I grew up within a large Irish clan, which included a maiden aunt, R. A voracious reader, R was employed as a "business arts" teacher at a local high school. Early on, she became my typist, transforming my barely legible, pre-adolescent SF and adventure stories into readable manuscripts.
About a decade ago, R suffered a stroke, which left her unable to walk or speak. This was the realization of her greatest fear—complete incapacitation and the cessation of her ability to read, write or communicate. For two weeks after her stroke, R was sent for assessment to "The Clinic."
One night, while visiting my aunt, as she sat slumped in a wheelchair next to her bed, aware that she was trapped in her own ruined body, I turned away from her and glimpsed, on the rolling dinner table that straddled her bed, a white plastic binder filled with pages of information on the causes and treatments of aphasia.
Before I could stop myself, I grabbed the binder and began flipping through those pages, reading hungrily. Not in an attempt to discover what had happened to my aunt or what could be done to help her. No, I devoured those pages because I reflexively sensed that they might yield a nugget or two that might help me add to the mythos, the dreamlife, the ocean of story that I have been attempting to create since I was a child.
I have spent most of my adult life writing about the intersections between language and reality and identity. I had seized on that aphasia manual as useful source material. Simply put, I had viewed my aunt's agony as nothing more than fodder for my stories.
I don't think I had made it through a full page when I suddenly became aware of what I was doing. I know I jerked my head up from my reading, as if my conscience had arrived late on the scene and, appalled by what it found, had slapped me across the back of my head. And in the instant that my eyes lurched from the page to R's slack, sorrowful face, I understood that the obsessive act of writing, of compulsively mining life for story, was dangerous. That it was disrespectful of the life it sought to utilize. That it could be juvenile and immoral and narcissistic and impoverishing. That it had the capacity to be, in a word, cruel.
I dropped the binder back onto the table, kissed my aunt goodbye, left the room panicked, and walked down the hallway to the elevator.
Stepping inside, I felt suddenly woozy and began to thumb the call button repeatedly—as people do in horror movies. It felt like a paralyzed lifetime until the car descended and when the doors reopened, I bolted through the Clinic's lobby, out the main entrance and into my car. Where I sat for several moments trying to control my breathing and ignore what the previous five minutes might have meant.
Did I consciously recall that awful night years later, when, while writing The Resurrectionist, I installed my main character in the Clinic?
I did—though I can't say that I understood at the outset how the meaning of the night might connect to the intentions of my novel.
What I did in those few seconds at the Clinic on that night called into question, in an instant, the nature of a lifetime's dream—to make myself into a writer. In the moments after I hungrily pawed that aphasia manual, my actions were transformed into a dense and revealing metaphor for the tensions that were becoming acute at that time in my life: the tensions between remaining fully human and in the moment, present, attentive, living for others – and – the need to retreat within a solitary mind in order to create the stories. The tensions, that is, between one's "real life" and the life one creates on the page.
So: here is a book about loss and grief and rage. About coma and comic books and pharmaceuticals. About psychotic bikers and mad neurologists and wandering circus freaks. But, ultimately and more pointedly, I think it's about the tangled morality of writing itself. What that process does to the writer. What it does to those around him. What it has the potential to do to, and for, the reader.
My aunt, R, died eight years ago. Is it only a calming fantasy to imagine that, were she able to read The Resurrectionist, she would forgive me for that night at the Clinic, when I tried to transmute her pain into my story?
I'm not sure.
But I know that, were she able and willing to read and forgive, I'd accept her absolution. In a heartbeat. That's one of the many things learned over the course of this composition. Yes, writing is a messy and difficult and dangerous process, fraught, always, with wrong turns and missteps and the potential to make us both more human and less. But today I feel as if I've woken from a 10-year coma in order to testify that the potential riches of story are worth the risks inherent in its creation.
Jack O'Connell's Box Nine, Skin Palace, Wireless and Word Made Flesh are publshed by No Exit Press. They will be publishing The Resurrectionist in the UK early 2009.
