I don't think so. It was interesting. My parents were very mobile. I think it’s very enriching to live that way as a writer. It wasn’t like just living in the United States as an immigrant. Having a consistent experience with my native land throughout my childhood as well as my adopted country, the country that had been adopted for me, was empowering because I was in connection with my native land; I didn't have to be born again as an American.

How do you negotiate between what the reader might perceive as autobiography in your fiction?

I can't, I can't. But there's a terrible tendency to read almost everything as autobiography.

Today in particular?

Yeah, today, because of memoir and all that. Obviously I use my life, but it’s not autobiographical at all. Harry Harriet, who's a transsexual in the novel No Telephone to Heaven  -- he's not really a transsexual in the sense of having two sexes -- is much closer to who I am. Not in a sexual sense, but in his work on himself to be a complete human being, taking in everything of who he is, reflects much more my own struggle than Clare's who is a fragmented person, or Christopher who is also fragmented.

The last line of my first novel Abeng. It may sound a little jejune now, but I still believe it. It ends by the narrator saying that everyone we dream about we are, and in a sense, when you create characters these are the people you dream about; they are you, you are them. They're coming out of your unconscious, and you’re responsible for them. You're responsible to make them, you know, characters, and to maintain a kind of integrity about them, and so in that sense you're everyone in your fiction, but that's different than writing an autobiographical character.

So, in regards to what you mentioned about the prisons, it's being a person that allows you write about other people.

To be a decent writer, you have to be able to approach people with compassion on the deepest possible level and cast yourself into their lives.

You have said, "Love demands accountability" in reference to your love of the United States . . .

Where did I say that?

In “Fiction as History, History as Fiction.”

Jesus! Yes, this country is endlessly fascinating to me. I find it absolutely interesting, fascinating, heartbreaking, and beautiful. Everything at the same time.

When you say accountability, is that a historical accountability?

No, I think what I was trying to say there was that if I'm going to be in this country, and stay in this country, I have to be accountable.

Personally accountable?

Yes, that means loving it and being able to criticize as well -- being a social critic, a political critic, whatever.

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Copyright 2002, Jim Clawson

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.