An Exclusive Interview with Author/Illustrator Eugene Yelchin

The cover of Eugene Yelchin's "The Genius Under the Table"

Eugene Yelchin is remarkable. His recent memoir, The Genius Under The Table, is as well. (It received seven starred reviews!) We connected to talk about memoir, craft, and much more...

Lee: There’s this really cool metaphor Barbara Kingsolver brought up in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - speaking of fiction being like planting a garden in a desert, where you have to bring everything - rope off an area and then bring in soil, seeds, water, and tend it to grow into the garden you want. Nonfiction, Barbara offered, is more like going into an overgrown jungle, roping off an area and then taking everything that doesn’t belong in your garden out. When you’re looking at your whole life, how do you approach telling just a piece of it (like you did in”The Genius Under the Table”) in a way that crafts a story with a beginning/middle/end?

Eugene: It's a great metaphor, Lee. However, one still must decide what to take out of the roped off garden and what to keep. I have never written a memoir before. I have never written a nonfiction book before. The process was completely mysterious to me. But as I began working, I realized that a memoir requires a solid story structure not unlike a fictional story. The questions I had to ask myself were the same questions I ask myself when I write fiction. What are the wants and the needs of my characters? What is at stake? What are the obstacles, the complications? What is the crisis, climax, resolution? The Genius Under the Table is a very simple book. It is about tough things (poverty, fear, oppression), but somehow, it turned out to be funny. If I were to describe its plot, the book is about me becoming an artist. I thought a lot about what might have led me to the career in the arts and I talked to my brother a lot. We have realized that the most significant events that had influenced my artistic future occurred between the ages of six and sixteen. By the time I reached sixteen, it was fairly obvious to everyone in my family that I was not good at anything but making art. As a result, the memoir’s duration falls within that period, roughly a decade from mid-1960s to mid-1970s, which naturally, gave my story the beginning, the middle, and the end. 

Lee: Did you think of yourself (the child you) as a character?

Eugene: Absolutely. Every person in the book is a real person, and every event in the book is a real event, but I turned real people into characters, and I organized real events into a cause-and-effect structure. Unlike autobiographies, memoirs rely exclusively on one’s memory, but our memories are unreliable. To get closer to the truth, traditional memoirs include two voices: a voice of a young person experiencing the past, and a voice of a mature author commenting on those experiences from the present. If I were a ten-, twelve-, fifteen-year-old, I would have found some “mature author” explaining stuff to me unbearable. As a result, I removed my present-day self from the book all together. The story is told from the point of view of myself as a boy trying to make sense of the complicated world he’s inhabiting. Lost, confused, mistaken in his assumptions, mine is an unreliable narrator, who is probably more real me than I’m willing to admit.

An interior spread from "The Genius Under the Table".

Lee: How did the art come in terms of sequence - did you draw first, then write, or the reverse, or was it some combination as you went?

Eugene: The illustrations in the book are the re-enactments of my childhood drawings. As a kid, I used to draw to make sense of things. My family lived in one of those grim Soviet communal apartments, all five of us together in one room. I slept on a cot under the table, and it was the underside of that table that served as my drawing surface. I vaguely remembered my drawings on that table, which, naturally, had to be adjusted to the needs of the narrative. When I was making the finished illustrations for the book, I already knew what I needed, but while I was still working on the manuscript, I would doodle on the reverse of a printed page, figuring out my next move. On occasion, those scribbled images suggested solutions to the problems in the text that I was trying to solve.

Another interior spread from "The Genius Under the Table."

Lee: There’s so much as children we don’t understand and that can seem really scary, to the point where we adults writing for children can want to explain everything… Letting the child you not understand things felt very real, and also brave of you as the adult creator of the work. Can you speak about that?

Eugene: I had never assumed that I could impart some significant knowledge to my readers. I can barely figure out stuff for myself. I worry that explaining the complexity of our thinking and our actions may take away from that complexity. Our job as writers is not giving answers, in my opinion, but asking questions. The more difficult the questions are, the better. Our job is putting our readers in situations which engage their moral barometer. Our readers must ask themselves: what would I do if I were in the protagonist’s shoes? How would I react to such and such statement or action? What is the right thing to do in such and such situation? Naturally, I take sides in the moral dilemmas of the stories I write, but I prefer for the readers to infer where I stand from the dramatic situations instead of my observations.

Lee: What advice might you offer other illustrators and writers as they approach crafting their own memoirs?

Eugene: I’m not sure I’m very useful as an adviser. But there are some obvious things I could mention: 1) Know what you are writing. Is it a memoir or an autobiography? 2) Remember that most people have some kind of childhood traumas. If you’re writing from the place of trauma, show us your effort to overcome it. Please, please, please, do not write from a position of a victim. 3) Stay away from nostalgia like from a plague. 4) Try to distinguish between real events in your life and the events you wish to be real.  5) Most importantly, try to tell the truth to yourself. The rest will follow.

Thank you, Eugene! 

If you haven't checked out Eugene's The Genius Under the Table and other works, do so now!

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

Eugene Yelchin on Writing a Memoir

Mulit-award winning author/illustrator Eugene Yelchin shares about his new middle grade memoir, The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain in this Publishers Weekly profile: Four Questions for Eugene Yelchin.

Here's just a taste:

PW: How was the process of writing directly from your life different from writing fiction?

Eugene: It was easier because I knew the story before I began writing! I knew how things came out. But there was no plot, so I had to impose a plot on my memories. I had to organize real events into cause and effect to make the memoir read like a story. That’s the only way to tell a story: something happened so something else happened. My early drafts were hundreds of pages long and included everything I thought was interesting, things my brother thought were interesting, things my wife thought were interesting. But I had to leave a lot of those things out because they didn’t fit into the cause-and-effect structure.

Also, when I work on a character, I try to be extra careful not to confuse what the character wants and what the character needs. Most of us know what we want, but rarely know or understand what we need. Yevgeny wants to uncover his family’s secrets and his country’s secrets, but he’s too polite, too well-behaved to demand truthful answers. He lacks the courage to fully confront the adults in his life. Instead he attempts to piece together his small discoveries like a puzzle. Only by the end of the book does he mature enough to demand answers.

It's a fascinating interview – read it in full here.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

Laura Davis Weighs the Hard Choices of Writing Memoir

In this Publishers Weekly opinion soapbox piece, Writers Who Make Hard Choices, Laura shares the “agonizing soul-searching” that went into deciding to tell her truth while at the same time knowing it will hurt people she loves.

Laura considers how her first book launched the incest survivor empowerment movement, and the importance, with her new book about to publish, of “offering this story to the unknown readers with whom my journey may deeply resonate.”

If you're working on a memoir, Writers Who Make Hard Choices is well-worth reading.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

Margarita Engle tells us about her Golden Kite Award-Winning "Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings"

Margarita Engel's memoir won the 2016 Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction.

Blog reader jpetroroy's question for the author:

Did you find yourself self-censoring while writing this memoir to protect others' feelings?

Margarita writes in response,

"Yes, I did censor myself while writing Enchanted Air, Two Cultures, Two Wings. I made the decision to omit anything that would embarrass or endanger a family member. I did not include certain anecdotes about my sister that I regard as her stories to tell, not mine. I did not include any stories about relatives who are still in Cuba if I felt that their activities or attitudes a long time ago might still cause problems for them.

At the time when I wrote Enchanted Air, I worried about how it might be received by Miami relatives, but I did not censor my plea for peace and reconciliation. The time felt right for publicly admitting that I am against travel restrictions and the trade embargo."

Thanks, Margarita, and congratulations again on your award!

And cheers as well to jpetroroy for the the great question, and for winning a copy of "Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings!"

Handling The Truth - A Book On Writing Memoir

National Book Award Finalist Beth Kephart is the author of five memoirs (in addition to writing poetry and short stories.) She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, and wrote this book on the craft of writing memoir, "Handling The Truth."

In an interview with Barbra DeMarco-Barrett on the Writers and Writing podcast (around 19 minutes in) Beth says,

"I am not a fan...of the purely chronological retelling of a story. Of a life story. I think that you have the responsibility, as a memoirist, to carefully structure your story, your memoir, around the themes that you are working toward.  What are the questions you are trying to answer in your book? And that's going to dictate themes. And that's going to dictate tone and mood and voice, and it's going to break things open for you."

"The real suspense in reading memoir, I believe, should be not what happened, because often in a prologue or preface or because we've read the press we already know that somebody got down the mountain or whatever else happened, but how are the over-riding questions of this memoir going to be answered? How is this writer going to come to terms with the big themes? And that's the lovely suspense that we find in memoir."

Fascinating - and great advice.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee