I get this ques­tion all the time: How auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal is your novel?

The book’s style, set­ting, and pro­tag­o­nist invite the ques­tion: It’s a first-per­son com­ing-of-age debut. It takes place large­ly in New York and Boston, where I’ve spent most of my life. And the main char­ac­ter — the Zin­sky of the title — is my age. 

But my hon­est answer is this: ​“The life I’ve lived is dif­fer­ent from the tale I spin about a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter named Zin­sky. But I’ve used plen­ty of ammu­ni­tion from my life to cre­ate Zin­sky and his story.”

The thing is — there’s heavy ammu­ni­tion, and there’s light ammunition. 

In the cat­e­go­ry of heavy ammo, I’d list the following: 

• My par­ents sep­a­rat­ed when I was six. Same thing hap­pens to Zinsky.
• My moth­er was an Eng­lish teacher. That, too, is the pro­fes­sion of Zinsky’s mother.
• I’m a zealot of all things relat­ed to lit­er­a­ture and foot­ball. So is Zinsky.

And yet, I nev­er quite feel like the heavy ammo pro­vides the entire pic­ture. The book con­tains dozens of minor ele­ments — in the form of small descrip­tions, sin­gle scenes, and turns of phrase — that are also auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. This is what I call ​“light ammo.” 

For exam­ple: There’s a wed­ding scene in Chap­ter 21, in which two char­ac­ters — bored by the cer­e­monies — play a game of prayer­book base­ball. Here’s how it works: Zin­sky whis­pers a page num­ber to Jim­my Cali­pari, the char­ac­ter sit­ting next to him. Jim­my attempts to open his prayer­book to exact­ly that page. If he suc­ceeds, he’s hit a home run. If he gets with­in five pages, it’s a triple. With­in 10, a dou­ble. With­in 15, a sin­gle. Beyond 15, it’s an out. So the game begins, with the same gen­er­al rules — three outs to a half-inning — as reg­u­lar baseball. 

A friend taught me this game in sev­enth grade. We were sit­ting next to each oth­er dur­ing the bar mitz­vah cer­e­mo­ny of anoth­er friend. We were bored out of our skulls. And this was 1987, so you couldn’t just take out a smartphone.

So you see, prayer­book baseball’s appear­ance in Zin­sky is an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ment. It’s not the heavy stuff of loca­tion, voca­tion, or fam­i­ly; but any way you slice it, it’s mate­r­i­al from my life that I mined to cre­ate a fic­tion­al scene. 

The point is, it’s easy to think of a novel’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ments in terms of big-pic­ture sim­i­lar­i­ties between the author’s life and the life of his or her main character. 

But just as often, it’s the small stuff.