On Becoming A Machine That Knows My Own Thoughts

On writing fiction or nonfiction

I once met a man, an inventor, who told me he had invented a device that would allow him to read other people’s thoughts. He was wearing it when he told me this and I knew he wanted me to be afraid of what he might see in my mind because people like him don’t usually imagine diverse outcomes. And the thought I had in my mind right then was nobody likes mind readers. I won’t know if he ever saw it but that’s what I showed him if he was looking. If you’ve ever read any science fiction about people with psychic powers, everyone is always complaining about the Telepaths.

You can’t tell anyone about this, said the man who introduced us. This was five years ago and it seems they didn’t tell anyone else about it either.

The thing is, I don’t want a device that shows me other people’s thoughts. I have only ever wanted the device that shows me my own thoughts. But of course I am not that yet, and perhaps that is what we all are, next, all of us waiting to greet whatever is next.

I wrote the above in a recent short essay for A. L. Steiner’s project Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments.

Seated Giant, attributed to Goya, 1918, from the Met Open Access Collection

This line about becoming a machine for knowing my own thoughts is how I feel about writing. It’s why I first started writing. The desire to explore myself in diaries became all of this.

Which brings me to this: sometimes I am asked why one doesn’t make up events in a personal essay—and by this I mean when a person asks me, why shouldn’t we invent them entirely?

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I have written about the difference between fiction and nonfiction extensively as regards my own work in this essay, for example, about why my first novel was a novel and not a memoir.

And I am in favor of deliberately inserting invented material into a personal essay or nonfiction narrative, when acknowledged as such, for the way it can be a powerful tool in a story. The example I often use is Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, which has stories about the men in her family that are illuminated by sections where she invents the story based on research she did in order to get inside of their persistent silences about their experiences immigrating to the United States. It connects their personal trauma to the state violence that created the silences, and the result is a profound education in the history of Chinese immigration. I typically discuss how the undeclared invention can backfire on a person—how the invention, when discovered, can become a scandal all its own, but it can also hurt the people who knew you and it betrays the reader’s sense that they can trust you. A few conversations this week brought up stakes I realized afterward that I wanted to underline as well, and how I will teach it going forward. And so here I am today.

I have typically spoken to students about what I call the epistemological pleasures of the two genres, the writing of them and the reading of them, and why they matter—yes, pleasure matters! And must be defended. The simplest version of the difference is that with fiction, there is the pleasure that you are in the presence of the author’s inventions, even when it is autobiographical, even if that is the slimmest veil. And with nonfiction, you are in the presence of the author’s best attempt to understand themselves in relationship to their subject. Especially when that subject is the self.

What I was taught when I studied the essay was that inventing at the edges of what you remember so as to sharpen a scene, that was okay, but okay never meant great. The material at the center should not be invented.

What I don’t see people saying is how deliberately inserting invented material without acknowledging it is a kind of self-abandonment. A way to say to yourself that you and your life and the way you can learn about it from yourself and the act of writing about it doesn’t matter enough to you to make a difference. The struggle with learning the truth about what your experience was in order to offer it to someone else should matter. Whether or not anyone ever notices or discovers this, the idea of sitting there and receiving praise for this while lying about your life seems very dark to me. A terrible loneliness.

A common excuse, when it comes up with students, is, “I thought it made for a better ending.” But I have yet to encounter that. The times I have ever walked a student through this, or an editing client, we always found a more interesting truth underneath whatever was invented. You steal from yourself to do this.

My pride in my work comes from creating it in spite of the fallibility of my memory. Much of my personal essay work and my teaching about this comes from beginning with the understanding that your memory is an imperfect record and proceeding anyway toward the truth. And using as possible the different archives around you, the ones you meant to leave and the ones you did not.

This scarab here is also from the Met Open Access collection, a photograph of Hatnefer’s Scarab, taken from the ancient Egyptian woman’s tomb when it was discovered in 1936. From the Museum’s text:

The scarab's base is engraved with a version of Book of the Dead chapter 30A, in which the deceased addresses her own heart, exhorting it not to bear witness against Hatnefer during the final judgment in the afterlife. In the top line, Hatnefer's name was inserted over an erased text, indicating that the scarab was not originally made for her.

Heart scarabs were very popular amulets. For the ancient Egyptians the heart was not only the center of life, but also of thinking, memory, and moral values. In the final judgement the heart was thought to be weighed against maat – the principle of order and justice. Only if the deceased had lived a righteous life was he or she allowed to live on in the afterlife. Understandably, the Egyptians feared a negative outcome and special amulets were used to ensure a positive judgment. The flat underside of a heart scarab is usually inscribed with chapter 30B of the Book of the Dead, the so-called heart scarab spell, or with its less common version, chapter 30A, which was used here.

I often use the collection for images to illustrate my newsletter but this seemed even more apt than usual. A scarab made to beg your heart to lie for you during the final judgement after death. Made for someone else, not even for you, and you scratch your own name into it, or someone else does, hoping for the best. If this really is true of the ritual, it is a perfect metaphor for what I mean here.

I became a writer from the start by wanting to know what I was thinking and how I came to think about it. That machine for knowing my own thoughts. An imperfect art. But I try, always, to stay close to that.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee