Writers have to decide who in their lives is fair game for subject matter, and all writers decide differently. The fact is, that when you are starting out, everyone is fair game, because you don't know how to construct a character, and an easy way (as Virginia Woolf discovered when she was writing The Voyage Out) is to thinly disguise your relatives and acquaintances. Relatives and acquaintances differ in their response to this—some put up with it, some hate it, and some are insulted if they are not found interesting enough to be included. Quite often, writers later learn just to draw characters, adopting one trait from one person and another trait from another person, and letting the traits interact with one another to build into a character. For the writer, or at least for me, this process is delightful, but there is some admixture of guilt; only when I concoct the characters of horses and dogs do I feel entirely free and happy.
When the inspirational humans are long gone, as with the characters who inspired Margaret and Andrew in my novel Private Life, the potential for guilt is replaced by another—the potential for caricature or flatness, and this was precisely the problem I had with Margaret and Andrew when I was working my way through the beginning drafts. Andrew's inspiration still lives on the Web (after the novel was published, a man who knew of him wrote me out of the blue and asked me if an astronomer named T.J.J. See was the man I was thinking of). Margaret's inspiration is a memory for my mother, and maybe only for her. My goal as I worked on my novel was to make Margaret live and to make Andrew human. It wasn't easy.
I wrote the first draft in Margaret's voice, having her tell her own story, and when I read it through, I realized that Margaret is precisely the person who cannot tell her own story. Her knowledge of her own story (which is a combination of what happened to her, what she felt about it at the time, and how she understands it now) is only partial—for a woman of her day, and even for many women in our day, not making waves is the best survival strategy, and to understand and then to act on one's understanding is to enter dangerous and unknown territory. Speaking in her own voice, Margaret was flat and uninteresting, a classic good girl and nice woman, never rocking the boat.
The man who inspired Andrew was in many ways too vivid and too unlikable to be in a book. In our family, he was just an eccentric old uncle, but when I delved into other stories of him, he struck me as a raging egomaniac, who never hesitated to declare himself the best scientist since Newton or to impose himself upon those around him. In Vallejo, he was considered a cross between a joke and a pain in the neck, and I had to wonder about the fact that after he died, they not only took down his observatory, they also leveled the hill it was built upon. He appalled me. And yet, he and my great-aunt were married for almost fifty years, and she seemed, to her relatives, to be a good-humored and easy-going person.
The novelist's task is to reconcile the unknowns of human life into something like a plot, and to make that plot both active and thoughtful—it needs suspense to carry it forward and contemplation to give it meaning. If your main character is a "genius," then the commonest plot device is to make him right in the end. But I thought it would be more interesting if he were wrong in the end (as most geniuses are). Another common story is of the dynamic, ambitious man who makes a mistake and fails, and his failure is seen as a tragedy. In this story, normal folks can only be the audience. But I am more interested in normal folks. And so I knew from the beginning that I would view Andrew's life through Margaret's mind, but that meant that Margaret had to learn and grow, and do so believably in the context of her time and place. I began reading history books. Then I was really in big trouble.
World history between 1880 and 1942 was very dramatic, and living where she does, at the naval ship building base on the west coast, Margaret literally cannot ignore it—not only is she surrounded by sailors and naval officers, she hears the din of ships being put together and taken apart day and (during wars) night. And so history had to pass through her, too, not only the history that Andrew is interested in, which is the history of science, but also the history that regular people are interested in—war, depression, war again, social unrest, politics, and the evolving attitudes of fellow citizens, not to mention natural catastrophes.
For me, the turning point in all of this chaos came rather late in the drafts, when Margaret, feeling more and more oppressed by Andrew's unending demands, gets enough perspective to suddenly see that he is tormented, as tormented as she is, in his way, because he can't stop himself from doing what he does—that's the nature of his energetic genius. After I understood that, then I could let her consciousness evolve into something more mature than it had been, which meant that she could also see her own torment with a little perspective. And when she understands it, she has gained autonomy. It is not power, but it is enough for her.
The characters who inspire a work must, in the end, fade away. The novel is about the inner life, and we have no access to the inner lives of most people other than ourselves (caches of revealing letters are, alas, rare). The inspirational characters are premises in a train of logic that is both reasonable and emotional. Inevitably, the conclusions belong to the author.
Be sure to check out Jane Smiley's other stories on FamilyGoesStrong.com: What's for Dinner, Who Would Wear This?, Do It Your Way, What's So Funny?, and Where Did My Life Begin?