How I wrote "Buying Lenin"
A brief description
When "Buying Lenin" was chosen for inclusion in the 2008 Best American I was asked to provide a brief description of how the story came into existence. If you look at the end of the anthology you will notice that, as usual, the more established the writer, the longer their bio, the shorter their description of how the story was written. My description is absurdly long, but it seems that readers enjoy it, so I decided to post it below.
I took the pictures from the main balcony of our apartment in the neighborhood of Liulin, Sofia, on a cold, gray day in December. The apartment complexes are old and ugly, but everything looks much better in the summer when the grass and the trees are green, and the Vitosha mountain is not covered in mist.
Factually this story is not biographical. Like the
narrator, I arrived in America after finishing high school, but all
similarities end there. My grandfathers were in fact hurt by the communist
regime, and let's face it – the narrator losing his parents is just a cheap
writer's trick. All emotions, though, I drew from my own life.
I spent the summer of 2005 back home, in Bulgaria. My parents have an
apartment in the outskirts of Sofia, in one of those neighborhoods you might
see
in movies like "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" or documentaries about
the ghost towns around Chernobyl. I was walking down the street, looking at
the long, tall, gray apartment buildings, and they seemed awfully ugly to me.
I knew that one of my grandfathers had spent a portion of his life building
just such
buildings and it occurred to me that he must have looked upon them
with different eyes. Surely he had seen promise and beauty in the
creations of his own hands.
The first line of the story came to me then, verbatim as it is now. Wouldn't
it be funny, I thought, to write about the two ends of the chain – an old man
painfully obsessed with his ideals and past, and his grandson fighting to
escape this same past and these same ideals? I knew that grandfather and
grandson would come together in the end and that a strange, absurd cause would
unite them. Wouldn't it be funny, I wondered, if someone tried to sell Lenin's
body on eBay, and if someone else could buy that body? What an awful
capitalist
thing to do.
I wrote a version of the story in two days and thought – that was that. I had
not bothered to fulfill my initial idea, and now this was the story of an old
communist fanatic, whom I, as a writer, had failed to take seriously. I had
left him a character in a twelve page story.
I presented the story in my first MFA workshop, and most of my friends liked
it fine. At the back of her copy Ellen Gilchrist, who then led the workshop,
had written only "send it out for publication."
A week after that a visiting writer I admire greatly came to our program. He
liked the opening paragraph, but said the story ought to be about the
grandson.
He said the story, in its present form, was a political allegory no
one would read. The characters, he said, came from a world where people worry
if there will be food on the table. In America, he said, people worried about
new cars. It's never too late, he told me, to go back to your undergraduate
Psychology major and get
a master's.
Instead, I expanded the story, put much more of the grandson in and thought –
that was that. My workshop hated the new version. They said the grandfather
had lost much of his charm and eccentricity. I rewrote again. I was, as
Americans might say, frustrated. I printed all scenes on separate pages and
spread the pages across the floor, and rearranged, and rearranged, and in the
end felt like a fool. I let a month go by, then sat down and wrote two more
scenes. Hunting for crawfish, which I knew my great-grandfather had loved to
do, and the final letter. It is a preachy letter, sentimental, as workshop
folk might say. But as I wrote it, I wept. I was the grandson, away, facing
death, alone. It is an awful thing to weep along with the characters you
write. It is a terrifying blessing.
I thank my friends for their advice, Bret Lott for publishing the story and
Donna Perreault for her thoughtful edits. I thank the editors of this series
for choosing my work. I thank you for reading it.