Author's Note

People are going to ask me if Paper Boats is true. I want to answer that honestly, which means answering it in two directions at once, because both directions are true.

No, it didn't happen. There was no Odessa, no Camille, no hurricane scattering two half-sisters to opposite ends of the country. I invented the storm, the street, the two mothers, the father who couldn't stay in two rooms at once. None of it is reportage.

And also: every page of it is true, in the only way fiction is ever actually true, which is that I built it entirely out of something that happened to me and never got finished.

I have two older brothers. We were raised in the same house, and it never once felt like the same house. I've spent most of my adult life turning that fact over — how three children can eat off the same table, sleep down the same hallway, answer to the same two parents, and still come out having lived, in every way that matters, three separate childhoods.

I used to think that was just a saying people used loosely. I don't think that anymore. I think it's closer to biology than metaphor: like half-siblings who share one parent and not the other, who carry the same blood and the same face in two entirely different bodies, living two entirely different lives, and somehow, underneath all of that difference, still turning out to be recognizably, unmistakably the same.

That thought — that image, really, though it was never an actual photograph, just the idea of one — is where this book started. Two people who look like they came from different families entirely, but didn't.

The place it stopped being an idea and became a wound I actually needed to write about happened at an ordinary moment, the kind that doesn't announce itself in advance. One of my brothers started to tell me something. He started to tell me about pain he'd carried from our parents — real pain, the kind that reorganizes a person from the inside — and for a few sentences, I felt something I hadn't expected to feel, which was recognition. Not the details. He never gave me the details, and I'm not going to invent them here, because they were never mine to take. What I recognized was the shape of it. Something in what he was circling matched something I'd carried myself, quietly, separately, for years, without either of us ever once comparing notes.

And then he stopped.

He didn't finish. I don't know, even now, whether he decided the room wasn't safe enough, or whether the sentence simply ran out of road, or whether some part of him had already given more than he'd meant to and needed to take it back. I didn't push. I have thought about that unfinished sentence more than almost anything else in my adult life, because it told me two things at once: that we had lived closer to the same story than I'd ever let myself believe, and that neither of us had built, in our whole shared childhood, a room where we could actually say it to each other all the way through.

That's the real argument this book comes out of. Not a fight. A door that opened four inches and closed again, and years of wondering what was on the other side of it.

I tried to write it straight, the first time. My brothers, our house, our parents, told as close to the actual facts as I could manage. It didn't work, and it couldn't have worked, because the actual facts belonged mostly to my brother, not to me, and where his sentence had stopped, mine had nothing to stand on but guesswork. I wasn't willing to guess at somebody else's pain and print it as truth. I set that draft down.

The second time, I tried sisters instead of brothers — same house, same two parents, hoping that changing who was on the page would let me finally finish the sentence he couldn't. But I ran into a different wall: I couldn't find a conflict big enough to carry the weight I actually needed the story to carry. Two sisters raised in the same house, the same resources, the same everything, didn't have room in their circumstances for the size of the distance I was actually trying to write about. The container was too small for what I was pouring into it.

The third time, I stopped trying to write my actual family and started trying to write the actual feeling, which turned out to be a very different assignment. I gave the two sisters different mothers. I gave one of them my brothers' side of the table and one of them mine, more or less — one raised in scarcity, one raised in a kind of safety that turned out to have its own damage hiding inside it — and once I let them come from genuinely different worlds instead of asking two people from the same world to somehow carry a difference that large, the whole book opened up in front of me the way a stuck chapter is supposed to open, all at once, after months of not moving at all.

That's the actual shape of what's underneath Paper Boats. Not a hurricane. A brother who started telling me something true and couldn't finish it, and a sister — me — who has spent years since trying to build the room where that sentence could finally be said all the way through, even if I had to build it out of people who never existed to do it.

I don't know if my brother will ever finish that sentence with me. I've made my peace, mostly, with the possibility that he won't, the same way Odessa has to make her peace with a father who can't be counted on to stay. But I know this: every time I made Odessa and Camille sit on that porch and actually say the whole true thing to each other, out loud, without flinching, I was writing the conversation I still haven't gotten to have. Fiction let me finish a sentence I don't get to finish anywhere else.

That's why I wrote it. That's what the three drafts were actually for — not failures, exactly, just three attempts at finding the only shape honest enough to hold something I couldn't tell any other way.