The Veiled Autobiography

"QRD – You openly call a lot of your work veiled autobiographies. Has this caused any problems between you & those vaguely featured?" 

"Adrian – Not that I'm aware of. But maybe it has and I just don't know." ("Adrian Tomine Interview", 2004).

How often, when a work of fiction is created, is the story a shadow of the author's life? My thoughts come from an uneducated line of thought. I've read many books, and I've thought of many stories I could write, but I've never put them down on pen and paper or to the keyboard to write out the stories I'd like to write. All of those stories have reference points in my life. Unless you can model the story off of something real, the story can never truly have the real tone you'd like it to!  It won't echo with people until it has something real about it, and that realism, I will say, comes across in the detail! 

I doubt there are any statistics on this, but I'm sure just about every work of fiction has some kind of twist on the life on the author within it's pages, to the point where a reader that knows the author would be able to laugh, or cry, or recognize the reference.

As Hilly from the Help protests that "The Help isn't about Jackson", I feel Adrian Tomine can't really claim Optic Nerve isn't about him. Maybe it's not directly, since I'm not a close friend of his, but his work always gives off an memoir-esque kind of feel.  Why does Mr. Tomine do this? Is it something so very human about him that wants to write about himself?  Maybe it was a lack of imagination? I guess one up-side is that as long as you keep on doing interesting things, you'll always have something to write about!  

Perhaps it's the veiled autobiographies that make the most interesting reads, because you take your life situations, and spice them up a little, add in the things that would have made that part of your life so much more interesting for the reader, and maybe for yourself.  

This is what Adrian Tomine has done with his career. Given us the spiced up version of his life. The interesting, pulpy viewpoint, that is as interesting and entertaining to look at as it is to read. So if you're ever looking for some inspiration, look no further than yourself, and as many random false plot twists as you can mix in (or if you're lazy, just do what this blogger did).