A Conversation Between Memoirist Beverly Donofrio and Novelist Kaylie Jones

In February 2005, old friends, novelist Kaylie Jones and memoirist Beverly Donofrio reunited to teach together in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In the months before the workshops, they conversed with one another about their respective genres and the experience of having movies made of their books. The following is the transcript of that conversation as published in the February, 2005 edition of San Miguel's El Petit Journal.

Beverly Donofrio
We met when we were unpublished hopeful writers at graduate school at Columbia University together, almost 25 years ago now. Although you were over a decade younger than I, we immediately hit it off, saw a kindred soul in each other. So, we started out at the same graduate school in the same workshop; we were inspired by the same teacher, Richard Price -- yet when you wrote your story, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, you called it fiction, and when I wrote my story, Riding in Cars with Boys, I called it memoir. What do you think the difference between autobiographical fiction and memoir really is? What did you gain or lose by considering or calling your book fiction?

Kaylie Jones
Frankly, I never felt I really had a choice but to write fiction. I grew up in a fiction writing household. My dad was a fiction writer, and growing up around him was a strange and fascinating experience. My brother and I were always competing for attention with the characters in his books. At dinner, he'd talk about these characters of his as if they were real people who lived with him in his "office," as he called his private writing space upstairs. . . .

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