I Might Have. I Didn't. I Wonder.

We are who we are, as authors. Thoughts in the aftermath of reading Why Fish Don’t Exist and writing My Life in Paper.

A scattering of handmade books, one featuring handmade paper and old ephemera, Beth Kephart

Sometimes, reading a perfectly shaped chronicle of life and learning and quest, I give myself a talking to:

I might have.

I could have.

I didn’t.

And so it was with Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. Which was published some five years ago to whirling acclaim. But, hey: I needed Cathy at my local indie, Main Point Books, to slip the book into my hands. Last week. I only learned about this book last week. A book that I have loved so much that even the acknowledgments made me cry.

It’s like the book was made for me. This book of history and science (I majored in the History and Sociology of Science at Penn). This book of rollicking sentences (I adore sentence-y rollick). This book that seeks glimmers of answers to impossible questions (including, To which rocks do we cling in a world built of chaos?). This book that, with its mix of the researched (the morally dubious taxonomist David Starr Jordan, the terrible legacy of the eugenicists, the fishy consequences of labels) and the memoiristic, would fall into a category of books I have coined the obsession vessel. See A Ghost in the Throat (Doireann Ní Ghríofa), Voice of the Fish (Lars Horn), and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Jenn Shapland) as additional exemplars. See also We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class (yours truly).

But the talking to that I gave myself was in reference to my own (most recent) nonfiction obsession vessel—My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press). My Life sprung from dual fixations. On the one hand: Dard Hunter, the world’s most famous and yet quite obscure (have you ever heard of him?) paper seeker, historian, maker, and philosopher. On the other: memory and how we hold it best—in our squishy minds or on flammable, tearable, crinkle-able paper?

Miller’s book is structurally sound; she places her desire to understand David Starr Jordan neatly within her hope to understand herself and to forge a theory about life’s purpose. He’s there, she’s there, and the narrative is propulsive, continuous. Flawless, actually, in my opinion. Not a single forced transition.

My Life, on the other hand, is a book of parts, organized into sections with titles like Remembering, Home, Obsession, Ambition, Doubt, Love, Erasures, and After Life. Within each section, I write toward diaries, photographs, menus, report cards, wills, dictionaries, so many paper things—first in deeply personal ways and then in brief universal notes (the history of, the meaning of, the science of, depending). Each section, finally, is introduced by a letter I write to Dard himself—tangling his story with my story, making my confessions.

Dear Dard: I grow obsessed with your obsession. Dear Dard: If we shape our theories about you according to the things you preserved, what theories will we shape about ourselves? Dear Dard: You died at 4:30 A.M. Dard II found you. We unbecome. We unbecome. Accept my gratitude for listening.

If you can’t summarize your own book with angst-free ease, if you don’t have a quick encapsulation for the neighbor who asks or the reader who wonders, well, then, you are, in this world of tweets, in marketplace trouble. I always knew that, with My Life, I’d be in that kind of trouble. Still, I persisted. I needed the memoiristic. I needed the history. I needed those letters, I needed to write this story, in this way, for this was the poem in my heart.

But reading Lulu Miller’s astonishment, Why Fish Don’t Exist, I paused. I thought again about the wisdom of producing a book that I will never be able to explain in a post much shorter than this, a book that was always bound for marketplace trouble, a book that does not behave like most other books, in its structure, its lines of tension, its reveals.

I might have. I could have.

I didn’t.

The truth being this:

We become the authors we are. We can only write our books.

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Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story received a Booklist star alongside gorgeous words by Carol Haggas; Beth Castrodale of Small Picks Press called the writing in the novel “staggeringly beautiful.” The book will be available wherever books are sold beginning on April 1.

My first book on the writing of memoir, Handling the Truth, won a Books for a Better Life Award shortly after its publication in 2013. I’ve continued to write about the making of true stories ever since, working with my husband to create workbooks, prompt-rich books, and suggested approaches to the page. A guide to those resources, along with a link to my essay collection, You Are Not Vanished Here (illustrated by William Sulit), can be found here.