Maybe the public images we construct for others are not that well-constructed after all. Maybe we just love to slip little traces in between the cracks and fissures of our self-imposed, self-identified masks?
I have never even attempted to read any material published by any of my authors as biographical. Certainly, I bite into Virginia Woolfe's "Ficton is a spider web attached to reality" and "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
But in my reading of my authoress' life she must have hated her life as the wife of a prominent husband. One of the classical cases of having given up her own life and career and love affair as a society news reporter and the major paper to become housewife and mother. When she attempted to get back into business as a playwright, her material was outmoded. She had lost touch with the writing style, the new mode of theatre, and the generation that were running the theatres now. Her realism was wordy and did not tackle the important irresolvable issues of life anymore. Her life, her reality had nothing to do with anything people were able to identify with. Or maybe she just -- at the end -- lacked the skill.
But why does she hints at that under all her material, the scratch books, the skits and sketches, the rejection letters and the society newspaper reports? One letter in which she discusses the presence of someone else to her future-to-be husband. Bitter tears about the loss of possibilities. Maybe that is touching me right now. Does she want to be pitied?
The restless research has led me to an archive that holds material on one of my authors. But the content of the files left me baffled and stunned. Apparently, authors nowadays give their selection of material to archives before even stepping into nothingness. No more embarrassing moments of discovery for researchers -- no more turning red, giggling, discovering (...)
How much are we in need of constructing our representations and make sure we keep our little masks intact -- even after our death. It goes further than just selecting the material. No, we are in need of writing selective guiding notes to make sure whoever will anthologize posthumously and maybe (un)righteously canonize us, will have the corrected image. Puzzled...