Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Sometime in late 2005, on one of our first outings together, my friend Cornelia took me to her favorite used bookstore in Portland, Me. The store, once thriving, was closing its doors. The stacks had been picked over, and all that remained were some used cookbooks and a smattering of other genres. I have had moments in used bookstores when I feel destiny pushing me toward an obscure title, but that day I felt nothing, no sign or vibration coming from any of the odd, unwanted books. But because Cornelia was a new friend and had driven me into the city to show me this store that she hadn’t known was going out of business, I grabbed a beat-up biography of Margaret Mead and took it to the counter.
I love the idea of biographies — the snooping and eavesdropping and rifling through old letters and journals, as well as the stepping back to see the subjects in the context of their family, time and culture — but they often sit on my shelves unread. As much as I want to know the stories they are packed with, narratives of fact rarely capture, for me, life in the way I like it to be captured on the page. Those real-life details often aren’t enough, or are too many, or are just not the right ones to bring a moment quiveringly to life in the way of a good novel, whose conversations and furniture and lovemaking feel as if they are truly happening while your eye passes over the words. And there is a claustrophobia that comes over me, a palpable sensation of feeling stuck in a place where everything has already happened. When I read biographies, I am too aware of these confines, that we are each, the biographer and I, chained by the ankle to fact, and cannot let our imaginations soar.
Despite this strong and perhaps unfair prejudice, I did end up reading “Margaret Mead: A Life,” by Jane Howard. Or at least I read up through the part when she was doing fieldwork in what was then the Territory of New Guinea with her husband, Reo Fortune, and they meet — and she falls in love with — the only other anthropologist in the area, Gregory Bateson. I stopped there and went back and read the section again. It is a short chapter: twelve pages, covering a strange, patchily documented period in her life. That would make a good novel, I thought. Just those months in the Territory of New Guinea in 1933. Such an interesting novel. For someone else. Someone who writes that kind of thing.
That would make a good novel. It’s a thought you have regularly as a novelist. You go to a friend’s house for dinner and you overhear a small, loaded exchange between her and her husband in the kitchen and a whole story starts spooling out while you are tossing the salad you brought. You don’t write it down and by morning the idea is gone, washed away like the rest of the flotsam that seemed for a delusional moment to be able to carry several hundred pages, but ends up bobbing off somewhere mentally inaccessible.
But the Margaret Mead idea did not bob off. The novel I was working on then was hard going and emotional. It required long breaks, and during those breaks my imagination began to slip off to those three anthropologists trying to piece together the great spectrum of human behavior while trying to master their own.
Even though I was quite sure that I could not write a novel based in fact and set in 1933 in the Territory of New Guinea, that I did not even want to write a novel like that — I didn’t read “historical fiction” for the same reason I didn’t read biographies — I wanted to know more. I read “Coming of Age in Samoa,” the book that made Mead famous in her 20s and “Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist” by David Lipset. I read the two books that came out of their field work in New Guinea: Mead’s “Sex and Temperament” and Bateson’s “Naven.” I read Mead’s published letters and her memoir, “Blackberry Winter.” I bought a green notebook and filled it with notes. I went back to my novel. I stopped again and started a novella about a love triangle between a doctor, a musician and a frustrated poet — a contemporary love triangle that required zero research. For several years my notes were mainly details about the Sepik River, about raw bat and sago pancakes, scarification and infanticide, bride prices and mosquito bags. Until the day I finally wrote a few sentences in the back of my green notebook. “As we left the Mundugumor, someone threw something at us. It landed in the water, bobbed beside the stern of the boat. (Pale brown thing.)”
Once I had those words, it became a novel. I saw it. I felt it. It was that fast, like a gas becoming a solid in an instant.
For a long time after that it remained three rough sentences in pencil at the back of my green notebook. But it was enough. I continued to read about Mead, about anthropology, about the Sepik river tribes.
I planned to tell the whole story in Mead’s voice, use all the real names and stick to the facts I had. There were enough gaps in the published historical record, I thought, in which my imagination could frolic. I’d done the reading with a squint, wanting to know things but not too many things. My research needed to be like an undergarment in the days before people started showing off their boxers and their bra straps. I didn’t want any of it to show through.
My green notebook was filled as much with what could happen as what did happen. A detail gleaned from my reading would trigger a whole possible scene, which I would write below the factual tidbit and mark with a star. When I returned to that initial research, I was surprised by the number of stars, how many ideas I already had. My reading and note-taking were laced with, perhaps driven by, my impulse to make things up.
When I teach fiction I often start a workshop with one of my favorite exercises called Two Truths and a Lie. I tell my students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first sentence of the paragraph must be true (My sister has brown hair.), the second sentence must be true (Her name is Lisa.), but the third sentence must be a lie (Yesterday she went to prison.). What I forgot when conceiving of this book is that it’s the lie that brings the story to life, makes it hum. The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.
By the end of the first chapter, all the lies I’d had to tell to create scenes and dialogue had driven my novel of historical fact directly away from history. Even the one line of dialogue I knew — “You’re tired,” is what Bateson supposedly first said to Mead — didn’t work in my made-up scene. My three anthropologists were on their way to becoming entirely their own people, with their own instincts and impulses and responses. Soon they would have their own names, their own particular passions, and leave Mead and Fortune and Bateson far behind.
Still, I thought, I was writing the story of an American scientist whose voice became louder and farther reaching than perhaps any other woman’s of her era, one of the few female voices that was heard at all during most of the 20th century. Then I wrote the second chapter from the Englishman’s point of view, and found the real voice of the novel. It took me a long time after that — years, in fact — to admit that this book wasn’t her story. It was his.
In real life, at the end of their five months on the Sepik, Mead, Fortune and Bateson went to Sydney and stayed there for another three months, trying to sort out their feelings for one another. In September of 1933, Mead and Bateson got on separate ships, she to America, he to England, while Fortune remained in Australia. Absolutely nothing was settled between any of them.
It became clear that my own tale was not going to end on the quay in Sydney Harbor. For a long time I didn’t know what would happen, only that I had the freedom to find out. I had slipped out of the shackles of history, made a clean break with fact. And I set off into the jungle of my imagination.
Lily King is the author of four novels. Her latest, “Euphoria,” came out in June.
An earlier version of this essay incorrectly stated that Reo Fortune never published a book. He did, in fact, publish several books from 1927 to 1942.