Where Do You Shelve a Ghost?

Pop left when I was eight to become a famous painter, and returned (when I was in my mid-thirties) as a playful, cantankerous, opinionated shadow of his own ambitious youth. I've painted him in words as best I can, showing him as he moved through his last two decades toward a surprise ending that was, in retrospect, entirely consistent with his eccentric nature and his life. A wry and uncompromising tribute from an exasperated, bemused, admiring daughter.

— SMC

Forward to the Past

Writing My Father's Ghost

So, what does an author move on to, once she has completed a multi-volume SF epic that took thirty years to write?

First, you stop and catch your breath. Whew, that's better! Wash some dishes, take a drive in the country, call up a friend and gossip for an hour. Go back to the gym routine on a regular basis. Hug the cat, the husband, the sister, and the pillows while sleeping late, late, late in the morning to catch up on both sleeping and dreaming.

But under all this resumption of normality, there's a funny little feeling of weirdness about not being engaged any more, at some level, in the rough, cruel, intense world of the men and women of the Holdfast and the Grasslands (and, as it turned out in the final volume, of several other places nobody had even known about before, least of all our author, scrambling as always to keep up with events as they developed; get your hot, late-breaking news of the future here!).

I'd spent years with these imaginary people living in my brain. That's what it means to say that the books were written in real time. From volume one, Walk To The End Of The World (1974, which means I began writing it in 1970) to the end of volume four, The Conqueror's Child (1999), the characters experience some thirty years of fictional life.

And it took me thirty actual years to complete the set of four books and the epic tale of those people. Thirty years of their fictive lives, thirty years of my actual one. Measured against the effective human life span thirty years is a goodly chunk of time, and its passage turned out to mean something.

While they were changing with the flow of fictional time in their fictional world, I was changing too, with the flow of what we are pleased to regard as real time in the real world (though there's no way to be certain which is which, of course). I wrote other books during that period, seven or eight of them, and they brought their own insights and lessons. I even wrote a play and participated in setting up several stagings of it.

Publishing changed during that time too, becoming ever more dominated by corporate giants, bottom-lines, star names, publishers buying shelf-space in stores for their predetermined "bestsellers", e-books and downloads becoming the writers' new hope and their new frustration, and authors being forced to take on an increasing burden of self-publicizing, of running their careers in ways that agents and editors used to do between them.

Meanwhile agents upped their percentage of authors' profits from 10% to 15% by fiat, while not increasing one iota the work they do for their clients or the size of advances, which in fact peaked and began to decline again for all but the Steve Kings and Danielle Steeles of the world. Publishers made a partially successful grab for newly invented electronic rights, which they hoped to assign to themselves for nothing (a grab which agents, by the way, did nothing that I know of to counter on behalf of the writers they purported to serve).

Meanwhile film techniques, thanks to computer art, became more capable of handling fantasy and SF concepts visually. Fantasy, SF, and horror more or less took over TV — Buffy, Roswell, X-Files, Farscape, Star Trek in a half-dozen permutations, etc. — and, latterly, much of big-screen film as well, although there it's sometimes a lot harder to tell. The whole culture shifted away from print and toward visuals and sound (MTV, more music, more of the time; audio books, disc players in cars), with the accent on the fast, faster, fastest, and the new, newer, newest.

And of course we all grew older. People got born, people died.

So in 1999, coming up at last from the finished project of the Holdfast books, I broke the surface of a different ocean, myself a different swimmer than the one who dove in thirty years ago. I looked around and I said to myself, "Phew; I need a break, man."

So I turned to refurbishing a couple of older projects that I had left unfinished, and also to using the changes in publishing (particularly the rise in print on demand publishers) to get my out-of-print older works back into circulation. I went to work on a webpage.

But my writer-mind kept milling and mulling and mooching around, looking for something substantial to do, but not SF, not fantasy, not a play: now if ever was the time for something completely different!

In a while I found it, turning from the making up of edgey fictional thought experiments to a tale drawn directly from that same thirty year stretch of time that lay between myself as a beginning writer and myself now. I decided to tell the story of my mad, cold, failed painter-father and myself as we lived, between the two of us, the final quarter of his life, out here in the West, after he spent decades on his own as a struggling artist in Greenwich Village.

This book became My Father's Ghost.

Writing it was an amazing change of gears for me, a jolt, a shock of cold water — frightening, challenging, and wonderfully invigorating. All of a sudden I had nothing to make up; no people, no ecology, no weather, no machines, no languages. Invention was, in fact, the enemy, since the point was to make the story as real and accurate as possible. And the reality, what I had access to of it anyway, was all there, just waiting to be recorded, assembled, and knit delicately together into what I hoped in the end would read as an effortless, seamless whole.

One concern I had was central: my memory is terrible. I barely know what happened, and I never know when it happened. Looking back, everything I can recall always seems to me to have happened five or ten years ago, or else way back somewhere in my pre-teen years.

In this case, it was not a problem. I had an old file of notes made back in the eighties, pages and pages of dialog recorded pretty much right after it had taken place because I'd been thinking then of writing a play about us, me and the old man and my husband and the dog (the play was going to be called "All Fours").

I also had the nearly forty volumes of handwritten journals Pop had left me, battered sketchbooks stuffed with yellowing, dusty letters and clippings from old art magazines and newspapers. Thus armed, I was able to move pretty smoothly through an account of the way he and I had returned into each other's orbits, and had come to understand each other and to accommodate (or not) each other's characters in my middle years and his old age.

I found that I had to do a lot more thinking about things, since there were no "characters" in this story to think things out for me on the page (my fictional people work for their living, believe me). I had to reflect on what had actually happened, instead of flipping through imagined alternatives of what could be and choosing the one that I thought would be the most effective in terms of artistic impact. I had to find the right voice for this story, a plain narration allowing for just enough rumination about the ways that our times and our culture bring us together with our aging parents, and push us away from them, and set our interests against theirs, and eventually part us for good.

I worried about writing things about real people — most of them my relatives — that some might find offensive; but I had to simply set this particular fear aside, or else become paralyzed entirely.

I had to sift, from among a myriad of incidents large and small, the comparative few that were, in combination, most intense and funny and resonant, meanwhile falsifying and betraying the old man and myself and everybody else in the story by the very act of writing it down. There was no way to put everything in. The selection process was a personal test of skill, an imperfect procedure at best, a reminder of the reality of limitation — limitations of memory, of perception, of understanding, of time and available space. How many pages would it take to tell the whole story of any life, assuming anyone could know that story? Too many.

So I was not responsible for telling the whole story but only my understanding of what I saw of it, and only those parts that I thought would hang together enough to hold a reader's attention and repay that attention with satisfaction.

This project brought into sharp focus the vast, shadowy shape of what I didn't know about Dad and his days and his thoughts; which was a reminder of the vast shadowy shape of what I don't know about anybody else close to me (let alone people I only glimpse in passing). Writing fiction makes you feel like a sort of spider-god, spinning a tale out of yourself and then lifting the best of it into the light for others to see. Writing about your own life and the life of your father makes you feel like a blundering, blinkered ignoramus feeling your way uncertainly along, inevitably making more mistakes and misjudgments than you can even begin to recognize until long after, if ever. You have to assume that you're making these mistakes, and accept them beforehand.

You begin to get a sense of how immense is the matrix that unites you with others, and how little of it is visible to you. Not to mention this huge time-dimension that you are usually unaware of: your understanding of every interaction changes with the shifts in your own viewpoint that the passage of time inevitably brings.

In sum, it was a powerful exercise in humility.

Not to mention that writing My Father's Ghost brought me smack up against the inescapable understanding that where my dad had ended up I myself am heading too, a decade or two behind him. A mood of exasperated but affectionate, sometimes peppery melancholy descended, and in that mood a good deal of the latter half of the book was completed.

It didn't take very long to write; well, there was all that invention that I didn't have to do. Life had invented everything for me.

Then came a year of thrashing around trying to find a publisher, which proved difficult; it's the old problem of trying to vault over the walls of your particular ghetto and being rudely rebuffed by the folks who live outside it. Who — outside of the SF and fantasy genres — had ever heard of this Charnas woman? Was the father somebody at least, a Warhol, a Picasso, or a child molester or dope fiend?

He wasn't. And there were so many memoirs out there to compete with . . . nobody wanted to "take a chance" on this one. If only I'd known when I started writing books that with the raising of the monetary stakes the whole thing would become something that publishers see as a ruthless game of chance! Or rather, of "Don't take chances, only sure things need apply." Had I but known — what? Foresight wouldn't have stopped me. Writers write, it's what we come into this world to do.

At any rate, we got nowhere until lo, right there at good old wit's end, my agent proved her worth by having lunch with a young editor that neither of us knew. Sara worked at a small publisher founded in the sixties to handle philosophical and metaphysical books back then, now owned by a conglomerate and known for a line of practical books on real-world subjects. To our good fortune, it turned out that this editor was (a) married to a painter (my dad was a painter) and (b) a fan of SF and fantasy, familiar with my name and eager to read Ghost.

She loved the book. She bought the book.

Now everybody loves the book — the staff, the sales force, the book designer, and, thank goodness, most of the writers we sent manuscript copies to for (we hope) their enthusiastic endorsements of its qualities. Inquiries about publishing excerpts come in from several high-circulation magazines, before the serial rights editor even gets a chance to put the book out there for their consideration.

There is buzz.

Heaven help me, here's this non-fiction book that I wrote in a quiet year, a quiet mood: a down-to-earth meditation on age and death and family ties, not an alien or a vampire in sight — and people are talking about it (I'll post a chapter of it on my page later so that visitors here can get an idea of what, exactly, is being talked about).

Looking for blurbs from other authors whose names book-browsers may know, we need only choose among those of my own generation. Everyone in middle-age (who is not already orphaned) is dealing in some way with the decline of their parents, the identity and power and changing significance in their own lives of their parents. Everyone responds to this story because everyone has an anxious interest in its themes.

Endorsements come in. They are heartfelt, they are encouraging, and above all they are useful. The book is spreading its wings a bit, it is acquiring lift and range. It is acquiring champions.

I am elated (maybe also a bit inflated, though it's too soon to tell): things are looking good for My Father's Ghost. Maybe it will fly.

Now I've done my part, at least most of it, and I can sit back and relax a while. I've sent in family pictures and photos, from which a very handsome cover design has been constructed. I've gone over the editor's questions and comments on the mss., to see which ones I need to respond to in the text to make the book better. I've gone over it again, later, checking the changes suggested by the copy-editor (that's the person who makes sure that you don't say your father had blue eyes in one chapter, brown in another, and that your punctuation isn't more confusing than helpful in smoothing the passage of the reader's gaze over your words).

I've sent it back; all that remains is checking the galley proofs when they come in, to catch any mis-spellings, dropped lines, and other errors that may have crept into the text since or slipped by all of us til now.

Now what? I mean, I only have one dad, and I've used him up.

What if this book about him is a galloping hit, a solid success, a doorway for me to step through into a whole different level of the book business?

What in Heaven's name do I do for an encore?

Well, I have this little idea...

What Reviewers Are Saying about
My Father's Ghost

"From [Suzy] Charnas, a true and tender account of caring for her aging father from the time of his truculent arrival at her home to his irascible last illness and death... The author makes good use of entries from [her father's] journals, full of amusing, brittle, sad, and hopeful anecdotes and musings, epigrams, and reflections on art and life... to capture the mix of guilt, longing, impatience, and empathy that characterizes their relationship. Anyone who has cared for aging and ill parents will recognize and perhaps be comforted by this frank delineation of the mixed emotions called up by the death of a father."

— Kirkus
August 1, 2002

"... a moving, thoughtful... never sentimental account of how daughter and father get to know each other in middle and old age. . . Robin's unique combination of eccentricity and strength speaks for itself... Charnas' story is bound to be a guidebook and an inspiration for anyone caring for aging parents."

— Publishers Weekly
August 5, 2002