Time is a Place
An Interview with Tim Dyke and Tom Gammarino about his new memoir-with-lies-in-it, Backbends.
Tim Dyke’s experimental memoir, Backbends, was released on June 26. We sat down after our last day of the school year (we’re both teachers) to discuss it.
TOM GAMMARINO
The editorial copy on Backbends describes it as a “memoir with lies in it.” Do you want to talk about that relationship between memoir and lies?
TIM DYKE
On the simplest level, it seems impossible to write the truth of anything that actually happened. First we have an experience, and then the experience turns into a memory, and then the memory turns into a story. And through that, there's omission and there's conflation and there's deletion and there's imagination. I feel like some memoirs think that's a flaw, but I just decided to go in from the beginning with that idea that this is a memory and a memoir, and it's my attempt to tell a true story, and it's going to have lies in it, and the lies are part of the truth, in a way.
TOM
I get that there’s an unavoidable subjective quality to memory—there’s no getting around that, and in a memoir it’s half the fun. But then there's stuff in this book that's clearly fictional, right? I mean, one of the characters is a talking mango.
TIM
Well, I was thinking about how myth works. Take the Garden of Eden story. It’s easy to imagine that that never really happened, but at the same time, if you like that story, which I do, there are truths about the relationship between knowledge and good and evil that come from a story like that. So I just decided to have my narrator be fully interested in creating myths about himself and then acknowledging that, oh yeah, that didn't really happen.
If I wanted to go in another direction, I could say that for thirty-six years and the entirety of my twentieth-century life, I pretended that I was a straight guy, and for me, that wasn't really pretending. It was my attempt to live a truth that didn't really exist. The closet is a kind of fiction that I lived in. So acknowledging that that was not real became almost like permission to then say, Okay, what are other parts of my life that were not real but that I thought were real at the time? We all tell ourselves stories, you know, to survive.
“It was my attempt to live a truth that didn't really exist. The closet is a kind of fiction that I lived in. So acknowledging that that was not real became almost like permission to then say, Okay, what are other parts of my life that were not real but that I thought were real at the time?
TOM
The first sentence of your book is “MY NAME IS TIM, AND I REVEAL TMI.” Were there times when you worried about crossing that line into the “too much”? Maybe with regard to what you would or wouldn’t write about other real-life characters, for example?
TIM
Yeah, absolutely. I think that was one of the first things that made me want to acknowledge from the beginning that this was a memoir with lies in it. Because if I, right now, tried to write about my friendship with you, you might look at it and go, Well, you kind of got me, but you didn't exactly get me. So it might be better for me to say, Okay, I'm turning Tom into a fictional character, but then all the complicated questions come out like, Well, what parts of those fictions ring true with you, with me? There’s a part in the first section where I'm describing a character, and then later I say that the character on the page is not the actual person that I know, because it seems to me kind of impossible to put an actual person on the page.
TOM
Sure enough, one of the things I loved about this book is how you're not doing any of that subtly. The book's interrogating its own form and the conventions of the memoir at every turn.
TIM
Picasso that said art is a lie that makes us realize truth. I think I just wanted to really lean into that. One book I was thinking about while writing this was In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. She's basically talking about an abusive relationship she was in, and she tells it through various lenses, like, I'll tell this part through a mystery detective lens, I'll tell this part through a comic book lens. So that gave me permission to use different lenses to look at these things that have happened to me.
TOM
Were there other books you thought of as models when you were writing this?
TIM
Do you know who Spalding Gray is?
TOM
Swimming to Cambodia?
TIM
Yes! I looked at a lot of his work when I was in college. I guess you'd call him a memoirist. His subject was himself, and he would incorporate the telling of the story in the story. I also like Tim O'Brien and the idea of “story truth” versus “happening truth.” Oh, and I read a really amazing book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland. Do you know that book?
TOM
No.
TIM
It’s half a researched biography about Carson McCullers and half a book about this author who identifies as lesbian writing about how Carson McCullers hid her queerness
TOM
Makes me think of Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.
TIM
Yeah, totally. I love that kind of stuff because it sometimes rings more true to me than a book that's trying to say that it has no lies in it.
"And I think a trend in the last ten years of storytelling is to blast through lines of genre and not assume that sci-fi or romance or mystery is inferior to whatever we call literary fiction, but also that literary fiction can incorporate all those elements.
TOM
Despite all the experimentation, I found Backbends really page-turning, really compelling. I'm not even totally sure why. It’s not a suspense story in the usual sense, and yet I was in suspense.
TIM
I read something yesterday that said every book is a mystery. I don't know if I agree with that, but it's kind of fascinating to think about. It's really important to me to write page-turning stuff. I mean, I love reading everything, and I'll read really weird, experimental stuff, but I love a good murder mystery.
TOM
I think part of that mystery for me in Backbends is actually the undetermined-ness of the genre. In other words, the suspense for me is partly writerly, as in How is he going to land this plane?
TIM
The whole idea of genre is another thing I’ve definitely been thinking about. I was talking about the movie Sinners with somebody. Have you seen that?
TOM
No. Not yet.
TIM
It's an example of a movie that just embraces the idea of multi-genre. It's like historical fiction, horror, musical, all at the same time. And I think a trend in the last ten years of storytelling is to blast through lines of genre and not assume that sci-fi or romance or mystery is inferior to whatever we call literary fiction, but also that literary fiction can incorporate all those elements. I also think about the whole queer narrative. I identify in the book as asexual, but also as gay, and I consider myself a man, but I'm also sympathetic to the idea of wanting to have no gender and just be myself, whatever that means. And so all of those sorts of between-spaces that I occupy in my life I try to occupy in my writing too.
“I also think about the whole queer narrative. I identify in the book as asexual, but also as gay, and I consider myself a man, but I'm also sympathetic to the idea of wanting to have no gender and just be myself, whatever that means. And so all of those sorts of between-spaces that I occupy in my life I try to occupy in my writing too.”
TOM
I described your book to someone as speculative auto-meta-(non)fiction.
TIM
I love that.
TOM
You mentioned Picasso a bit ago, and I was reminded of an anecdote I’ve heard about him drawing a sketch on a napkin and a fan being amazed he did it so quickly. His response: That sketch took fifty years—or something like that. So: if I were to ask you how long this book took you…
TIM
I used to say my first book, Atoms of Muses, took me eighteen years, because there were things in that book that I had actually written eighteen years earlier and it just evolved, evolved, evolved. But this one really started during COVID times. Suddenly nothing that I was writing made sense to me, so I just started keeping a COVID journal. Then I was like, the world does not need another COVID journal, so I started turning the journal entries into stories. Somebody I knew, who runs High Frequency Press, said she was interested in looking at my work, and I showed her these stories, and she said, I like this, but I don't think they're stories, why don't you take this summer and add 10,000 words and turn it into a memoir? For the next couple of years, I was working really deliberately on the book. But of course, you're right. There are stories in the book that I've been telling all my life, and there are things in there that I've been thinking about for a really long time.
TOM
Let’s not forget too that this is a book about Hawaiʻi, specifically your neighborhood of Makiki.
TIM
Yeah, I’ve lived here since 1992, with the exception of two years when I went to graduate school in Tucson. When I was in Tucson, one of the first classes I took was this class called Poetry of Place, taught by Jane Miller, and she said—and this is in the book—"All poems are about place, unless they are about time.” And then she said, “but then again, time is a place.” And that was a very mind-blowing quote that I've been thinking about since then.
I moved to Hawaiʻi when I was twenty-eight, having never lived anywhere longer than four years of my life. I've now been here thirty-two years, and yet I've found it really kind of hard to write about Hawaiʻi because I do feel like I'm an outsider. I don’t have deep connections to culture or land in Hawaiʻi, while I like to think I have deep respect. And so, over the years, I've thought that the place that I write about is sort of placelessness. But then, during the pandemic, I was confined to my little 800-square-foot cinder-block apartment in Makiki and I would take walks. For some of that, the park was closed, and I looked longingly at the birds that were flitting around the park, and I started to develop this sort of personal connection to Makiki Park. So the book is rooted in Hawaiʻi, but it also acknowledges my own transience.
TOM
Well, it’s certainly a book that hasn't existed on the Hawaiʻi literary scene until now.
TIM
I like thinking about that because I admire a lot of books that are in the Hawaiʻi literary scene, and I'm happy to put mine out there.
Tim Dyke is a teacher and writer who lives with parrots in Makiki. He has published a chapbook titled Awkward Hugger, a book-length poem titled MAGA, and a collection of prose poems called Atoms of Muses with Tinfish Press. His memoir, Backbends, will be published by High Frequency Press in 2025. Tim has taught high school English at Punahou School since 1992.
Tom Gammarino writes all manner of things, but has a special love for speculative fiction. Recent stories and essays have appeared in Honolulu Noir, The Hawai'i Review of Books, and Interzone. He teaches Science Fiction, Magical Realism, and Creative Writing at Punahou School, and plays guitar in a progressive rock tribute band called Brainchild. Check out his website at tomgammarino.com and his talented work with the band, Brainchild.