Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Lindsay Merbaum writes about The Gold Persimmon from Creature Publishing.

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The plan was a one-night writing retreat in an upscale hotel, one night being all I could afford. The lobby was a rectangular chamber with a high glass ceiling, escalators rolling on a loop on either side of a cascading fountain, ferrying guests up, down, and away. As I approached the check-in desk, I passed a glass cistern of cucumber water on a high-top marble counter. I took some in a little waxy paper cup I didn’t know what to do with once I’d drunk its contents. As I stood at the tall check-in desk, crushing the cup in my hand, someone in a suit with a name tag clicked away at a keyboard, smiling at their screen. It was all very official, ceremonial, this experience of checking into a hotel in downtown San Francisco. They had my name, but it was meaningless to them. I was anyone, no one. A tourist, perhaps, far away from anyone who might criticize, or tell me what to do.

I took the elevator to my room and surveyed the view of this part of the city called the “financial district.” It’s the ugliest bit to be sure, crammed with department stores and big-name pharmacies and shoe shops, bouncers in suits guarding the double doors to designer boutiques, the concrete glittering with the glass dust from crushed syringes. There’s always construction in that part of town, which herds the meandering crowds of tourists into tighter walkways. The school where I worked was nearby, set up in an old hotel with mushrooms in the basement where a pool used to be. In my ten years in the Bay Area, I would have three different jobs in San Francisco’s financial district — two schools and a nonprofit — all within walking distance of one another.

I took a shower, put on the plush robe hanging in the closet, and began scribbling character sketches in my cheap spiral bound notebook. I was building my own hotel on the page and filling it with people who’d suffered some fantastic loss. I wrote into being a failed opera singer who had been raised by her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor; an adulterous, misogynist doctor whose wife disappears on him, leading to questions about her true identity; a struggling, alcoholic adjunct who realizes she’s misremembered her own traumatic past. None of them made it into the final draft. Instead, I found my way through the novel by following the trail of Clytemnestra, the priestess of check-in at The Gold Persimmon hotel, where visitors come to grieve in luxurious, sound-proof solitude. Clytemnestra forms a relationship with a guest, violating protocol and risking her job, and the stability it provides her fragile world of loss and loneliness. Like me, she risks so much for someone entirely unworthy. Where her story came from and who it truly belongs to is the novel’s great reveal.

The next part of this story is supposed to be a scene where I write what becomes the first chapter of The Gold Persimmon. But that’s not what happened. Instead, my real-life boyfriend at the time showed up unannounced. He was in some kind of crisis about our relationship, about me. He couldn’t leave me alone for fear of what I’d do, who I might talk to, or touch. I thought love was supposed to be like that, that I deserved a love that was tumultuous and dangerous, a man who winnowed down my sense of self. So I let him crash my expensive one-night writing retreat. I put the notebook away, but not forever. No matter what happened, no matter what he did, I would keep writing.

I sent myself to a hotel to work, and with me came my mess, my trauma, in the form of a frightened, violently insecure man. It’s taken some years to see trauma has influenced much of what I write. It leaches out of me like a poison. But I don’t want this essay to be about that, even if it’s the truth. I don’t want this to be the sum total of my story, for it to become someone else’s story in the end. Who controls the narrative? Let’s say I wrote my book about that; it’s the truth.

I wrote my way through the labyrinth of The Gold Persimmon. Along the way, a second narrative emerged from the darkness, this one unfolding within a Japanese-style love hotel in NYC, within which seven people become trapped when an inexplicable fog descends on the city. One of the people stuck in The Red Orchid is a young writer, looking for inspiration for their first book. We see how Jaime’s trauma — both the experiences they have within the hotel, and the trauma of their past that occurred outside it — is reconstituted into a new narrative. In this way, the novel becomes about storytelling itself.

Sometimes I feel like fiction is the most personal thing in the world. Maybe, at times, even more personal than memoir. While memoir mines the author’s memory to tell a reader “This is what happened to me, this is my story,” fiction explores what an experience has triggered in the writer’s subconscious. It reflects the way trauma reroutes memory, and how memory edits itself, inventing and replacing. To read fiction is to accept an invitation into a writer’s imagination. Once there, you watch the weaving of “life” into symbolism. Authors of fiction reveal so much about themselves without necessarily even realizing it. What have I shown of myself?

If a novel were a kind of building, it might be a hotel, with readers coming and going, turning over the same words in their minds. Something available for anyone to consume can still feel deeply personal. The highest achievement between writer and reader is for the reader to feel this book was written for me.

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