Life story

"I remember when my mom got into a car accident when I was two," he tells me from across the table. I can barely hear him over the awful karaoke happening only feet away from us.

"You remember things from when you were two years old?"

He nods. And then he proceeds to offer me his life story as my next writing project. 

I know he's trying to help me. I'm a writer who does not write. I explain to him my theory about writers and crazy people. Crazy people listen to the voices in their heads and do what the voices tell them. Writers just write down what the voices say.

He laughs, but I'm not sure it's because of my wit or because of the karaoke.

I try to avoid writing about people I know. It's been a jynx in the past, and is one of those things that has great possibility for pissing people off. I've done it in the past to mixed reviews.

In fact, I wrote about him briefly years ago. It didn't turn out terribly, but it was half fiction when it was finally printed.

But to sit down with someone and have them lay out the pieces of their life to that you can try to make enough sense of them so as to commit them to the page? That's a huge responsibility. And I am honored that he would trust me enough to offer.

In the end, I'm a lazy writer and his story may never be published. But it offers us both an opportunity: for me to write, and for him to come to terms with his past.