PETER SELGIN: Story Behind the Story

How would you describe your new book, Duplicity?

Duplicity is a metafictional psychological thriller about twin brothers, both of whom happen to be writers of very different kinds. One twin is an accidental bestseller; the other is a commercial failure despite decades of dogged effort. As one astute reader described it, “You think you’re reading a novel, until you realize you’re reading a deconstruction of a novel.”

Duplicity is a novel. Your last book, The Inventors, is a memoir. Both rely on facts and memories, arguably two sides of the same coin. What’s the difference?

The main difference, or differences, I think, are of degrees and intent. While fiction and nonfiction both make use of experiences, the driving force of fiction is imagination, whereas with memoir the engine under the hood is memory. That said, and as The Inventors makes or tries to make clear, experiences don’t exist independent of memories and memories don’t exist independent of imagination.

Both books draw from your own family experience, including that you are and have a twin brother. How different was the writing process with these two books?

The two books can be seen as two sides of the same coin, since they treat similar (and even arguably identical) themes: twindom, identity, self-invention. Apart from that, they’re very different books and the experience of writing each was as different. While The Inventors took decades to write and passed through many radical incarnations on the way to achieving its present form, after I’d drafted the first several pages of Duplicity, the book fairly wrote itself. Once I had my narrator’s voice—which is to say, once I had Stewart Detweiller (Duplicity’s first-person protagonist)—it was mainly a matter of letting him take over. From then on, writing the book was like walking a spirited dog on a long leash.

You’ve written a novel that also includes insights about the writing process itself. Can you explain why—and have you been surprised by how many readers value this inclusion?

It has occurred to me more than once that the working title for any good novel-in-progress might be, “Everything I Know So Far.” Alternatively, that title could be, “Everything I Know So Far About Writing a Novel.” Every novel a novelist writes teaches them how to write that particular kind of novel, as well as, by implication, how not to write every other kind. Implicitly, the same lessons are there for any reader to wants them. With Duplicity, I made those lessons overt—or rather Stewart, gifted writing teacher that he is, makes them overt. It’s part and parcel to his character. That it adds a layer of metafictional irony to the novel is a windfall. And yes, to my relief and delight, most readers seem to appreciate it.

Without giving too much away, Duplicity starts with a death. From there, the book has lots of twists and turns, both in the places that the narrator takes us and in its stylistic shifts. Why is all this twisting and turning important for the readers’ experience?

One pleasure of reading fiction, perhaps the main pleasure (and this can apply to nonfiction stories as well), is that of having one’s expectations subverted, which is what those “twists” do. What’s true of good endings—that they’re surprising and inevitable, applies—or should, ideally—throughout a gripping story, with our first reaction to events being something like “Oh, my God!” followed soon thereafter by, “But of course!” What isn’t wanted in a good novel—or in any good piece of writing, fiction or non—is predictability. Writing that doesn’t somehow subvert expectations, that doesn’t complicate or challenge our presumptions and feelings in any way, that doesn’t somehow “twist” them, isn’t in my view worth reading once, let alone more than once.

You’re written novels, memoirs, essays, plays and books about the craft of writing. Is there a method to how you move from one book, one mode of storytelling, to another?

I’m tempted to say that I let form follow function, but what does that mean, really? The humbler answer is that at bottom I think all writing, to the extent that it’s any good, is essentially the same. We have our subjects, and in writing about them we try to get at—if not “the” truth, some truth. That said, when I teach writing, I tend to avoid words like “truth.” Ditto “style,” “voice,” “authenticity.” The words I most like to use are “precision” and “clarity.” They’re clinical rather than personal: terms that could be applied to a surgeon’s performance.

As writers, I think we need to be like surgeons, that the operations we perform should be carried out with surgical precision. Our tools aren’t scalpels and forceps: they’re nouns, verbs, syntax, etc. We operate not on bodies, but on memories, experiences, imagination and ideas. When a patient (a subject) comes into the operating room, that’s when we decide what tools are needed, what surgery to perform. That’s when we decide, “This is probably going to be a 2,000-word essay” or “This looks like a play.”

You’re a prolific and disciplined writer. What drives you? What keeps you going?

I don’t think of myself as disciplined in the sense of having a writing schedule and sticking to it come hell or high water. I go long stretches without writing a word of any significance. But once I grab hold of something, I’m like the proverbial dog with a bone. I won’t let go. Then I’ll write for five or six hours a day—especially in the revising stages, which I especially enjoy. That’s when I get to exercise precision, which, as I’ve said, is really the point.

As for what drives me, my father was an inventor. I grew up watching him create devices in his laboratory, from drafting table to lathe, saws, drill press, wiring and testing circuits—until at last something existed that wasn’t there before and that actually worked. That’s what drives me: the desire to make something that wasn’t there before and that works. The difference is that my inventions only work on paper.

I know you’re working on a new book. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

The book I’m currently writing is a novel set in a down-on-its-heels former hat manufacturing town in Connecticut, circa 1963. It’s a relatively well-behaved novel: no metafictional high jinks, notwithstanding which there is, I hope, magic of a kind. The book’s subtitle is “Of Things Unknown and Unknowable,” and it deals with the sense of mystery and wonder that’s native to most young children, but that comes under siege usually with puberty, when it’s tamed and circumscribed by so-called “reality.” The novel itself poses several mysteries, chief among them the identity of a stranger who wanders the town collecting odd items in his rucksack.

MORE FROM Peter ON Transformations:

“A Matter of Perspective.”