Reading, Writing Fiction, Death

On my Father, My Craft, My Passion

Photo by Mohamed Awwam on Unsplash

My father has been dead for 3.5 months. He died on June 2^nd. I can still visualize his cold blue flesh, can feel my warm, blood-pumping palm against the coolness of his corpse, can still see his blank dead-marble eyes gazing at nothingness.

Since his death, until recently, I have not been able to write a word of fiction. Actually, this started prior to his death. Probably months before. I remember writing fiction last year, 2022, before I moved in with Britney in her house in Lompoc. Maybe the fiction writing stopped when I first moved into her house in mid-January, 2023? Possible, but I don’t think this is true; I believe I did write some fiction beyond this point.

Either way, it’s been a while. It’s strange, in a sense. Fiction used to be my Main Thing. I’ve written, what, 13 novels? (Two of them have their own sections on my other stack, Sincere American Writing.) But I guess there’s something about specifically writing fiction that is harder, for me, than writing personal essay, biography, book reviews, political-cultural commentary, memoir, etc. Fiction utilizes a different part of the mind. It requires more from a writer—principally the use and feeling of deep emotion, imagination, wonder.

But recently I’ve been working on a novel about my father’s cancer journey. This is confusing because I’m also simultaneously working on a collection of my Cancer Diaries, the personal journals I kept meticulously during my father’s 23-month journey with terminal illness. These journals, obviously, are nonfiction. I wrote nearly every day, telling it as it was, writing down what happened, how I felt, dialogue that occurred, fights, fears, etc. (See recent posts on journal fragments.)

In the end I discovered, once I placed all of the entries into one gigantic Word document, that I had a whopping 190,000 (yes, you heard right!) words of prose. (Roughly 750 pages.) This made me think of the 9,000 pages of notes and personal diaries and journals left behind by the dead-young-yet-incredibly-prolific Soren Kierkegaard.

But in addition to this collection of journals—which I went through carefully with a scalpel and cut down to a withering 146,000 words and which I’ll be going over again and which will likely end up being self-published or published on Substack as a Two Volume fiasco—I have been working on a novel, told in the 3^rd person, about my father’s cancer journey as well.

Now, much of my work—read: My fiction—is and always has been to a large (but not complete) extent autobiographical…or as “the kids” say it nowadays, auto-fic work. This work is to an extent of the same cloth: There’s a protagonist, with a different name than myself, who is a fictive stand-in for me, Michael Mohr. But he isn’t exactly me. Once you write “yourself” down it never is exactly the same. And you never tell exact truths.

And that’s the other thing: Since I reread all the journals in their entirety, I know (was reminded) of exactly what happened and when regarding my father and his sickness: The ER trips; the hospital stays; the coughing fits; the bleeding; the hospice; being bed-bound; the M.G. (Myasthenia Gravis) symptoms; etc. And I know the precise times for all of these things, the specific days and weeks and months and whether it was 2021, 2022 or 2023. Yet for this novel I am only roughly following this true timeline and scale. I’m not as concerned with following things “exactly.” I figure the [eventually published] journals will showcase that. With the novel I want more to show the emotional journey; in other words the book is less about the cancer itself and more about the relationship between father and son.

But there’s another intriguing wrinkle which makes this very much fiction. I also dip into the father-character’s POV (point of view). Meaning: There are chapters wherein I write from the father’s perspective, seeing things through his eyes. I have found this both challenging, boundary-pushing and fun. And actually it’s helping me, in a weird and unexpected way, understand my father more, I think. Odd how writing can do that. It acts as therapy; catharsis; revelation. When writing [as honestly as I can] from the father’s point of view, I am forced beyond the stretching point to think of how life might have been from his perspective, instead of my own. How did my father see me?

And this makes for fun and slightly painful writing, because if I’m doing it honestly I’m seeing some of the ways my father probably both loved yet disapproved, praised and yet criticized, accepted and in other ways rejected my existence/life/character/personality/choices/lifestyle etc. I gather the courage to write from his POV (“his,” since it’s a character stand-in and not exactly “my father”) based on knowing him (mostly from some emotional and physical distance) for 40 years, from all the conversations we ever had, from what he told me about himself, what my mother told me about him, what I learned about his familial backstory and history, what I knew and know about my mother—the woman he spent 47 years of his life with—and everything I witnessed him do, from building his own house to betting on the horses to investing his own money in stocks and bonds to watching the Dodgers to fixing a car to hiking and backpacking with me, etc etc etc.

Based on all this information—and of course not without my own innate bias—I can cobble together an idea of “who” my father was as an inner man. This brings me joy because, simply put, I never really knew who my father was, at least not internally. My mother is a different story. She, like myself, has always worn her heart on her sleeve (even if she practices perception-management) and has communicated her inner emotions. But my father was always the bastion of classical Mohr German Stoicism. It’s in the DNA. His father had it. His grandfather had it. He had it. I do not. I carry my father in me in myriad ways…but make no mistake about it: I am more my mother than him.

Writing his POV has been very fun, expressive and eye-opening. In some ways it makes it feel like he’s alive again, at least on the page. Certain perspectives are hard to write, like my writing from the POV of a woman, say. But writing from Dad’s older Baby Boomer, Stoic, practical Man’s Man POV I don’t seem to struggle with. And it’s enjoyable because, finally, it’s not a stand-in for ME. To a large extent I am sick of writing [narcissistically] about “me.” Let me finally write about my father. A man I loved, a man who’s validation I did not often receive but which I always craved. A man I was both honored to care for and yet was often confused by. A man who did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but who buried it under ten layers of stoic Greek practicality. That man.

I find myself also constantly reading. I’ve always been a big reader, since I was a child. I took a break during the wild drunken teen years, and throughout most of my twenties it was hit and miss: I was far too busy living a wild life to the point that I didn’t need to read about one. (Enter On the Road.) But since sobriety—the past 13 years—it’s been reading reading reading. Since Covid especially, for some reason it became, alongside writing, my total escape, particularly when I was still living in Manhattan. And most of the books I read are men from the 18^th and especially 19^th century, Americans and Europeans, specifically French, German, Russian.

Dostoevsky. Flaubert. Rousseau. Balzac. Trollope. Chekhov. But then also books about psychology such as Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer-Prize winning, The Denial of Death. (Which makes me want to read Otto Rank’s books.) I try to read contemporary books but, with some notable exceptions—Ottessa Moshfegh, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Celeste Ng, Jennifer Egan, Rachel Kushner, Meghan Daum, etc—I find much of the current writing either boringly “MFA-y,” stylistically neutered, or else totally infected with the noxious poison of racial or gender or political ideology which, in my opinion, has zero place in authentic Art.

Reading keeps me sane. Writing keeps me creatively aligned. Creativity is a power unto itself which I respect very much. My father never really understood me, aka he never understood Art or Artists. I remember him cackling awkwardly one Christmas after I’d opened my gift from my mom of several French novels. He didn’t understand why I should feel so indebted to “the French.” As if that was somehow un-American or something.

My father, brilliant as he was as a computer engineer, and highly educated (two Masters degrees, one from Cal Tech, and a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley), was nonetheless never a sophisticated, refined, cultured man. He did not read novels. He did not like going to museums. He did not appreciate visual art. He was not into traveling abroad. He didn’t enjoy a fine red wine with fancy meals. He was more of a highly-educated All-American red-meat-eating man of his [Baby Boomer] time. What you saw was what you got. Straight-up. Intelligent—even contrarian—but simple. Basic.

I am, as I said before, much more my mother than my father, though I absolutely do have him inside me. (In both positive and negative ways.) I carry on, to whatever degree, his “legacy.” I am, in fact, The Last Mohr. His brother is dead. Both his parents are dead. No cousins etc exist. I’m it. Finito. The end of the line. And I am not having kids. So my father’s line ends with me. Is that not the most wild, exquisite Art of all time?

And so it is from this birthing, this spiritual trauma, that I write from my father’s POV. In the form of long-fiction. A novel. I try to resurrect my father from the grave in order to understand him more now that he is permanently gone, never to return. His soul has floated away, whatever that means.