SOURCE: Yuzna, Susan. “Reading My Life Between the Lines.” The Washington Post (13 August 2000): B2.

How should you act when you meet yourself as a fictional character? What do you say? Do you embrace yourself warmly, or pretend you've never met?

Her name is Michelle. She's the girlfriend in the new movie based on Denis Johnson's short story collection Jesus' Son. I haven't met Michelle on the screen yet (the film hasn't opened in North Dakota, where I now live) and haven't made up my mind whether I want to, but I've met her in print.

The first time was in 1988, when I opened the New Yorker to find a story by Denis. He and I had been a couple at the time in which the story was set, and the protagonist's girlfriend was unmistakably based on me. Actually, though, that me was already an invented character. I invented her back in the druggy early '70s in Iowa, where I met and fell in love with Denis when we were both undergraduates in the University of Iowa's famed writing program. Or maybe he invented the me I became with him. Or perhaps we both did the inventing. I was his muse, he claimed. I also was a potential character for his fiction—not just the fiction he wanted to write, as I realized even then, but the fictional version he was creating of his own life; while he was inventing me he was inventing himself as a character too.

As an undergraduate, I had won a national poetry contest. But my made-up self had nothing to do with writing, or talent. The character I, or he, or we, invented was a blend of the female models you see in the fashion ads—tall and slender, like me—and the sexy models in men's magazines. To please Denis, I promised not to cut my long hair. I painted my nails red, wore slinky dresses. I think of her now as the Fantasy Woman, but he thought of her then as the Perfect Woman, and said so, often. I was flattered. I was loved. I was desired. My female friends, on the cusp of the women's movement, were horrified. But his friends told him how lucky he was.

There was a certain glamour to it. I thought of us as a literary couple, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. Maybe I should have considered the fact that while Scott died young, he did become a major author; Zelda ended up in the loony bin.

By the time I found Denis's story in the New Yorker, like almost everyone I knew who had survived the '60s counterculture, I'd buried that phase of my life and turned middle-class. I read the story in the basement “writing room” of a turn-of-the-century Victorian house in Minneapolis—the room I supposedly used as a study although I never wrote anymore—while my husband and my son and stepson slept above me, unaware of my once-crazy lifestyle. I marveled at the detail. After 10 years, it seemed Denis recalled every scene, every gesture. How had he remembered? Especially since he was nearly always drinking or getting stoned.

The next emotion, in what would become a roller coaster of them, was pride. He had pulled it off, had been published in the New Yorker, which (as we knew from our Iowa days) ordained him as a serious writer.

I called my mother, who still lived in the small Minnesota town where I grew up. She had no use for the writer-boyfriend from my past. She preferred my husband, a “good provider,” in her generation's phrase, an engineer who owned a house and was willing and able to take care of me, his son from a previous marriage, and the son we had together. The problem for me was that I didn't love him, whereas I had loved Denis wildly, to the point of nearly extinguishing myself.

I could not explain to my mother how I felt when I read the line in the New Yorker in which the narrator refers to “my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known.”

At the time I felt stale and out of the literary loop as a stay-at-home mother. My husband was building his career while I took care of everything else, and I was very, very lonely. I spent my days at the mall and at museums, or accompanying my son to classes: Music. Art. Swimming. Anything I could think of to keep my mind off the fact that I wasn't writing anymore.

I often thought back to what happened and what might have been. After college, I had turned down the opportunity of graduate school to play the muse for Denis as he wrote his first novel. When it failed to find a publisher, we ran out of money. Denis stopped writing and we both spiraled down into a life of poker games and getting high.

After a few years, late one summer night, I left Denis and Iowa behind. I didn't tell anyone at the time about the violence that had come into the relationship. Later I wrote about the night I left in a short story, but threw it away after another writer told me that “the world of writers” would see it as exploiting my former connection. Apparently it was okay for him to exploit me, but not vice versa.

I did, eventually, get back into writing. By the '90s, I was divorced and in graduate school. Many of the poems I wrote then were based on those days of fighting and drugs when I was with Denis. But acquaintances who read the poems and didn't know my history, I discovered, assumed I was writing about my ex-husband. So I felt I had to set the record straight. And that was how my seduction into the character of Fantasy Woman began again. I learned that I could change the way people looked at me in an instant just by dropping the fact that I had once lived with the man who wrote Jesus' Son—a favorite in the literary world and especially among the fiction-writing graduate students, most of them young enough to be my children.

When they saw me as Michelle—some embodiment of the girlfriends who appear in various stories—they no longer saw me as the boring, middle-aged single parent I was. I was an exotic creature. I had once read that Marilyn Monroe, walking somewhere with a friend, turned and asked if she should turn into “Her” now. Like Marilyn, I also could become a Her. I was a character created by someone else, and I have to admit I couldn't resist it.

The last time I talked to Denis was in 1982. I know when it was because I was pregnant with my son. When I told Denis I was going to have a baby, I heard him crying softly. I believe he had a notion we would get back together someday, and I guess the pregnancy ruined that illusion. Before he hung up he asked me to name the baby after him (I didn't).

I wondered where all that emotion came from. I thought it must have been about the abortion—the one I'd had 10 years earlier, when I was with Denis. Later, when I read a 1990 story he wrote based on it, I found the girlfriend character was no longer the beautiful woman I had read about in that first New Yorker story. Now she was “a traitor, and a killer.”

Those memories were very painful, and I despised his story. How dare he write of the abortion: “What the father and mother did together”? No, the father and mother didn't. I did. I was the one who decided. I was the one who grieved. He had done nothing except supply the sperm that made it necessary, and that part is mighty easy.

“It's only fiction,” my writer friends tell me. “Don't get upset.” Michelle was fiction. But my life didn't stop being real just because I was, in some sense, Michelle.

And I didn't stop becoming Michelle, from time to time. Even if the stories made me angry, I was still attracted by becoming Her. I thought she was a more dramatic character than I was, and that others would think I was more interesting if I were she instead of myself. Shakespeare promised his “Dark Lady” she would gain immortality in his sonnets and perhaps that's what I wanted, too. Perhaps we all want to be larger than we are, want to live forever, and being included in a work of art realizes that yearning to some degree.

I might have gotten stuck inside the character I had created and in the script Denis had written for me. But, shortly before getting my master's degree in 1995, I won a Bush Foundation fellowship. Two months later—as I was packing the U-Haul to leave campus—I learned the University of Akron had awarded me a poetry prize and wanted to publish my work.

Suddenly validated as a writer, I found I didn't need Michelle anymore. I tossed out the New Yorkers with Denis's short stories in them and gave away my copies of his books. In many ways, I left graduate school with a lot less baggage than I'd brought with me two years before.

I am now past 50, am an assistant professor in a small town no one has ever heard of, have a second book of poetry published and a third one nearly done, and have an unfinished memoir in my file cabinet, ready to be tackled again once I have the heart and judgment to face that era of my life. I don't drink, don't do drugs anymore, and go to the gym regularly to fight the aging of the body Denis once praised.

Two months ago, a fellow writer at a California artists' colony showed me a New York Times entertainment section for the week when the movie Jesus' Son was opening. A black-and-white photograph accompanying the review showed the actor and actress playing the lead roles—only to me they weren't the two fictional characters but us, Denis and me.

The first thing I did was compare: Yes, he looks a lot like Denis but she's all wrong. I would never in a million years have worn a stocking cap. She should be dressed more exotically. Maybe that black serape I wore, have her fingernails painted dark red. The jackets are all wrong. No one wore those then. …

Stop it, I told myself. But I felt the borders of my identity blurring. I called a friend in Iowa City. “It's only fiction,” he said.