WE WOULD HAVE TOLD EACH OTHER EVERYTHING

Hermann excavates the foundations of her writing in a series of autofictional essays about influences on her life and craft.

Based upon content from her Frankfurt Poetics Lectures, Hermann examines three areas of inspiration and practice in an effort to “bring together influence and writing.” Her thinly veiled narrator (who happens to share a last name and a list of publications with the author) launches the first of three essays with an account of a revelatory nighttime encounter on the streets of Berlin with her longtime psychoanalyst. (The analyst had been treating her close friend Ada during a period of intense friendship, developed when the young women were members of a close circle of friends, creating their own lives.) Hermann’s friendships with two confidants from that era—Ada and the mercurial Marco—resolve very differently and demonstrate the varied results of creating a “chosen family.” The focus then shifts to Hermann’s own family’s painful history of illness, mental illness, and secrecy. References to dolls, puppets, and the like illuminate the shadowy forces behind Hermann’s need to tell her story—in a form that allows her to share while maintaining a protective “shell” about herself. Hermann’s last area of exploration addresses her writing. The question of what to convey and what to conceal is crucial to the narrator’s innate sense of literal self-preservation. Hermann examines what she’s written and muses on the differences between dreaming, making things up, and exaggerating. Her conclusions about the forces animating the stories—that she (or her narrator) has told and will tell—are equivocal and dreamy. This thoughtful interrogation of the conscious and unconscious influences on fiction was translated from German by Derbyshire in a direct and matter-of-fact voice.

A serious meditation upon one author’s motivations and methods.