How to use historical matter and be true? True to what? Over the course of five years I grappled with this question. I had to import a version of integrity into the genre. How do you not lie in fiction? Some modernist (and premodern!) answers: to “bare the device”; to assert the reader’s present time (the time of the reading, art as object); to challenge linear time; to expose the writer’s point of view; to meld figure and ground. Then how to use historical matter? I pressured the genre by bringing my relation to this slice of history into the book. History is endlessly porous; so instead of creating a middle distance, I used extreme close-ups, historical long shots, and autobiography.

My books usually contain an element of collaboration; in this case I asked about forty friends for observations and memories about their bodies. Those intimate details are applied to—that is, stitched into—remote fifteenth-century characters. Interior life is clearly attributed—in the acknowledgements! Some of these observations have been published by their authors. They are not descriptions of fictional characters in the usual sense, but random pleasures and fears that couldn’t possibly be known from the middle distance. They atomize interior life, pressure the idea of historical recreation (locating Ed’s fear of death inside the Vicar of St. Stephen) and at the same time they summon a community (of friends, of physical anarchy) in which to stage my obsession. Physical life, obsession: history as disjunction, a gap.

I created an aesthetic relationship with history by setting limits. I refrained from reading a book about Margery till I was done with the novel, confining myself to her self-description. I limited descriptions to certain aspects of fifteenth-century life, especially clothes, food, and physical gestures. I did not read conventional histories to “fill in.” Instead, I married my prose to Margery’s, confecting a sentence halfway between us, feeling Margery and the period through the rhythm of her language (another kind of collaboration). Most of the texts I used were books of hours, saints’ lives and such from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following the model of Tzvetan Todorov’s beautiful Conquest of America, a reading of many texts from the period.

I am interested in the puzzle of using real people in fiction; my fictions have been autobiographies. I suppose I have staged Margery’s story in the theater of autobiography, building aesthetics out of the interpenetration of fact and fiction. For me, the world of fact is made up of fiction, from “ideological state apparatuses,” to the sale of lifestyle, to the all-and-nothing of language itself. And, of course, the world of fiction is a fact.