As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Waldman describes a deliberate distance between lived experience and its transformation into fiction. Rather than writing “straight from life” in the heat of events, she emphasizes the necessity of time: memory must ferment, reorder itself, and shed literal detail so it can become art. The verbs “fester,” “mature,” and “transmogrify” suggest that raw experience is not yet meaningful; it requires emotional processing and imaginative reshaping. The remark also implies an ethical and aesthetic stance: waiting can protect privacy, reduce self-justification, and allow the novelist to extract patterns, motives, and themes that are truer to human experience than a diary-like transcription.