As a Chocolate-Loving, Democratic-Voting, New York-Living Fiction Writer, I...

My niece recently asked me to read her college application essay, which began, "As a triplet, I..." You may have noticed the way many of us tend to begin every opinion we offer with qualifiers like, "As a woman, I..." "As an African-American, I..." "As a Jew, I..." "As a left-handed lesbian of indeterminate color who enjoys finger-painting in a wheelchair with survivors of sexual assault and tsunamis, I..."

Where does this impulse to bolster an argument by tying it to the author's identity come from? One explanation is that in the age of reality TV and the internet blogger, we've become increasingly convinces of the fallacy that empiricism is the firmest basis of truth. In other words, the best way to know something is by experiencing it.

I remember when I was a composition instructor, I asked my students to write an essay about a time when they'd changed their opinion. What was the opinion and what made them change their mind? I got back a series of essays that ran something like, "I used to think drugs were okay, but then I got addicted to them and realized they weren't." "I used to think science was boring, but then I won a national merit award for my science project and I realized it wasn't." My favorite was, "I used to think pre-marital sex was wrong, but then I got a girlfriend and I realized that it was okay."

Perhaps we've become a nation of empiricist philosophers, but somehow I doubt it. It seems to me that the "experience" part of the equation is less important to us than the "my." We are endlessly fascinated by our own lives, particularly if we belong to a younger generation brought up in an educational system that puts a premium on self-expression over empathetically understand of someone else's plight.

Nowhere has this lesson been driven home more firmly than in literature classes. It's become almost axiomatic that in order to teach a novel, poem, story, or play successfully, it has to relate directly to students' lives. Got a roomful of African-American students? Teach them Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, and Rita Dove. Jews? Give them I. B. Singer, Philip Roth, and just to be daring, a touch of Jonathan Safran Foer. Hispanics? Garcia Marquez ought to work (never mind that he's South American, not Caribbean or Mexican), and then some Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz. The list goes on.

Similarly, writing students are encouraged to mine their own rather limited experience of the world in search of nuggets to write about. Recently I taught a class called "Fiction and Personal Narrative," in which students could submit works of fiction or non-fiction. The students were wonderful writers with great imaginations, but the one question that seemed to stump them again and again was when I'd ask them, "So is this a work of fiction or non-fiction?"

Of course when I was a writing student, and I and my fellow students were no wiser. Our instructors always reminded us that we had to remember the works we were reading were fiction. We were not to assume any story was autobiographical. That state of affairs lasted for about two seconds. Almost immediately after getting our first few batches of stories, I remember we'd whisper to each other in the hall, "Oh, I didn't know he was a drug addict who lived in a shack in New Orleans with a stripper." Or "Wow, I guess she had some unresolved issues with her mother that she's been taking out on her boyfriend." Or "Isn't that funny? I never would have guessed she came from an Orthodox Jewish home and rejected her faith to pursue a career as a writer."

No wonder memoirs are so popular these days. In a way, they seem more honest than fiction writing of this style. After all, what's fiction really? Just non-fiction with the names changed.

When I was starting out, I'd veer between autobiographical and more imaginary modes. Before I wrote my Prague stories, I was working on a series of fantastical tales like "Gay God," about a gay bar where a magical spirit lived above the ceiling and maliciously and capriciously set up couples or broke them apart. A teacher of mine liked my cleverness and imagination, but challenged me to add more feeling to my work. That's when I began delving into autobiographical sketches, inspired by people I knew in Prague. And yet, the two stories that seem to resonate most with readers are ones that also seem to have little direct connection to my own life. One's about a middle-aged couple visiting a concentration camp. The other's about two Czech boys searching for the missing head of a famous statue of Stalin.

It's funny that no one asks me if either of these stories is autobiographical, yet both borrow large chunks of experience and emotion directly from my own life. On the flip side, when I tell people the plot of my new book, about a Jewish mother and her drug-addicted gay son who go to Israel, the first thing they want to know is, "Oh, so did you go to Israel with your mother?" (For the record, the last time I went to Israel in the company of my parents was when I was a pre-adolescent, long before my numerous stints at Betty Ford in the company of Liza, Liz Taylor, and all the rest. And as a survivor of drug addiction, I resent the implication that etc. etc...)

With the book I'm writing now, I'm determined to get out of my own head, learn about experiences radically different from mine and identify with them anyway. For example, I'm currently reading Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a non-fiction tract about the roots of terrorism, written by a Muslim academic born in Uganda. I've also been checking out homeland security journals online, Communist newspapers, and maternity magazines. As I read, I'm continually impressed by how little I really know, how much knowledge is necessary to even begin to glimpse our complicated existence. As Horace says (and I only know this because it's the quote of the day on my desk calendar as I write this), "To know all things is not permitted."

So, as a pregnant Muslim Communist homeland security expert, I urge anyone who's reading this to forget yourself. Try on a new hat for a day. Use the great divine gift of the imagination to see what's on the other side of those identity blinders you've been encouraged to shackle yourself with all these years. See if you don't learn how small you are.