What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Anne Mini

author

The youngest child in a family of writers, Anne Mini (blog) grew up helping writers smooth their prose and reconfigure their plots; her friendship with one SF writer spawned her memoir, A Family Darkly: Love, Loss and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick. The book won the Pacific Northwest Writers Association's Zola Award for Best Nonfiction Book/Memoir in 2004 and is due out this year from Carroll & Graf. Having just finished rewrites on her first novel, The Buddha in the Hot Tub, she is currently working on her second, to be titled True. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard/Radcliffe, a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Washington.   photo: Marjon Floris

 
I’m putting the finishing touches on my memoir, A Family Darkly. Since it will ostensibly be coming out soon, it has pushed my fiction projects to the side for the moment.

I actually cannot give you a solid release date, alas. For the last six months, the PKD estate has been making threatening noises about suing my publisher, which obviously has complicated the release process considerably. In a perverse way, though, writing under the cloud of a potential lawsuit made the manuscript jump to life for me far more than it had previously: when every last sentence might cost you your livelihood, you definitely make each one count.

 
What led you to this project?

In a way, my entire life has been leading up to it. This was a story I had avoided telling for 23 years, since Philip died. He was my mother’s ex-husband, and in my late elementary school years, he and I became very close. He was heavily agoraphobic, and my father was dying, so we formed a very strong bond, whispering into the telephone. In fact, he was my first writing teacher, showing me how to create plausible realities on the page and in real life.

For years, I told him everything; he talked through plots of books he was writing, problems with his publishers -- and we made up stories about his life for him to tell interviewers. We were both flabbergasted at what he was able to convince people to believe, and over time, the thrill of getting away with it became addictive. It was our secret game, and I loved it.

Philip died when I was fifteen, three years after my father did, and my world flew into shards. I stopped eating, stopped confiding in people, and withdrew into a shell, protected by this illusion I created of being the perfect teenager. With all of my experience spinning elements for Philip’s public persona, a small deception like cold perfection was comparatively easy. I kept that shell around me all the way through graduate school.

In the meantime, though, those stories Philip and I had made up together took on a life of their own. Like the children’s game of Telephone, the stories were embellished each time they were passed along. As movies were made of Philip’s work -- BLADE RUNNER, TOTAL RECALL, IMPOSTER, MINORITY REPORT, PAYCHECK, and soon, A SCANNER DARKLY -- his worldwide popularity grew, and with it, that persona, a pastiche of truth and fiction, was perpetuated. His name became iconic, associated certain brand of paranoid-yet-accurate cynicism about government and corporations.

In this image, I felt that the man I had known had become entirely submerged -- which I now feel is utterly unfair to Philip’s fans. But to rectify it, I would have to shatter what was left of my illusory self: I would have to come clean about how effectively I had hidden for so long. A memoir where I exposed all the years of deception to my own adult scrutiny seemed like the only means of doing that with integrity.

 
What are you trying to do with this project that you haven't done before? What challenges are you overcoming?

This question made me laugh, because truthfully, this book is not only the first time I have ever written about my own life in any detail -- it is practically the first piece I have ever written in the first person voice!

Being totally honest -- on paper or elsewhere -- is hard. There were times in the process where I was HUGELY tempted to turn away from the darker aspects of the comedy I had lived. Throughout the writing process, I was very afraid of how people would react -- not Philip’s fans, who I knew from experience tend to be very smart and possessed of wonderfully offbeat senses of humor, but of those closest to me and to Philip. I was terrified of what my mother would think, for instance.

Here again, the lawsuit threats have been most clarifying, at a very fundamental level. It’s one thing to face down your creeping insecurities when you are not sure that they will actually manifest; it’s quite another when your fears show up with their own lawyer. So much of my writing process in the intervening months has been about making very, very sure that I was saying what I wanted to say -- and make very sure that I was depicting others exactly as I saw them at various points in my life, without prevarication.

In the face of that pressure, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to fold up, to retreat back into the myth. Some of the people who were ostensibly most supportive of the project at first changed their minds when they realized that I was going to tell the truth, rather than presenting some prettied-up FINDING NEVERLAND version of my relationship with Philip. (Which was, incidentally, suggested to me rather forcefully just before the first lawsuit threat appeared.) I had to protect my point of view -- and make sure that I WAS presenting it as a point of view.

 
What has been rewarding about this particular project?

Ultimately, it has made me take ownership of my own memories. Writing a memoir is rather like going through therapy by shouting one’s observations across a packed opera house to a partially-deaf analyst sitting in the balcony: it requires complete commitment to getting your point across. It’s very satisfying when you’re heard at last.

It is tremendously liberating to write about one’s deepest, darkest secrets, you know. Compared to the gorgeous myth of a perfect childhood I had been peddling for so long, it’s a tremendous relief to tell my truth at last. Whenever anyone reads the book, I feel as if I have put my guts on display, after years of hiding them under mummy-like wrappings. Not all of it is pretty, not all of it is funny, but it is honest. People can like that, or they can reject it, but at least it’s me.

I also feel that this book is the logical, inevitable conclusion of all that giggling plotting I did with Philip as a child and young adolescent. In a way, the book project is my way of going back and apologizing for sins past. I do think that his fans deserve to know that not everything that has appeared about him in print would stand investigative scrutiny. And the story is itself quite amusing; I think Philip would have laughed a lot while reading it.

 
What's next for the book?

The book has been under contract since March, 2005. As I said, though, the publication process has been something of a rollercoaster ride -- far more bumpy than for the typical book. At this point, though, once the publication date is set, the manuscript will be out of my hands almost completely. That, too, is going to be a trust exercise. So in the meantime, I tinker.

Links

A note about Anne's memoir on scifi.uk.com

Read R. Crumb's story The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick

See more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 24 Feb 06, updated 1 Aug 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco