory. Creating Wheelie Willie.
(3) Transrealist. Isabel’s birth, relating to the fourth dimension and synchronicity—although I wrote about this birth already in All the Visions. Maybe a fresher fatherhood memory, something I haven’t written about. Or about transrealism. Life and science into fiction and fact. Back-to-back in Heidelberg: seminal works in two new SF subgenres: White Light (transreal), and Software (cyberpunk). And don’t forget Infinity and the Mind. My dream of finding crystals in the shale on the mountain slope I was climbing.
(4) Cyberpunk. Writer in Lynchburg, 1983 – 1986. Roland, the Vaughans, my career starting to happen, the birth of cyberpunk. The boat race, poling from L’burg towards Richmond. Talking in a field to that ex-MP guy John— what was his last name? Those kids from Richmond coming to see me, as if sent by Eddie Poe. The trip out West, effectively in telepathic contact with Sylvia as, over and over, we were able to find each other.
(5) Wizard. Retooling in Silicon Valley, getting up to speed, working three jobs, the Cyberthon. Falling in with the Mondo crew. 1986. Figuring out what computation means. Grasping the gnarl of natural life.
[Preying mantis face produced by sucking in my cheeks.]
But—why bother writing an autobio note at all? What am I supposed to get out of it? Self-knowledge. Bragging pleasure. Guidance. Publicity.
Working on these notes in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe. The guy at the next table has an ascetically shaved head, and he’s eating an abstemious salad of greens and goat cheese. Thoroughly, carefully, he chews a single wafer-thin slice of tomato.
It’s foggy every day in San Francisco this July, Sylvia reports, studying the paper.
A young woman at another table shakes her head, smiling. No health problems for her, not yet. I used to feel that way. Potentially immortal.
Who would really want to read a memoir by me, after all? It’s not like I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who read the Contemporary Authors autobio note, which is online.
There should be some riddle whose answer I’m seeking by writing the memoir. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write?