Fiction? Friction!
You can't make this stuff up... or can you?
Yesterday, I sat and talked with Ron (Nihilistics singer) over lunch for almost three hours. I won’t go into details but will say there are issues to be worked out and this was a good start. Getting together with Ron was my version of sitting down with someone you shipped off to war with way back when. Despite the intervening years we have a pivotal shared history in the trenches, even if versions don’t always align. I’m okay with that if we’re not haggling over major plot points.
After all, I never claimed to have an infallible memory.
I conveyed to Ron something said to me Friday night by a friend whose mother wrote a successful line of romance novels:
Have you ever thought of fictionalizing this story? Then you don’t have to worry about names and dates and places. And it would have a wider appeal. It wouldn’t just be about your life and this band.
I replied “I HAVE thought of that. There are early versions where my story is the skeleton but the flesh is different. But back in the day we were against all that made up shit that bands like the Misfits did. We always said ‘Real life is the true horror. We don’t need ghosts and goblins.’ and it would feel dishonest somehow. This is also about my legacy, about the fear of being written out of the story.”
I’m trying to sit with all of this because I don’t want to engage in score-settling, taboo in a memoir. I’m also not looking to create comic book heroes and villains. I’m hoping to tell a compelling story and can’t honestly say which form serves my purposes best. As Ron asked, will the world care about one more memoir from another NYHC witness/participant? I honestly can’t say.
Can you?
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P.S. The above image was animated using Adobe Firefly. And last week I promised a longer installment of NIHILISTIC but our fairly new smoke alarms went off at 2:46 AM and again at 3:30 AM (false alarms, both). These damn things are SO LOUD I swear I can still hear them. The result: I’m toast, despite the fact our toaster is on my workbench awaiting replacement parts.