Personal Character

Ira Glass: What would have happened if there hadn’t been the McCrearys?
Myron Jones: I never thought of that, because they seemed inevitable. They had to be.

Writers and actors, and sometimes visual artists and musicians, make up characters. They do it for use in art.

The more I talk to people about writing and acting and characters, though, the more I realize that making fictional characters is common–not just in artists, or in children who invest dolls with personalities and set a place at the table for invisible friends. People who enjoy role playing games do it as a hobby. People who enjoy sexual role playing do it because it turns them on. Con artists and cops and various others do it for professional reasons. Sometimes people make up fictional characters for their children, as part of story telling, as moral examples or even as threats. And, of course, plenty of folks on the internet are pretending to be people who doesn’t really exist.

A few weeks ago, This American Life had a story about a teenage girl whose mother was unusually strict. She was convinced that her daughter might, at any moment, trip and land on someone’s leaking penis. The daughter was unable, as a teenager, to have any kind of life… and so she got a job babysitting for people who did not exist.

She invented a family, the McCrearys, whose two- and three-year old children were frequently in need of watching by this girl, Carol, and her brother Myron. This allowed her to leave the house, and allowed her brother to back up her stories. All she really needed to do was invent this family, and to come up with reasons for the family to be secretive (she said the father worked for the FBI) and for a reason why the money she made was never in evidence (she said the father was investing it for her.

But she went much further. She made the McCrearys real people with personalities. She told her mother stories about what the children did and said. Her brother believes she was working on some of her issues with her own mother and childhood by creating a better home for the McCreary kids. Regardless of why Carol brought the McCrearys to life, they certainly had a life. Carol, Myron, and their mother talked about them at dinner. Their mother asked after them frequently. To this day, Carol and Myron (now in their seventies) speak warmly about the McCreary family, as if they were old and beloved friends not seen for some time.
 
The DPCS and I speak with equal warmth, if less detail, about our old friend Roland McGregor. We made him up about fourteen years ago, when we were trying to determine the paths through which junk mail was coming to our house. We filled out a few things as Roland–a middle-aged Francophone father of five–and waited to see what would be mailed to us as a result. “Tons of stuff” turned out to be the answer, much of it tailored to Roland’s life and interests. I still have some of the French recipe cards someone sent to him.
 
As with Carol and the McCrearys, all we needed from Roland, as a character, was a name. But we both came to feel that Roland was someone we knew. An acquaintance from up the street, maybe, whose mail was carelessly delivered to our address. The DPCS tells me he’s writing Roland into a book, as a minor character. I’m looking forward to seeing him again.
 
When I mention Roland to others, I’m surprised how many people told me about their own Rolands. A lot of people have done what the DPCS and I did–they made someone up for a survey or contest entry form and received mail for that person over the years. Most spoke of their fictional people with the same kind of affection that I feel for Roland and that Myron and Carol seem to have felt for the McCrearys.
 
I wonder exactly how common this sort of thing is. Is it done all over the world, by people living very different lives? Storytelling seems to be a common human impulse, and maybe the urge to create and flesh out fictional people comes from that. Or maybe it’s a similar desire to the desire to have children. I often hear people speak about unconceived children as if they’re crawling at their feet or upstairs in their rooms working on book reports.
 
Who are the people you’ve made up, and what was your impetus to do so? What are they up to these days?
 
Current Bedside Reading: Suzanne O’Malley, Are You There Alone?: The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates
Commentary: O’Malley has a lot of experience as a journalist and screenwriter. She has managed, though, to turn out a book that’s full of grammatical errors and that barely touches on some important questions in the case. Interestingly, she frequently quotes Rusty Yates regarding his confusion about all the nasty things people are saying about him… but she gives the reader only the vaguest sense of what those things are or why people are saying them. I’m not taking sides or suggesting that Rusty Yates is one thing or another. I’m just saying it would have been a better and more illuminating book if it had gone into more detail about those aspects of the situation.
 
My iPod Is Singing: “With such a find mind I know it has to be hard to resist throwing narcississtic intellectual tantrums in the supermarket aisles of your self-regard.”

Jul 19, 2010

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