A writer I've always truly admired, Henry Miller, and his sometime lover and general partner in crime Anais Nin, both spent a lot of their writing lives analyzing and agonizing over Miller's second wife, June. She comes off as a truly fascinating person in both Mary V. Dearborn's wonderful The Happiest Man Alive (about Miller) and Deirdre Bair's Anais Nin: A Biography, and in her various guises and amalgamations with other women in Miller's own books. She comes off as pretty much a really messed-up muse for a messed-up pair in a messed-up century; I am pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to stand her as I have a very low tolerance for drama queens (of either sex).
There is perhaps something to the fact that Miller, at least, did most of his best writing while he was suffering the most from what June did to or with or without or despite him -- the three-volume Rosy Crucifixion is mostly a reaction to his time sharing an apartment with her and a lesbian lover of hers -- and from what I'm discovering so far in the Nin biography she, too, owes a lot to this exasperating cokehead.
Real-life muses are nothing new, of course. I think just off the top of my head of how all the Pre-Raphaelites seemed over and over to do portraits of Elizabeth Siddall in their paintings as an example.
The question in my mind is now, who is the most fascinating person in my own life? Whose real-life (or imagined) adventures could best sustain a novella (for such is what NaNoWriMo has us producing, 175 pages, 50,000 words)? I am truly blessed in that there are several. One of my friends could be a Wild West Orlando (as in Virginia Woolf's hero/heroine, not as in Bloom or Furioso); another is a walking soap opera (that would have to be on HBO)... another... oh, there are so many possibilities.
I've got a month yet to think about this. And think about it I will.
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