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In a recent interview to celebrate the 50th birthday of her UK publisher, Picador, which is republishing her novels, enigmatic and hugely successful Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid remarked to an interviewer that “a writer isn’t a liar. A writer is telling the truth in some way. It’s not even creative; it’s the truth but in somewhat different forms.“
She was recounting an episode from her unhappy childhood when her unloving mother sent her to live with her own “horrible” parents and sister in Dominica with whom she constantly fought by letter. The young Kincaid had felt sidelined by the grand ambitions voiced by her mother and new stepfather for her three, much younger, male siblings. They had no such expectations of her, it seemed, although she was exceptionally smart and dreamt of getting a scholarship to attend the UWI, “or doing something spectacular”. “By accident”, she dropped the first-born interloper on his head. “There are no accidents”, she admits now but she was obviously hostile to the baby and it ended up with her exile from her family in Antigua and the thwarting of her dreams; at least, her journey to literary stardom could not have been envisaged. Her unsent, complaining letters home were discovered and she was sent packing back to Antigua. It turned out that much of her writing has been a processing of her faulty relationships with supposedly loved ones, especially her mother and a brother who died from Aids.
James Comey, sacked by ex-President Donald Trump as head of the FBI for failure to declare personal loyalty to him, like the Godfather, and not the FBI, made more or less the same remark about literary fiction and lies in last week’s enlightening Sunday Times Magazine interview – the publication of Comey’s first novel, a spy thriller, Central Park West, is imminent. The interviewer, in turn, made the connection between cause and effect - what makes someone want to tell stories.
In his bestselling memoir, A Higher Loyalty, (2018), Comey admits to feeling “mildly nauseous” about the result of his decision, as then FBI chief, to make public just days before the 2016 US presidential election that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. It grabbed the headlines, causing her to shed voters and get Trump into the White House. His dilemma, given his family are Democrats, was that he might be accused of covering up for Clinton and helping her into power. He chose to be seen to do the right thing and to be squeaky clean. Like a writer developing a plot, Comey told his interviewer, “There were two doors and they both led to hell. And I chose the door.”
He acknowledges no regrets. “It’s a decision that will stand the test of time”, he claims, but in the interim he and the USA must face the consequence of what Donald Trump unleashed from its dark underbelly. The interviewer considered whether it might explain Comey’s turn to fiction, “where you can plot your own ending and the good guy always wins.”
It is a pertinent observation, and Comey may need to feel better about himself after alienating people on all sides – Hillary Clinton’s side is supposed to detest him even more than Donald Trump and his many wild supporters do. Comey lives in Virginia and his environs are reportedly “bristling with spies and FBI agents”, not to mention security cameras. It sounds like one of the safest places in the country. And it had better be, since he receives regular nasty threats from the Make America Great Again (Maga) and other loonies. It is reported that one in five Americans has a mental problem and one in 20 is seriously mentally ill. As an aside, a British friend intending to spend part of his retirement in Colombia was told that the country has a special visa for over-60s wanting to move there mainly to contain the Americans, who can cause havoc. It seems that war veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorders make up the numbers.
Comey has lots to say about the revulsion he felt towards the ex-president, about how disgusting it was to see the mark on Trump’s neck where the bright orange makeup ends and the white revealed. He came to realise that the ex-president sat behind his desk and wore/wears long ties to hide his paunch. Trump startled him with his obsession, already early in his presidency, about allegations that he had sexually abused women and had paid hush money to a porn star. Trump’s constant defence of Vladimir Putin and annoyance with the FBI for investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election bugged Comey, too. He compares Trump to the mafia boss John Gotti who headed the notorious Gambini family and whom he put away (when still a prosecutor) for extortion, murder and robbery. He has the inside, too, on other famous jailbirds.
Comey is not short on material for the thriller novels he has lined up, and as he says about fiction writing, “You can make it up and still tell a story that’s accurate.” Reality, however, is always worse than fiction and the writer can conjure but cannot change the past or make the future happen as it would best suit us, whichever door s/he chooses.
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