How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Lipstick crowns the golden Marlboro filter.

This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers.

The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.

Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is not to know it.

You turn the cards face-up as you lay them out, one by one, and consider the symbolism of each, as well as the fleeting impressions you get as you hold a card in your hand. Each card acts as a separate scene or chapter within a larger story, and as you go through the reading, you create a relationship between them. In that sense, it is, whatever truth it tells you, a terrific narrative exercise.

This was a period, I would learn later, when psychic abilities enjoyed a certain level of respectability with Republicans, due to the CIA’s involvement in trying to develop them as a military tool, but this still doesn’t explain it. My memory of the day begins only with the announcement that the doctor was coming, and the level of seriousness with which the visit was proposed to the class. “Dr. Tanous believes that all children are psychic naturally,” my teacher said. “That it is just a matter of training your abilities. Tests and games that anyone can do.”

I can’t skip what I need to do to love this face by making it over. I can’t chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like the something they want. Being real means being at home in this face, just as it is when I wake up.

I am not the person who appeared for the first time that night. I am the one only I saw, the one I had rejected until then, the one I needed to see, and didn’t see until I had taken nearly everything about him away. His face is not half this or half that, it is all something else.

Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.