Autobiography + imagination = fiction?

Allegra Maud Goldman
by Edith Konecky

It's kind of a cool thing to turn your life story into a novel. If I did it, I'd be a bookworm who magically transforms into a track star at age sixteen, then hires onto a rainforest expedition and discovers a new species of black jaguars, before moving to Taos, New Mexico where I make a living as a backpacking writer. Or maybe a Rockette!

Of course that would read like the nonsense it is--and this book isn't. It's probably more real than reality, because a writer who sticks with only the remembered facts will never tell the whole story. Ms. Konecky may have made up the funny story of her discovery of "sitting" and how it creates a new body part, "the lap."  But who cares? It's funny and it highlights the audacity of the girl who'd do such a thing.

I didn't get all that, at first. I approached this book thinking it was simply a humorous autobiography, and that was a shallow, simple thing to do! I got what I deserved. For me, it wasn't funny enough or earth-shattering enough, and I missed out on the richness of the interplay of imagination with reality. I raced through and didn't 'get' half of what it had to offer.  Only after reading the afterword, a very learned exposition of how it represented a near-perfect example of the Bildungsroman, did I get the point of it all--it's not comedy or tragedy, it's the transformation of a child into a human being. Incidentally, it had a lot to say about the middle-class lifestyle of the 1930s and women's search for personal worth in a time when girls prepared for marriage, period.

A lot to get out of a short book. or maybe I should say, a lot to put into. I will read her later work, A Place at the Table, and see where she went from there.