Alexander Hemon
(3 of 3)
"He searches for historical facts in fictional narratives," says the writer T Cooper, whose novel Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes explores some of the same terrain as that of Hemon's books--immigration, adaptation and the slipperiness of factual truth. "He understands that historical 'facts' are full of some of the greatest fictions of all time."
Since the Lazarus project received universal renown five years ago, Hemon's worlds have multiplied and contracted. He divorced his first wife and married Teri Boyd, a photo editor, with whom he had two daughters, Ella and Isabel. He and Boyd began hosting a literary salon--first at their house, then at a bar--which became "the glue of the Chicago artistic scene," as Hemon's neighbor, writer Rebecca Makkai, describes it.
"I'm always mildly dissatisfied with where I live, looking for the next place," says Pulitzer Prize--winning, Chicago-based author Jeffrey Eugenides. "But Chicago is it for him. He's always going on about his butcher and his mechanic and his dry cleaner and how he never wants to leave them. He has a very intimate relationship with his butcher, like what a New Yorker might have with a shrink."
But in 2010, Hemon's carefully constructed world collapsed. In "The Aquarium," collected in The Book of My Lives, he recounts the death of 10-month-old Isabel, who is diagnosed with and succumbs to a rare form of pediatric cancer. The elegy is walled in by data: lists of times and dates, procedural details, pharmaceutical names. The simplicity is heartbreaking.
"It's very difficult to fictionalize intensely emotional stuff," he says, "because it might be a violation of other people's sorrow." This is why, despite his propensity for blending fact and fiction, this one story required a memoir to tell it. Parts of The Book of My Lives recount the actual incidents fictionalized in his novels and stories, but it's "The Aquarium" that probes deep into Hemon's urge to obfuscate. Before Isabel's death, he writes, "I'd needed narrative space to extend myself into; I'd needed more lives." Afterward, "we had to live inside a void that could be filled only by Isabel's presence. Isabel's indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow."
And yet, even at this moment of ultimate loss, storytelling holds fast. His older daughter Ella, longing for her sister to come back, invents a new sibling. Her fictional brother Mingus concludes the story, building a family of his own and traveling through a world of Ella's creation.
Ella's instinct was, Hemon says, "a kind of revelation. I saw how she processed this and I thought, That's what I do. The whole character of my personal sovereignty was formulated through the act of storytelling. This engagement is a way to keep things real." He laughs in amazement. "Do you know what I mean? As long as we're trying to imagine someone else's life, someone else's spirit, we are all connected."