Book Notes: Author finds fact through fiction

"The Country of Loneliness" By Dawn Paul. Marick Press, Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., 2009. 169 pages. $16.95, paperback.

Sometimes the most intriguing books are those not easily categorized. While Boston-area writer Dawn Paul’s new book is fiction, it straddles a cognitive divide between memoir and invention, between what we feel is real and what we believe is imagination.

Experienced readers who traverse the vast fields of literature might occasionally find themselves disoriented. “The Country of Loneliness” is one of those books. Is this fact or fiction? Where am I? Authors of these unusual books consciously navigate the strange territories. Dawn Paul says that through fiction she found her father. She discovered a father that she can finally love, appreciate and grieve. For her, this country is terra firma.

“My original idea,” says Paul, “was to write a memoir, about me, about growing up with my father and why I did not like him and why I was so afraid. But I realized I didn’t want to know about me. I wanted to know him.” Paul’s father died at the age of 52. The Depression, World War II, neglect in the way he was parented helped define him.

“The Country of Loneliness,” published by Marick, a small press that focuses primarily on poetry, uses what Paul knows of her father and extrapolates. She says she came to understand and love her father by creating his story from scraps of truth and family legend. She could have dug deeper for facts to write a traditional memoir, but “I’m not a journalist. I write stories. I was trying to find out what it felt like to grow up as my father did.”

“The imagination,” says Paul, “is a powerful thing.” Readers can’t argue this assertion because fiction, as writers and readers know, gives us powerful truth, visceral truth we find ourselves trusting more, at times, than the truth we find in nonfiction.

“What I wanted to know was what he felt,” Paul says.

Paul left home at 18 and her father died young so she never got to know him. She found herself missing him despite the vast chasm formed by fears and distance and time. He’d been a fearsome and imposing figure — large, loud, drunk and violent. For Paul, he was dangerous and unknowable for as long as she was a child in his presence. The stories she’d heard of his kindness, warmth and generosity didn’t jibe with her own sense of the man. The writer and storyteller in her intervened, giving her access, finally, to her father.

Loneliness defined him, she learned. One anecdote most certainly helped orient her work. Her father’s mother kept him in the back yard. She learned that her young father paid another boy one penny to spend time speaking to him from the other side of the fence.

With these anecdotes, more family legend than verifiable fact, she wrote a book that shifts between a young woman’s search for an understanding of her father and the invented stories of the father’s coming of age.

The book has been of interest to many, says Paul, a creative writing teacher at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Mass. She has done several readings in the Boston area. The book addresses questions her readers find curious and compelling. Despite the fact that World War II was the “good war” and despite the widely held understanding that soldiers weren’t subject to the same psychological ramifications that the Vietnam War provoked, Paul says, many lives affected by this war “just fell apart.”

Cape Ann Beacon writer Rae Francoeur can be reached at rae.francoeur@verizon.net. Her book “Free Fall: A Late in Life Love Affair” comes out in April. Her blog can be found at freefallrae.blogspot.com.