I did not come out until my 20s. Before then, I lived a constructed life, shielded from what I refused to name. I was surrounded by people who gave me the grace of never asking me to name myself. In the meantime, I looked outward. I studied how others moved through the world, effortless. I watched how they made themselves up, presented their best faces. I observed how they failed, too, and who noticed those slippages. I learned how to trace what their faces were saying, what their bodies were betraying, edging toward the acceptance that this was equally true of me.
When my first book was about to be published, I came out to my siblings via letter. I tucked these letters into their copies and mailed them off. There were two things I wanted them to know, but I suspected they would remember only the first: that their little brother was coming out. The second, however, was just as important: Those stories were not me. I made them up, I told them, although I knew they would wonder which parts were true.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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I write fiction because it is a private act. It is the place where I tell the truth to myself. Other forms of writing require something else: a parsing of what I know to be true, or a qualification of what I have omitted or overlooked or second-guessed. But I have always understood that I could use fiction as a shield. That “I” there is not me, I could say to myself. In form and shape, that “I” could say and feel things I suspected but had not witnessed, intuited but had never heard aloud. I understood early on that this privacy to imagine was sacred and revealing. I learned to protect it by shaping it into fiction.
Writing is a mystery, and I want it to remain that way. That answer may not satisfy some people, and I am keenly aware of that. They have expectations about the people and the place that I write about. “This is not the novel I expected you to write,” an editor once said before turning it down. My work, to someone like him, is a representational stand-in, a look inside an unfamiliar world glimpsed once and never visited again. “This is too cerebral,” another editor told me, a comment I will never forgive or forget. Embedded in both responses is a denial of the privilege of the imagination, the dignity that comes when we are allowed to write in ways that confound, complicate, or contradict. I write to embrace that mystery, but I am aware of too many people who think that someone like me is not entitled to such complexity.
My most profoundly moving experiences as a writer have occurred when I am standing before students at Reedley College, a community college six miles from where I was born and raised. I have seen the transformative moment of recognition—my stories are the closest these students have ever come to seeing themselves in art. When I share with them a story about a Mexican father who asks his estranged son for money, they respond to the shadow traces of the fathers they know. They discover that moral questions can bloom richly right in our families. This is why I share my writing, but maybe not why I do it.
Writing is solitary and lonely work. For me, it began as a place where I sorted out difficult truths. It has transformed into one where I figure out how to protect the most vulnerable parts of myself and the people I love. What I have learned about fiction is that it could help me face how complicated truth can be. Discovering why I didn’t want to tell the truth about myself made me realize why others didn’t share their truths. We make stories to address what rattles us. This will rise to the surface eventually. Stories, after all, come with the hope they will be believed. At 77, my mother revealed to me just this year that she has often wondered about the grave site of the baby she lost when she was 14, if it still exists. I write fiction because stories like that stun me, and, even now, I do not know the right questions to ask in the fragile moment of revelation. I write to respect what comes to light, but I also write to honor the mystery of why it stayed hidden, however long.•
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