“Is it autobiographical?” This is the question that all of my colleagues, family, friends (and the strangers I tell I’ve written a book) ask me.
My automatic response is “No” but as I’ve taken a deeper look at this over time I wonder, is any book not autobiographical? What are we doing as writers, if not translating our life experiences onto a page? Whether that feels like we are opening a vein and bleeding, or processing our trauma, or having some kind of literary epiphany, we can only write what we know no matter how far-fetched or distant from our own lives it might seem at first glance.
For this debut novel, it doesn’t take looking too hard to find elements of my story. Sure, I’m an American transplant in Ireland. Yes, I had planned on a different master’s degree than what I was summarily transferred into by Trinity College. It’s true, I found it a little annoying when my co-students in psychology courses became emotional or unglued with only the tiniest provocation. But it’s not about me. Or is it?
One of the challenges of being a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who chooses to write a novel is knowing that I am revealing a part of who I am on every page. I’m used to being the person in the consulting room with the tightest boundaries, the most mysterious and contained back story, and now here I am—totally exposed (even if it is in fictional code).
Years ago, when I was in my final placement of a doctorate in clinical psychology, eating good food in a fancy clinic with a very erudite supervisor, he casually commented that although he frequently published in academic journals, he would never write fiction because all his colleagues would analyse him through the work.
I must have carried that story around with me for over twenty years because it started haunting me in the past few months as my publication date loomed closer. Jesus, what if everyone analysed the book and picked me apart—slowly and carefully diagnosing me through the gaps in the text? What if they read about my main character negotiating his cultural status and wondered about my foreign-ness as an American in Ireland? What if they heard his inner thoughts and wondered what do I really think about them, about my job, about my patients?
So I called him. He’s long since retired and I found a landline number for him online through this wife’s cottage business and she answered on the second ring. When I asked for him, she didn’t ask any follow up questions and kindly went into the sunroom to wake him up from the nap he was taking after a lunch out with his grandchildren. I swear this is all true. The nap and everything.
An experienced psychoanalyst, it took him only two minutes flat to get to the nub of the problem, even though he was groggy from his afternoon snooze. “Yes,” he said, “people are going to analyse you. A lot of people are not going to like your book. Many people will have unkind opinions, and you will be totally exposed. That must make you very anxious.”
Pretty obvious, I thought.
“On the other hand,” he went on, talking mostly to himself although I was hanging on every word, even after all these years. “What if you didn’t write it? What if you let the fear and worry get the better of you and you decided it was easier to just forget about it. Wouldn’t that be depressing? Being held back by fear?”
Well yes, actually.
“So,” he summed up. “Either you will be anxious or depressed. You decide.”
Such a perfect intervention for me. I will be anxious. I am anxious now, writing this. But I’m not depressed. Not yet. Then he offered to read it and suggested we could get together and he can tell me what he thinks. No thanks, I said.
So, is the book autobiographical? Sure, whatever. Analyse away.
But what’s behind the book? A psychologist choosing anxiety.
Jenny Wilson O’Raghallaigh is an American clinical psychologist living and working in Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger and she was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. Mandatory Reporting is her first novel.
