Love Stories

What's the actual point?

My first semester in an MFA program, the most consistent piece of positive feedback I received was that I’m “good with dialogue.” I have a background in Playwriting, which might be why no one seemed to notice that the vast majority of my dialogue is just two characters flirting. Where I’m “strong,” I’m strong there. For non-romantic dialogue, I steal shamelessly from overheard conversations.

Of course, there’s more to romance than romance: there’s projection and hurt and intimacy and confession and self-delusion and self-revelation and obstacle, sometimes there’s mental illness that needs to be treated, trauma that needs to be painfully undone. There’s a foundation of trust that can’t easily translate to words or images. Sometimes that trust is broken and has to be rebuilt. Sometimes that trust was broken because you thought the relationship had already been irrevocably lost. Romance is a lot of being wrong when you didn’t expect to be and being right when you didn’t always trust that you were.

I’ve often lamented that Hollywood movies, which inform far too many subconscious “this is how it should go” narratives, don’t show us these aspects of romantic partnerships. Then, very occassionally, I’ll stumble across a piece of narrative art that does, and I’ll think eeeeeep, I cannot watch this! Watching fictional couples overcome their deep-seated ego-needs in order to build and strenthen communication is almost as painful as doing it yourself.

I can’t tell if I’m working on a memoir with romance at the center of it or not. I was when I left San Francisco, and given how many pages I wrote in mid-tier hotels across America, I’d like to say with conviction that I’m working toward something. But the closer I get to the aspects of the story I was running from (which, as it happens, have nothing to do with romance), the more I understand why so many of us are drawn to heightened love stories of angst and fire and honey, or sexy misguided choices the likes of which Pulp songs were so delisciously made of in the 90’s. No one is standing on the moore shouting to Heathcliff, “Who are you really angry at right now?” Lestat never asked Louis about the root of the unrelenting sadness that made immortality so unbearable for him (though he overcame it in the final Vampire Chronicle which Anne Rice published with a heroic and frankly freakish consistancy in 2014 after starting the series in the 1970’s.)

Jane Austen’s romances endure in part because her characters do communicate about fraught matters. They fight, give into outbursts, reflect on their words and actions, and apologize from a depth of lessons actually learned. I could go on about what Jane Austen does adeptly — hilariously satirizing revered insitutions and the concept of nobility are two major strengths — but rendering partner-to-partner communication in the theraputic sense actually interesting is one stunning achievement.

Romeo and Juliet takes place over a three-day period: we’ve all been there, right? My dear friend Arlen once theorized to me that that play is a satire, that the pile-up of bodies at the end of what’s ostensibly a romance has a dark humor running through it. All these people dying in such a short time because this 14-year-old girl and a boy she just met decided that they literally couldn’t live without each other. Arlen roundly declared that we were all missing the point and that Shakespeare meant to show that teenagers make stupid decisions and that love, far from being something to die for, makes you do stupid things.

Those two famously did not communicate except in the form of erotic poetry. Which, on its face, is awesome. But had Romeo actually gotten the message that Juliet only looked dead and had only been given pseudo-poison as part of Friar Lawrence’s crackpot plan to make it possible for them to run away together, could they have actually made it last? Would we have even wanted them to?

When I fell in love for the first time, I was sixteen, and we were together for 3 years, so that doesn’t feel like something to discount. But adult love, the kind where the real shit comes up, where you really feel the extent of what you would do for someone and, more terrifyingly, what they would be willing to do for you, I’d say I’ve felt that twice. One of them is my current partner of 13 years, so that works out. The other relationship was, in origin and impact, insurmountably messier, but easier to describe. Ian has never had any sort of connection to Hollywood movies (he is, in this and countless other respects, not very American, likely due in part to having spent his earliest childhood years in Japan, where his artistic New Yorker parents taught English).

But I grew up loving Hollywood romances, and I fell for someone else who felt the same. His everyday spoken dialogue surpassed anything I could write, and I had the capacity to understand that if you’re talking like a polished screenplay, there’s probably something you’re running away from or refusing to share. But I didn’t want to understand that, because it felt like a dream, and I had a lot that I was running away from. I’m not suggesting that at the core of every epic romance is crippling fear of facing who and what you are, except I kind of am? A little? It depends on many things.

Part of what’s semi-soured me on epic romantic narratives trying to manifest themselves in real life is Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, who are still on the Defendent side of a human trafficking lawsuit brought on by a young woman who used to work as their nanny. July will mark a year since the allegations of Gaiman’s decades-long predatory behavior broke, and I’m still contending with the emotional fallout of having bought so fully into their thing. These lingering feelings of betrayal don’t stem from straightforward sadness about a suspiciously public open marriage between two artists turning out to be a horrific situation — though, knowing that a small child is involved, that is horrible enough — it’s about the fact public-facing images of benevelence and generousity serves as an effective mask for so many abusers, even on the small scale. That was a bit of a topical whip-lash, but these are the issues I’m trying to, somehow, integrate into a cohesive work.

It’s like this: therapy isn’t fun but escapism is. Brain-consuming romantiosexual connection can be simultaneously very, very real and a method of escaping the issues one might be in therapy for. Those two statements don’t sound like the stuff an absorbing manuscript is made of, and yet I can’t let go of the notion that I have a book here. I mean I actually 300-pages-worth do have a book here, it’s just no one’s idea of ready. It’s had early readers. The most recent one asked me what the story is, exactly, what’s my impetus for writing it?

Around this time a couple years ago I would’ve answered you with thundrous wailing, cascades of tears. And depending on our relationship you would’ve given me a hug or taken a deep breath and softly ventured, “That’s not really an answer.” Now, the wound is more or less closed, leaving me mostly dry-eyed and articulate. Even if I’ve figured out the story I’ve been running from — which has, at its core, a narcissist and predator unrelated to romantic partnership — why tell it to you? I’ve been spilling out information about my own life to a steadily-growing readership for nearly three years now (thank you all for subscribing!), but suddenly I’m thinking of revisions beyond this amorphous space and I can’t remember why I’m doing it. When I’m feeling even-keeled I can say, “I have a story to tell about some uncomfortable shit that’s more common than anybody wants to believe and I need to talk about it because it doesn’t get talked about.”

Except that I don’t especially want to talk about it either. Hence the escapism, the epic romance with its ensuing cinematic heartbreak, the screenplay dialogue that rivaled screenplays, even this very essay, which is couching the issue in talk of romance, just as I do in my current draft. I’m talking around and around and around everything and I’ve taken you on this carousel with me. Hopefully it’s one of those majestically beautiful merry-go-rounds, with elaborate work-of-art horses on which we’re going up and down.

I don’t know all of you personally but I find it less of a task, these days, to write for you than to write for an imaginary world out there. The old inspirational adage that YOU need to write for YOURSELF seems like a quaint one, not only because we’re unprecedentedly bombarded with the unsolicited opinions of people near and far in this abominable corperate-bought social media age, but also because we know that the main step to getting a project out into the world is convincing at least one business-minded stranger that there’s an audience out there for what you’re doing, a “market” when we’re feeling crass.

I don’t want there to be a market for the story I’m running from. On a human level, I want to be alone in the precise atrocities I have to relate. But I’m not, and that’s the only reason I’d even think about relating them. I haven’t seen this story outside of the online support groups I dipped in and out of years ago. Even those people back then told me it was helpful to them to read my writing about it. They’d ask me if I was a writer, a poet. Those were very dark days when I was sure the answer was, and would remain, no, not anymore.

I suppose that, more than anything else, was the reason I found it so urgent to apply for MFA programs. Because I still remember being convinced I would never write again, and I needed some tangible way to mark this change from being that to being me. I stopped writing for years. Right up until, as it happens, I met the person at the not-quite-center of this trembling manuscript. He was a writer too. In fact, he was the person who suggested I start a Substack when I didn’t know what to do with my over-the-edge rage about things people said to me on the street. He is, in a sense, a reason why you’re here, which is all very weird to say, and isn’t to obscure the fact that obviously I’m the one saying all this, but—

It’s been a long time since any one person has altered my consciousness that fully. I was admittedly in the thick of an untreated depression in those days and needed a fuck of a lot more altering than I objectively need right now. The only other person who’s shifted my core to that degree is Ian, but Ian’s lived with me for over a decade. This was someone I more or less met on the street, and only because Ian insisted I should really get out of the house that day and go to the block party happening outside. What if he hadn’t insisted? What if I’d let depression win? I was wearing the lounge clothes I had slept in, and consciously put together an outfit for the first time in what might have legitimately been weeks. I remember looking in the mirror at my bucket hat and threadless lemur shirt and technical-fabric pants and black Docs thinking fuck yeah, I look like a human being and not like someone who just made the decision to behave functionally seven minutes ago. Gonna go make friends!

Which I did, in a manner of speaking, but to a depth and at a level that I can safely say neither of us bargained for. And it was only after several dispiriting moments of feeling like I didn’t belong among these already-established clusters of friend groups, all of whom were younger than me. So was he, by a hair’s less than a decade, and I was about to turn around and go back inside before we made eye contact. At that time, even talking to a writer felt like a glimpse of an alternate universe. I’ve still got the capacity to talk about this? Which version of me is even here right now? Some hopeful pre-many-events just-conjured version, clearly, and she had to have appeared somehow from the palms of this stranger because I haven’t been her for years.

I guess if you meet someone and you’re convinced that they brought you back from the dead, you’re bound to develop strong feelings fast. If the conversation ropes you in for hours that feel like minutes, if this person happens to be stomach-shiftingly attractive, and if they smoothly hit on you after an appropriate amount of time, leaving you in the crazy position of having to say no where you’re feeling more yes than you have in recent memory, it’ll get hard to think things through. Which is why I’ve had to hash this story out for different reasons at different times. I’m still figuring out what fucking story I’m telling. Even the allegations against Neil Gaiman changed the story: he was the first author we talked about. When I found out that he hadn’t read my favorite of Gaiman’s works I bought it for him (thankfully, used). That was the same year I taught high school for the first time, and I started the high school students off with an essay that Neil Gaiman wrote about cities. That motherfucker was all over that period of my life. I just saw the full extent of it now.

The story I’ve been running from is about someone who was loved as fanatically as Gaiman was loved, just on a smaller scale. I actually watched her alter the spiritual beliefs of other people in the way cult leaders do. She even wrote books, and coined a phrase that became culturally influencial, only she didn’t trademark it, so that the person who had the sense to trademark it gets all the credit now. There’s even a big-time Hollywood celebrity who popularized the phrase. No one knows, because of that slept-on trademark, who’s really behind it. My purpose with this proposed project, though, isn’t an exposé of someone who, by virtue of not having her shit together, never became a celebrity. My purpose is—

And fuuuuuuck, that’s where I still get pulled back up by the carousel again. You’re not my therapists and I don’t want you to be. If I tell this story, what’s in it for you? I’m still figuring that one out. My favorite memoirs aren’t harrowing tales and I don’t want to write a harrowing tale, that’s why romance was such a natural start. If all sharp persistant keep-you-up-at-night pain could be as fundementally hot as that pain was, maybe no one would need therapy. I came alive from that grief. I’d never had that experience before.

I didn’t come alive from the story I’m running from. For a while there, I wasn’t sure how much I even wanted to live through the story I’m running from. The narrative I’d constructed instead, to boost the one put fourth by the antagonist in question, that was a story I spent a long time believing I couldn’t live without. I only gradually learned I was wrong because of my personal trainer helping me become a person who works out, and because of Ian and because of therapy and because of Wellbutrin. Buried beneath my hippie-artsy upbringing is a ruthlessly practical voice that asks if any of this needs to be written down at all. I guess there’s only one way to find out.

Gomez and Morticial Addams (Raul Julia and Angelica Houston), who will never disappoint.