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"  &amp;quot;It was bad enough being written into my daughter&amp;#039;s life story; worse was knowing where she was getting her facts.&amp;quot; Why she wrote the last line: This is from my story, &amp;quot;The Quietest Man,&amp;quot; which I&amp;#039;m now revising. The narrator, Pyotr Komorov, is an aging samizdat writer now living in a small college town in New Hampshire. He&amp;#039;s just learned that his 23-year-old daughter, Katya, is having her first play produced, and knows he should be thrilled: what kind of father wouldn&amp;#039;t revel in his child&amp;#039;s success?  But Katya&amp;#039;s writing an autobiographical play -- a play, she says cryptically, about her family. That&amp;#039;s all she&amp;#039;ll say, and it throws Pyotr into a tailspin as he imagines the way he&amp;#039;ll be depicted onstage. He and his ex-wife, Mila, separated when Katya was still an infant. Pyotr is convinced Katya was bred on unflattering tales about him -- all of which, he&amp;#039;s sure, will be made very public on opening night. Pyotr&amp;#039;s certain Mila has hammered into Katya&amp;#039;s head that he was the one who dragged her to America in the first place. Back in Moscow, while still living under Brezhnev, they&amp;#039;d launched an underground journal with their colleagues from the university, detailing the arrests and interrogations that weren&amp;#039;t being covered in Pravda. They wrote by hand -- the government had a record of everyone who owned typewriters -- and late at night Pyotr would sneak into different buildings at the university to type the materials. But when the KGB still linked Pyotr to one of those typewriters, he was brought in for questioning and fired from his teaching post in the history department. At the time Mila had seemed like the lucky one: she was on maternity leave from the economics department that term, and so avoided arrest. But it was Pyotr&amp;#039;s name fellow dissidents began chanting outside the university. It was his name that made international headlines and reached the desk of Saul Sandalowski, the Yale professor who campaigned to get him a visa and a teaching job to avoid imprisonment. And that, Pyotr knows, is just the beginning.  Mila would talk about how the moment they landed in the states he became, essentially, an absentee father. How he ducked into his study at every possibly moment, how birthdays and anniversaries slipped into a murky, irretrievable place in his mind -- but how he never seemed to forget the dates of Saul Sandalowski&amp;#039;s dinner parties. How, while Mila stayed back with the baby, Pyotr held court at every one of those parties, telling the story over and over of how he refused to name names in the interrogation room, earning him the title The Quietest Man. Even when Mila told Pyotr he owed it to their daughter to be home more, even when she threatened to leave him and take Katya to stay with her second cousin in Brooklyn, he just didn&amp;#039;t care.  Pyotr knows all of this is true. Of course at the time he&amp;#039;d never expected that two years after Mila left him, the Soviet Union would collapse and the work he&amp;#039;d dedicated his life to would be done. That the dinner discussions at Saul Sandalowski&amp;#039;s would suddenly revolve around Bosnia and that a young female Yugoslav would become the new honored guest -- and he certainly didn&amp;#039;t expect that same woman to win tenure over him. That his thirties and forties would be about mastering the delicate, tricky dance of adjuncting throughout the east coast -- and the more that he thinks about the way his life has panned out, living alone and moving from job to job every few years, the book of essays Saul helped him get published now out of print and his relationship with his ex-wife and daughter fractured at best, the more Pyotr becomes convinced that this &amp;quot;revenge&amp;quot; play will be the crowning humiliation of his life.  So, in a desperate attempt to get her to revise the play, Pyotr forces Katya into a father-daughter weekend in New Hampshire -- where things do not go as he had planned.  The ethics of turning autobiography into art have been endlessly explored. And yet it&amp;#039;s still something my writer friends and I argue about all the time. Some defend it as a basic right, or even a necessary act of catharsis, and I agree -- on principle. But I can&amp;#039;t deny how hurt I&amp;#039;d be if someone took the most painful or embarrassing parts of my life and spun them into fiction. The idea of being inaccurately -- or, maybe worse, accurately portrayed -- in a public work of art is something that must terrify every relative, friend and ex of a writer, and I&amp;#039;m curious how that alters the dynamics of a relationship. I&amp;#039;m interested in the moment Katya finally discovers the power she holds over her father, and how she wields it -- or whether it scares her and she holds it back instead. And although, as a young woman also finishing my first large writing project, I would have had an easier time narrating from Kayta&amp;#039;s vantage point, I knew before even writing the first sentence that I wanted Pyotr to tell the story. I always try to write from the perspective of whoever&amp;#039;s in the most complicated place fictionally, largely because it&amp;#039;s a lot of fun to see how they worm their way out. And I enjoy the challenge of trying to make the reader sympathize with such a rash, paranoid and difficult man as Pyotr, though it&amp;#039;s hard and frustrating and I&amp;#039;m not sure I&amp;#039;ve succeeded yet. Like relatives, I love but don&amp;#039;t always like my characters. What I truly like about Pyotr is that he&amp;#039;s self-aware and well-intentioned, but also, if you boil it right down, an asshole. And yet he fascinates me. I&amp;#039;m interested in what it would mean to have dedicated one&amp;#039;s entire life to a cause that lost its relevance in the course of world events. I&amp;#039;m interested in the way academia courts and coddles the politically persecuted -- how, in the end, Saul Sandalowski makes Pyotr feel like nothing but a forgotten member of the Dissident-of-the-Month Club. I like writing historically, especially about strange moments of political idealism; in the collection I&amp;#039;m finishing, I&amp;#039;ve also written stories about the Weather Underground, Jewish partisan fighters in World War II and Communists during the McCarthy Era. What interests me about Pyotr isn&amp;#039;t that he was a dissident writer, but that, more than two decades after the Iron Curtain has fallen, he&amp;#039;s still romanticizing such a dark moment in Soviet history simply because he held an important place in it. I&amp;#039;m interested in that very basic and human desire to leave a legacy. And, ultimately, I&amp;#039;m interested in what it means to Pyotr to have built his entire identity around the freedom of expression -- only, in the end, to go to such difficult and dramatic lengths to censor his own child. About the author: Molly Antopol is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she will be a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing beginning this fall. She has an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Mississippi Review Prize Stories and Poems of the Year, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Nimrod&amp;#039;s Prize Stories of the Year, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a4499/molly-antopol-last-line/>