Great Uncle Art

I recently read Liz Gilbert’s “Committed,” and just loved it. It’s full of insight, humor and honesty. Though I adored “Eat, Pray, Love,” it appealed much more to my girly sensibilities, while “Committed” is a book I think my husband would enjoy as much as I did.

Anyway, there’s a short section in the book that has me thinking. She talks about how people live on in the stories we tell about them. Take for instance, my Great Uncle Art, who I talk about with some regularity. He came to California in the dust bowl and became a migrant fruit picker. At six foot four, with a giant wing span, he excelled at this profession, traveling up and down the coast with the harvest, and visiting different girlfriends in every city. My memory of him (he died when I was fairly young) was of a gruff, hard-smoking, hard-drinking tower of a man, who loved to knit.

Every time I saw my Uncle Art he had some new little doll he had knitted for me. I was always fascinated by how his giant, rough hands ever managed to make something so delicate. After reading “Committed” I got to thinking about how, in a small way, Uncle Art lives on every time I tell someone about him, and the realization I had this morning was that he will live on in the same way even if I turn him into a fictional character.

The thing about fiction is that we read it assuming that it’s entirely made up, but every detail had to come from somewhere, and where else could it come from but the writer’s life? And so I come again to the idea that fiction and non-fiction are divided by such a blurry line. I think that is why we read fiction, for great stories that ultimately tell great truths.