LITERARY FICTION WEEK #4: Offer oblique biographies of your characters


As she walked down the train carriage, Annie composed an imaginary autobiography, selecting and categorising what she considered to be key facts about herself for an imagined posterity. When she was eight, she had eaten an ice-cream sandwich so cold it had given her a migraine. In her first year of university, she had lost a pair of socks when they had fallen out of her fifth-floor window. She only ate blackcurrant yoghurts when she felt she had earned them. Her bellybutton was slightly deeper than she would ideally like, plunging from the gentle curve of her stomach down into a tiny pit of wrinkled skin and fluff. It had been knotted by the midwife, whose name she did not know, in such a way as to leave a miniature knuckle of umbilical cord down at the base of the pit, like a grey-pink boulder plugging the hole. The colour of the fluff that formed in it seemed to be completely independent of the colour of the clothes she wore, emerging as small bundles of mysterious greyish lint. Sometimes, while she sat on her bed gazing at it, she imagined her navel was a separate creature in its own right, quietly observing the world from belly-height – the thought both thrilled and disgusted her.

9 comments:

  1. I quite like the whimsy in this one actually.

    An aside: your blog, excellent though it is, makes it slightly hard to enjoy books in the same way. I keep putting the prose I read elsewhere into the categories suggested here... Or making up my own along the same lines.

    Keep it up though!

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  2. Well, I’m glad to hear that I’m ruining reading for someone other than myself. If you have any good ideas for posts, drop me an email and let me know – I’ve done about 160 now and need all the help I can get.

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  3. This takes me back to the age of 3 when I contracted chicken pox. I still remember the sight of the red pox in my belly button and how it itched. Now, whenever I look down and find a stray bit of lint lodged in the folds left from my umbilical cord, I'm taken back to the age of 3 when I contracted chicken pox, much as I was taken back to the age of 3 by this post. In other words, this entry made me itch.

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  4. So the autobiography is imaginary and the posterity imagined, fine. Are the facts actually facts, or is she making them up too?

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  5. Like Andrew, I really like this passage. It's strange certainly, but not bad at all. I'd like to read the rest of this novel.

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  6. You were in excellent form today, Joel. I was just thinking that I'd actually like to read this story when you hit me with the "tiny pit of wrinkled skin and fluff."

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  7. I like the use of literal navel gazing to portray the figurative navel gazing. Excellent meta-self-absorption.

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  8. sounds like many novelists I know

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