EISENBERG
“Days” is also by far the most autobiographical piece of fiction I’ve ever written. I avoid using real people, including myself, in my fiction, but that piece started out as nonfiction—an account of going to the local YMCA and trying to run around the little track there as a way to endure the horrible ordeal of stopping smoking.
I had had no idea how deep the addiction went—it had essentially replaced me. I was a human being who had structured herself around the narcotic and the prop, who had melded with the narcotic and the prop. Once the narcotic and prop were no longer available, the human being simply died. I was left in a kind of mourning. I was grief stricken. I had murdered someone, and it was me. But as it turned out, that was the only way to allow a less restricted human being to take shape and live.
INTERVIEWER
In what way was your smoking self different?
EISENBERG
As a smoker, I was very brittle, very inelastic, rather reckless but not in any way adventurous. I could only sort of topple into one situation or another. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t change, but I was safe—in the sense of being preserved. It was like being embalmed, like being smoked, I suppose.
When I decided to stop smoking, I didn’t realize I would be dissolving the glue that held me together. But by the time you think you need to make a decision, that decision has already been made. The person I was leaving behind to die on the road was already half dead. Still, there wasn’t anybody ready to take the place of that dying person for quite some time.
INTERVIEWER
Did writing start to take the place of that dying person?
EISENBERG
I’m not sure writing started to take that place, but I wouldn’t have been able to write if I’d been smoking. I don’t think of writing as therapeutic, but I don’t know how I could have managed the despair if I hadn’t started to write then.
INTERVIEWER
Of course art-making isn’t therapy, but I often think artists don’t need to be quite so loath to admit some relationship between art-making and therapy.
-Deborah Eisenberg, The Paris Review