Fictionalizing Life Stories: The Wine Thief

In research interviewing of men who had committed violence, one story of sexual abuse would not let me go. I didn’t know how to write it up as social science, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to write fiction, which appeared to be a fitting format for the story. Yet, it was as if the story itself was telling me to write it. So, I took fiction writing courses and began a novel. This article is a chapter from the novel-in-progress. I’ve changed the names and the location of the story to hide the identities of the protagonists. Though the core story is faithful to the man’s account, I added some details from the accounts of other men who had sexually abused children and/or who had been sexually abused as children Most men who are sexually abused as children do not abuse children in later life. In the novel, the boy Yukee comes close to molesting another boy but does not. With the help of a school social worker named Maggie and a one-armed piano player named Jack who had a grand desire to make up for his own serious mistakes, Yukee escaped the life that my informant led. This is a chapter from a novel in progress called The Wine Thief.