The Interview: Eleanor & Her Biographer

Eleanor: I think it's time that I interview you, my Biographer, for the record.

Biographer: For the record.

Eleanor: Truth. Your version of it, at least. What you consider the truth.

Biographer: We can try this, sure. Ask whatever you want.

Eleanor: No questions are off limits?

Biographer: None. I might choose not to answer, but you may ask anything.

Eleanor (smiling): Okay then, here we go. Seatbelts fastened? Okay, okay. I have lots of notes. I've been keeping tabs on you, you know.

B: For more than 18 years, yes, I know.

E: You talk about your Little Room, but you like the exotic. You like the adventure.

B: I'm not sure how to answer that one.

E: Well, examples then. You were married once in Rome. You honeymooned once in Iceland. Your favorite cities are Paris and Dublin.

B: Okay, yes.

E: You've always said that once my story is finished -- really finished, as in, this is the correct version of me, you're ready to die. You will have nothing left to accomplish, you say. I am your epic, your opus, your masterpiece -- if you have a masterpiece in you.

B: I've said these things. I'm not sure you can take anything at face value. But yes, I do keep trying to get your story right, and I know I can't leave this world until I do.

E: So what you're saying is -- I'm to die for! (Eleanor giggles.) To have my story written and published and have people say, wow, this is pretty darn good and we should keep this in print forever.

B: I think that you're the star, Eleanor. I'm just a player in this, a conduit for something larger, and that something is you, plain and simple. And the story, the themes I want to address with your story. I do think that you deserve to stay in print. And I think it's up to me to make sure I write you well enough that it happens this way.

E: How many pages of me do you suppose you've written -- to date, since 1990, when you say I first climbed inside your head?

B: I have no idea. Thousands. Lots of drafts. You've already lived many lives, and most of those lives were all wrong. Completely wrong.

E: But I remember each one I lived. You can't just write me, and then delete that part of me. It would be like asking you to forget parts of your own life, yes?

B: I suppose.

E: You spent nine days in Paris, by yourself -- this was your first trip there, and you barely spoke a word to another person. You slept in the afternoon. You sat on the grass in front of the Eiffel Tower and ate your lunch. You felt the sun on your face. You couldn't believe that you could close your eyes, and open them, and see the Eiffel Tower. You thought, this is what's pictured on calendars, not real. What's real is mundane and repetitive. It's not the Eiffel Tower. You walked the streets long after the Metro shut down for the night. You returned to your hotel when the garbage collectors were just beginning their routes.

B: I could hear my footsteps on the street as I walked. I could hear my footsteps echo, in fact. Even Paris sleeps sometimes.

E: The bums -- the homeless. They always wanted your cigarettes.

B: And I didn't smoke! But in Europe, everyone smokes. So I bought cigarettes, just to give them out when somebody asked.

E: There was a club in the Latin Quarter you loved. You liked to watch the pretty girls in their short dresses while they danced to swing music.

B: Le Caveau de la Huchette. The doorman didn't speak much English, but he let me in for free as long as I promised to get drunk. He took pity on an American who obviously wasn't your average tourist.

E: What about Notre Dame, the first time?

B: I was finished with the night, I was drunk and stumbling along, and I wanted to walk on the other side of the Seine for a change, so I crossed a bridge, somehow made it to a bench. There were a couple of others there. Nobody talked. It was too late for talking. I looked up. It was Notre Dame. It felt surreal.

E: You wrote entire chapters about me, about me and my father, Jay Spain, visiting Paris. What happened to those chapters?

B: Deleted. I lost the hard copy, too, I think. That was a few years ago.

E: You did the same thing with Dublin, except for that trip, you had me visiting with a girl named Mary, and Mary was my lover. Was I old enough to have a lover?

B: Those were mistaken attempts to tell your story. I didn't get it right.

E: But I loved that trip! Mary was kind -- I didn't care that we kissed. I was more interested in being in Dublin.

B: I never had you visit Rome, or London, or Madrid, or Morocco. I was selective.

E: You also had me in a jacuzzi room with Mary in Upper Sandusky, Ohio -- at a Comfort Inn or something. I remember that. We stole my father's credit card and were charging everything. Mary was seducing this guy we met, so we could steal his money. We didn't know when the credit card would be cut off.

B: You remember too much, Eleanor. It was all wrong though -- you were never meant to be in those places, not for the final draft.

E: But I was, and I can't forget any of it.

B: I wrote chapters about you going to college, too.

E: Even though my story is supposed to end when I'm 17 -- 18?

B: I guess I was thinking more than one book. Or maybe I was thinking, you needed a back story and a front story. I had to know what kind of person you would grow up to be, so I could write the earlier parts.

E: You wrote me as a killer once, too. Before we heard about school shootings on the news like this is so routine. Before it became so common, and I know it's horrible to say that. But you made me ahead of my time, and not in a good way either, walking into my school and taking hostages, and then that reporter from Rolling Stone visiting me in prison to write my story.

B: He would have been your Biographer in that version.

E: But I'm not a killer. I don't like guns.

B: I don't like guns, Eleanor -- so, no, you're not a killer. No one will ever see that draft of your story, I promise.

E: When did you decide on the doughnuts?

B: Nobody who's reading this is going to know what we're talking about!

E: That's what makes it fun. There are doughnuts in my story, in the version you say is the real story of me.

B: Yes. Your favorite flavor is strawberry frosted. We can say that much.

E: I like sweets, I do.

B: You like to drink, too. That hasn't changed. You always drank too much, too early in life. I'm not sure why I did that -- why I wrote that.

E: Because you were no rebel when you were young.

B: (Laughs.) I didn't have my first beer until college, but I made up for it. In high school, it was the girl I was dating, who didn't drink, or the beer and parties and the rest of it. I guess I chose the girl. I'm always choosing the girl, aren't I? Sometimes it gets me into trouble. But for you, Eleanor -- you get to experience all of it at once. Sometimes too much. You live through me, and I live through you -- a weird sort of arrangement.

E: How do I know that this is the version of my story that's going to stick with people, that's going to resonate? How do I know that this version of my story will stay in print, or that anybody will want to publish it?

B: The good stories -- the good words -- they eventually find a home. You will always have a home, Eleanor, but eventually, the world will be your home. I have to make that happen, if it takes me the rest of my life. So, no, I can't die before the world sees you and loves you. Or understands you. Or gets you.

E: Well, anyhow -- let me see, I have so many questions left. We've barely scratched the surface of what I want to ask.

B: We should get back to your story, not mine, and not all of the versions of you that didn't work out.

E: Sometimes I miss Mary.

B: Maybe she'll make a cameo appearance.

E: I'd like that, if you could manage it.

B: Are we ready to get back to the new words?

E: I want to hear more about Iceland, and what it was like getting married in Rome.

B: Those were other lifetimes for me, Eleanor. Those were my personal stories that didn't get lived right. I'm evolving too. My story isn't finished. We're on parallel paths in this thing.

E: The right story, the story you want people to remember you for. Not the literary biography, you mean.

B: There's plenty of literary biography. I'll leave that for somebody else.