Looking at me looking at you?

""...Lives are lived in circles, not linearly, with past and present looping each other. This seems especially true of me, who takes my own family history as synechdochal, standing in for the family history of the artist. My sense of the present is profoundly shaped by my sense of the past, and the past brings a peculiar pressure to bear on the present in my life and writings. I am besotted with history, my own and those of people around me. I live within this history, and the history becomes me.

So how do I manage to transform my little postage stamp of a life into an imaginative space where I can roam happily over several decades, creating a vast anthology of human experience from limited materials? I was, after all, no obvious genius from the outset, being a shy boy from Philadelphia. Unlike some writers, I have no large experience of the wider world. I write consciously, applying myself with great energy to the task before me, with a deep understanding of what I am doing.

In a very real sense, I have fathered myself, having seen fatherhood diluted as it passed down from my grandfather, then to my own hapless father. I have a visceral need to regard myself as independent of the family, to lift myself over my sister and parents and everyone else around me. I do so by making fictions, all kinds of fictions. I became an artist in my own mind, creating a story to fit this need. I have become many other things as well, an outcast, a bohemian poet, a world traveler, a historian, a friend, a criminal, and so forth. These are all masks put on for the occasion, the life-phase, the person in front of me, the immediate need.

.... Over time, the mask has grown onto my face, becoming my features, the very skin itself. Only the wild, sad eyes peeking out through the mask tell the world about the soul lurking behind it. Those eyes, with their countless changes, suggest something of the many thousand selves that make up the person called...g. Friedman