‘We are the stories we tell ourselves’: American-Canadian writer Ruth Ozeki

The perspectives that shape a story is a favoured theme in Ozeki’s fiction, whose fourth novel The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021) won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Also a Zen Buddhist priest and filmmaker, her first two books, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), are about the advertising and public relations world, not ordinarily a glamorous topic but enlivened by Ozeki, 66, who drew from her own experiences making documentaries for meat and crop companies to shine a fictional (and unflattering) light on the storytellers of our world.

“I was very aware that my presentation of reality in those documentaries was a story being told by people with financial interests,” says the American-Canadian writer. “[These books] are really about how capitalism impacts the way we perceive and present the world.”

In her next book, this theme became more explicit. A Tale for the Time Being (2013) is about a novelist called Ruth who discovers a teenager’s diary on a shore in British Columbia, months after a devastating tsunami. This story’s early drafts contained only the teenager’s adolescent struggles with loneliness and not the novelist, but Ozeki herself barged into the final drafts when the 2011 Fukushima earthquakes wreaked massive destruction in Japan.

“The book I had written was a pre-earthquake book, and now we were in this post-earthquake world, which was broken,” says Ozeki. “I realised that the only way forward was to allow my fictional world to stay broken. If I named my character ‘Ruth’, then readers would always wonder ‘Is this real? Or is this not real?’ And that was useful to me because I could talk about how an event like Fukushima changes the way we perceive the world.”

If Ozeki’s novels hitherto took cautious and measured steps towards a meditation on storytelling, The Book of Form and Emptiness, leaps to a sprint from page one. It is about a woman who loses her husband and starts hoarding everything he’s ever owned, and her son who starts hearing voices from those belongings. The novel is narrated by a Book in the son’s possession, and begins thus: ‘A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice,
calling itself into being. A book must start somewhere, and this one starts here.’

“All this relates to Buddhism and the way we perceive reality,” she says, “We experience our own lives in story form, right? We are the stories we tell ourselves. Buddhism shifts the story slightly, identifying it, making us aware of it.” Just like Benny, the novel’s protagonist, latches onto objects which talk to him after his father’s death, we associate memories and stories with non-sentient things, too. The tragedy of us never knowing the origin of these things themselves — probably in a factory worker’s hands who will never own or see the fruit of his labour again — is not lost on the narrative.

“Buddhism speaks of three possible reactions to an object or situation: attraction, aversion or neutrality,” says Ozeki. “I wanted to explore that interaction in a materialist consumerist world.”

To dismiss the voices in Benny’s head as abnormal and nothing else would be a mistake, though. Ozeki says she never made a conscious effort to insert neuro-diversity into her narrative — “I just like writing about interesting people” — but did want to address how telling a psychiatrist you hear voices almost always leads to the voices being “pathologised and diagnosed”, whereas if creative people say they hear voices that help them make art, those voices are “lionised” by society.

“I think we exist on a spectrum,” says Ozeki. “Normal is a fiction. It’s a construct. We made it up. So why can’t we remake it and expand it into something more inclusive and compassionate?”

Her work in documentaries convinced Ozeki that stories, whether they are penned or filmed, are always a manipulation of reality and can only be “approximations” of the truth, whether motivated by religious, commercial or other desires. “There’s no neutral or omniscient point of view,” she says, “so I’ve always been interested in taking that frame of a story and turning it around and asking, what else is happening?’”