Finding the Form with Ian Roy | The New Quarterly

I had a stroke a few years ago and it changed me in such a way that I am now the kind of guy who is telling you that I had a stroke a few years ago. Before the stroke, I would have kept that kind of information to myself. I’m a private person—or, rather, I was a private person, especially when it came to something as delicate and personal and fraught as having had a stroke.

After the stroke, and a little bit of heart surgery—Did I mention the heart surgery?—I found myself answering the generic and uncomplicated question “Hey, how are you?” with an honest and complicated answer. I didn’t mean to start doing this. My instinct, upon hearing myself tell people my private business those first few times was to snap my mouth shut and run—but instead, I leaned into it.

Part of the reason for that—for leaning in rather than running—was that I wanted to be changed by what had happened to me. That is to say, I didn’t want to go through what was for me a traumatic experience and then go right back to how things were before. I wanted to interrogate it, and myself, in order to figure out what I could learn from it. What I landed on—or what landed on me, because it did not feel like a conscious decision—was to become more open and forthcoming, more vulnerable. To be clear, I find this all a bit embarrassing—and also terrifying. Ultimately, though, it felt inescapable.

Why am I telling you all this? I have primarily written fiction my entire writing life. That has always felt relatively safe to me. In fiction, I can be, to quote Tennessee Williams, emotionally autobiographical without giving too much of my life away. When questioned, I can say things like: That’s not me, that’s a character!

In the aftermath of my stroke, I had to stop writing for a bit. The stroke left me feeling fucked up. (That’s the term I used with all of my doctors when asked how I felt. You’re a writer, they said, can you not think of any other way to describe how you feel? No, I answered over and over again, I can’t because I feel fucked up.) As soon as that feeling began to subside—it took nearly a year—I started writing again, and the first thing I wrote was a personal essay about my experience. This was unexpected, but I went with it. And then I wrote another one. It felt cathartic to write those first essays; it also felt helpful to articulate what I’d gone through—if for no other reason than for myself to better understand it. I was surprised when people reached out after reading those essays: they wrote to share their own experiences, and to tell me they were moved to hear about my experience. Those essays—and this inexorable inclination to be more open and vulnerable—reminded me how nice it is to be reminded that you are not alone in the world.

That’s how I came to write “Have a Good Life”—an essay about fatherlessness. This was not at all something I had ever planned to write about in an essay. As I address in the piece, I do write about the idea of fatherlessness all the time—but I do so within the context of fiction. (That’s not me, that’s a character!)

Then one day I simply sat down and started writing this essay. I had no plan, no outline, no map—I just sat down and wrote it.

My approach to writing essays is the same as writing a short story: I write as much as I can in one or two sittings—without editing or revising as I go. I call it overwriting. I try to get it all out. It’s terrible; it’s messy; it’s far too long—but after a day or two, almost everything I need to work with is there on the page. What happens next is that I read through it to find out what it is I’m trying to say. I scrape away what isn’t necessary, and I add a little here and there to flesh out what is necessary. This stage can take days, weeks, months. It can take years. This essay, however, didn’t take long at all. I wrote it in about a week. I love it when that happens but it is a very rare occurrence.

Once the essay was done, I kind of shelved it. My thought was that if I were to publish a collection of essays someday—years from now—maybe I’d include it. I had no intention of submitting it to a magazine; I wasn’t ready for that. I did, however, include it in a grant application that I sent to TNQ. And then an editor from the magazine reached out and asked if the essay was available to publish in an upcoming issue. My first instinct was to say no. In fact, I panicked, shut down my computer, and didn’t reply for a couple days. But in the spirit of how this all began—this new tendency toward openness and vulnerability—I said yes. And here we are. There is a part of the process of writing a personal essay that feels like exorcising something from your psyche. And now that this essay is in print, there is a part of me that no longer feels the need to write any more on the subject—because “Have A Good Life” says all I have left to say about fatherlessness, about my fatherlessness.

Ian Roy is the author of five books. He lives in Canada.