Why I Wrote No Journey’s End

Why I wrote No Journey’s End: My Tragic Romance With ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten in the first person…Leslie’s actual letters to me.

Peter Chiaramonte

Why I wrote No Journey’s End: My Tragic Romance With ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten in the first person—is because that’s the only way for the reader to be certain the story is absolutely true. I had considered the epistolary POV (told through letters from various characters to one another), but chose instead to take Leslie’s letters and combine them with my own journals, diaries, newspaper clippings, photos, tape recordings, and library of philosophy, literature, history, and everything-Manson.

In my chapter 16: An Academic Prepares, you will see (when you read No Journey’s End in the next couple of weeks) how I left some of Leslie’s actual letters as letters, and with others I used the language in conversations. I didn’t want the whole book to be epistolary, as Leslie and Frank Earl Andrews once intended to do, and not do. [You may have to ZOOM-IN to 500% VIEW to see the faint pencil text of Leslie’s letter to me clearly.]

2012

When my dear friend and colleague, Albert J. Mills suggested I write a novel, I immediately began work on Moscow Prospect—a pure fiction based on my wild adventures in a few North American universities that led me to Europe, seduction, corruption in higher education, war with Russia, revolutions, and pipeline politics to boot. I began my research…then one day my daughter Mia discovered a box of letters from Leslie and, when I reread them, I changed course and started writing my story of 1976-1980 and what led me to grad school in California. How I met Leslie Van Houten took off as a memoir with a life of its own. As a writer, what’s a poor boy to do? I was hooked.

But it failed as a straight memoir. It was boring and ordinary. Too academic. Too speculate. So far remote from the action I’d actually lived through. Once again Albert Mills suggested, “Is this really the story you want to write? Why not make it into creative nonfiction? History believes the sincere and truthful novelist, not the academic historian.” I tried it again. This time something remarkable happened. Two years later, here it is: No Journey’s End.

Whose Emotions Are We Sharing; From Whose Point of View?

We live, as we dream, alone.”     —Joseph Conrad

On the topic of point-of-view, here’s another smart, useful book by award-winning author and writing instructor, Nancy Kress, that I want to recommend to aspiring writers: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint (Writers Digest, 2005). The only thoughts, plans, dreams, and feelings we can directly experience are our own, writes Kress, and I believe this is true. In No Journey’s End it’s through my eyes and gut feelings that we view all the action.

I even toyed with the notion of writing the book from Leslie’s own point of view, instead of my own. There are, after all, varying degrees of creative nonfiction. But having more journal and diary notes of my own to rely on, than even the hundreds of pages of letters and transcribed recordings from Les, I decided to stick to my own POV. Although….

I did attempt a variation of one of Kress’s writing exercises on page 171, and considered writing alternating segments from Leslie’s point of view. For example, I’d seen this technique masterfully done by Aleister Crowley in his novel from 1922, Diary of a Drug Fiend. Book I—PARADISO is told in the first person by the husband, Sir Peter Pendragon. Book II—INFERNO is told by his wife Lou. In Book III—PURGATORIO we revert once again to the first person narrative of Sir Peter.

Legend has it that—as an agreement for helping the couple overcome severe addiction to cocaine and heroin—Crowley insisted they maintain “magical diaries.” Which they did. Once Crowley possessed them, he forcibly hung on to the diaries until he’d completed his novel in 28 days, using the same drugs as he’d weaned the Pendragons of in the first place. Pretty darn cool if you ask me…