Benedict Wells: “The stories within us”
Published: Tuesday, Jul 23rd 2024, 10:30
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For the first time, the Zurich bestselling author talks openly about his troubled childhood. Writing presents itself as a survival strategy and - quite simply - as a craft.
Until now, Benedict Wells has been a latent secret. An essay on his website explains why he dropped the von Schirach surname and adopted the name Wells - namely to distance himself from the von Schirach family's Nazi past. His novels, however, raise more questions than they answer. They are always about family, about the difficult relationship between a son and his father, about growing up under precarious conditions. And Wells is so good at telling stories that one can hardly doubt their veracity.
Yet now, at the age of 40, he writes in his new book: "I talked a lot, but for years I had no language for my real feelings." The family home was characterized by "drugs, an empty fridge and neglect". Separated from his severely depressed Swiss mother and his German father, a hapless gambler, Wells grew up in institutions. There he found solace in nightly readings on the toilet and learned that stories are perfect escapes.
Benedict Wells calls this sleepless boy "Neverboy", a child "who did not happen". The fact that he reports on him in the third person is a narrative trick with which he splits himself off from his childlike self as an authorial narrator and allows him to appear as a character in a story. Basically, this reveals more about his writing than the second part of the book, in which he demonstrates the technical aspects of his art and gives tips as if in a writing workshop. Many secrets are revealed, but the last one remains: Where is the line between fiction and reality?
*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
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