Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, K.E. Semmel writes about The Book of Losman from Santa Fe Writer’s Project.
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In 2017 I started writing an essay about growing up with Tourette Syndrome. The essay, I hoped, would be a springboard into a larger book that I planned to model on Timothy Denevi’s excellent Hyper: A Personal History of ADHD. Like Denevi, I would frame the narrative with memoiristic essays from my life braided with chapters on the clinical aspects of Tourette: history, symptoms, diagnosis, etc.
At that point in my life, I was the Executive Director of a nonprofit literary arts organization, a position that comes with enormous responsibility. The stress of that job caused my tics to flare up, particularly at home when I gave them free rein, so after I rear-ended a car during an intense ticcing fit I went to the University of Rochester Medical Center—which specializes in tic disorders like Tourette—to figure out why I ticced. Although I had been ticcing for as long as I could remember, it was only then, as an adult in my forties, that I was officially diagnosed with Tourette. That diagnosis made perfect sense, and for the first time, I understood where to look for answers. But when I went looking, what I found were a number of books written by clinicians and/or researchers, with very few told from the point of view of someone with the disorder.
Knowing that I could write such a book, I was aflame with the idea of telling my story and educating the public on what Tourette was about. I dove into my research with gusto, jotting down reams of notes, and after a couple months I began to write my story (temporary title: TWITCH). But something soon happened that paralyzed my creativity. After writing the most indelible scene, the most horrible moment of my childhood ticcing experience, the one that made me hide my tics from others, I realized I had two insurmountable problems:
1) I had nothing more to write about. My life was uninteresting, and I bored even myself to think about it.
2) The completed ten-page essay was a sad one, the kind of piece that makes readers feel bad for the writer, and I didn’t want to write a sad story*. I didn’t want people to feel bad for me. The truth was, though I certainly had sad moments in my life (who doesn’t?), my story was not a sad one. Not really. On top of that, I like to laugh when I read (who doesn’t?), and my essay was far from funny. How could I shift gears entirely and write a humorous Tourette story without resorting to caricature? Jonathan Lethem wrote a wonderful (and funny) novel featuring a character with Tourette, Motherless Brooklyn. But his protagonist detective, Lionel Essrog, has a version of Tourette called Coprolalia that only around 10% of TS patients have. It’s the version of TS most people think about when they think about TS, because it involves public shouting and swearing. Since it’s dramatic, it’s what the media likes to portray. But it’s not my version of TS.
Blocked from writing, I stewed on my dilemma for several weeks.
Ever since I was a freshman in college thirty years ago, I’ve wanted to become a novelist. To reach that goal I’ve read god knows how many books and written thousands of pages, approximately 99.8% of which remain unpublished. Along the way, somewhat accidentally, I became a translator from Danish or Norwegian, and I’ve translated another few thousand pages. All fiction. Fiction was what I loved more than any other literary form. So why was I trying to write a nonfiction book?
This was the question I ruminated on. And before I knew it, something important happened. A window opened.
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I’ve been fascinated by memory since I was a kid, particularly childhood memories that you cannot recall as an adult, that are, presumably, lost forever once you reach a certain age. Where do they go? When you die, if your life really does flash before your eyes and you see long-lost memories again, where were they stored during all your living years?
My son was seven at the time I tried writing my nonfiction book. Every day he was experiencing something new. How much would he remember of these experiences? I wondered. Would he completely forget the beautiful day we shared watching Ichiro Suzuki play baseball in Milwaukee? The same day I bought him a huge Lego set at the stadium and he proudly carried it through the parking lot to our car? I will remember that day for the rest of my life. Will he? Such a huge loss, if not.
With similar thoughts in mind—many years before my son was even born—a seed of a story planted itself in my mind and stayed with me, but I never had a narrative vehicle with which to use it: What if scientists developed a pill that would allow people to relive or re-experience long-buried childhood memories? While chewing on my dilemma and unable to write my nonfiction book, I pulled this idea from storage in my brain, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I finally had the right story to broadly explore this seed. To let it germinate and grow. I put my nonfiction book notes aside and began writing fiction again, carving deeply into the ten-page essay I’d written. I salvaged less than a single page, keeping a chunk that would grow into the absolute centerpiece of the manuscript that would eventually become The Book of Losman.
At first I didn’t know what I had, or even what I was doing, but I knew the idea was a good one and that I would roll out the thread as far it would go. In this way, the book began as a memoir and ended up, five years later, as a novel. There’s a “true” story in Losman, a fictionalized account of a single experience from my life. Everything that’s wrapped around this one moment—the half page of text I salvaged from my nonfiction essay—is fiction, all illuminated by my experience as a translator and as an expat in Denmark.
I will turn fifty the month The Book of Losman, my debut, is published. It’s the right story at the right time. I’ve spent the last thirty years preparing for this moment: reading, studying, translating, and writing fiction. It’s hardly a surprise that The Book of Losman emerged, in the end, as a novel.
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K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator. His debut novel, The Book of Losman, will be published by SFWP on October 1. His most recent translation is a reissue of Simon Fruelund’s short novel Civil Twilight (Spuyten Duyvil), which he previously wrote about for Necessary Fiction. *He did finally write, and publish, a sad nonfiction essay about his experience with Tourette. You can read that here in HuffPost. Visit him online at kesemmel.com.