Near the end of my junior year of college, I walked into my favorite professor’s office hours. I was agitated, fidgety, on the verge of tears. I sat down. He offered me tea. Without really explaining the source of my agitation, I explained to the patient, bewildered man that I was there to ask him whether it was permissible to write fiction.
I chose to bring my question to this man because he was a good teacher and a nice person. But in retrospect I also did so because he was someone who had suffered horrible losses, and who wrote about those losses recognizably and openly.
I didn’t think about this meeting for years afterwards. It came back to me, suddenly, a few weeks ago when I was walking to the store to buy a pot for making soup. It was like waking up with a hangover and remembering fragments of the night before. I couldn’t believe I’d asked him that—and I’d asked it with such urgency, almost begging, with a sense that the stakes were enormous.
Then again, I was in an altered state. All those months I felt as radically, neurologically altered as if I’d been on hard drugs or blackout drunk. I behaved insanely, in ways I never have before or since. I look back on that time and see myself moving around as if inside a murky snowglobe, my motion slowed. My interactions with others felt as if they were happening through a kind of goo. Only a few moments felt lucid, the sound momentarily turned up: sitting on a bathtub rim while a friend rubbed lotion onto my hand, for instance. These moments happened with a burning clarity, and then the snowglobe filled again with its strange fluid. I was not in my right mind during that time.
So I don’t feel embarrassed about my odd behavior in the professor’s office, but I do feel a kind of bafflement at my own question: Is it ok to write fiction?
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