The History of Great Things (24 page)

A
LL THIS TO SAY:
in crafting a book like this, you might assume I'd be inclined to comb through these archives. Weirdly enough, I don't especially enjoy looking at much of this material. I did read my journals from beginning to end a few years back, when I was trying to write a memoir, and nothing about the experience was enjoyable. At best it was marginally illuminating, in that I discovered that I remembered some things very differently from the way I'd written about them at the time.

But the point is that I didn't want this book to depict events with any accuracy. I am a fan of whatever you want to call this category of fiction in which authors use their real names for their character names. As someone who has often mined my own history for inspiration, I find that using my real name feels like a fun way to blur the lines further while also not pretending that a story didn't begin where it did. This book began with a simple idea: if I had the opportunity to sit down with my mom, who died in 1998, and dig into what each of us thought we knew about the other person's life, what would be revealed? My hope was to capture something of the essence of these two real people, reflecting who they truly were/are/could have been/could be. The book
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
, by Percival Everett, blew my mind. There's no way to synopsize it simply, but it explores a father-son relationship, playing with point of view in a way that's unlike anything I've ever read. That no one had ever told me to read Percival Everett before is also mind-blowing, because Percival Everett is so in my wheelhouse that he pretty much built the wheelhouse. Sometimes you don't even hear or think about who builds the wheelhouse you're in, but now I'm working my way through all the bricks Percival Everett laid, believe me.

All this to say that I made the non-decision not to dig too deeply into literal stuff.

I
N THE FOLLOWING
pages, I present to you some literal stuff to peruse that may or may not come from the collected archives of the Crane/Russell/Brandt estate. Any resemblance to individuals, living or dead, is entirely ambiguous. I'll be curious to know if you think that what you see in this assemblage lines up with the story as I tell it, or if you think it matters.

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