memoirifiction
Looks like "mortification" and it's not but it's not-not
Unnamed Specific-Year Memoir Project continues, at a steady pace now, not the world’s-about-to-end speed with which those first hundred pages tore into my life. I’m on page 137, and plan to turn the house upside down in celebration when I reach the arbitrary milestone of page 140. I’m not sure why I chose to write a Medium post about the next half of the book being centered around fire; I had my account from the days before Substack became our whispered replacement for the impending Twitter wrecking ball and decided to mark this next phase in the manuscript in a different but compatible form. Either that, or COVID was giving my recovering brain truly senseless directives. It’s hard to tell anymore.
I don’t typically write these for support. When I’m in the mood to pontificate it’s usually because I’m feeling cocky and unshakable, or righteously shaken by some ableism out there and ready to right myself again with the help of your readership and attention. But we’re about to go fully diary here in the teenage-girl-with-the-little-key sense because what’s shaking me now is not their shit, out there, it’s me, in here. Writing.
I don’t remember if I’ve said that I might end up fictionalizing this whole damn thing just to mitigate moments like the one I had last night. Being as cavalierly all for the truth as I’ve built my whole thing around being is ultimately only as useful as is how much you care about pissing people off with the truth. Here’s a little secret about the Midwestern side of my family: they’re full stop evil. Just trust me for now, I don’t throw that word around. Pissing them off? Absolutely no big deal. Evil, thankfully, doesn’t mean they actually have demons on their side who could come after me, or you. I became a much stronger writer when I finally realized that.
But this project where I make a readable thing out of the past year? The truth in this could hurt someone I truly, truly love, someone who’s bent over backwards to keep me in his life even when I did near-unbelievable things to push him away. Growing up, I never contemplated a reality where the truth could hurt someone I love: if you’re hurt by the truth, I concluded, you suck. (The evil alluded to re: my heartland relatives starts with dozens of people aggressively running from the truth.)
But back when I drew these conclusions I thought I was an unfailingly good person. I thought I couldn’t do anything in the name of visceral desire that would potentially hurt someone I want to protect. I’m not sure where I got this idea that I was so Good — my dad, probably. I’m gonna get really textbook here and say that if I had him to talk to in that earthly call-him-up sort of way now I probably wouldn’t need to write this. I spent so many years of my life choked with fear that I never understood what I was capable of doing if I actually set myself free. My powers of rationalization are extraordinary: if I want something badly enough, I can convince myself at the core of my being and 8/10 others that there’s every reason why I should have it, why this is not what it looks like, why anyone who’s going to dismiss me on this is just not seeing the full picture, not paying attention to what’s important. My aunt Beth always told me I’d have made an excellent lawyer and as I get older I’m afraid I see her point. If I want to justify something, I will. And if there is any part of your conviction to the contrary that can be shaken in the slightest, I will find it, and I will throttle it.
I’ll start with myself, of course. I will construct a moral code so serpentine that all “if this than that” statements will evaporate, making every possible explanation into one that explodes all preconceived by which I mean sensible notions of what is right and wrong. And all this is to say:
The city of San Francisco operates by a set of COVID-related rules that don’t even apply to the rest of California as far as we can tell. I’m testing negative for COVID because I took Paxlovid, one of the advantages of which is that it speeds up your negative test results. Ian did not take Paxlovid because he has one of those “it’s basically a cold” type bodies where COVID is concerned and I emphatically do not. But even though he’s fever-free and he’s now been home for nearly 2 weeks and there is no way in any corner of science that he is remotely contagious at all, he has to remain home because he’s still testing positive. This means we have essentially been quarantined together for the duration, no more than 4 hours apart in what’s now starting to feel like months. I’m not even complaining, Ian is exquisite company and it’s been lovely not to have to cut off our morning coffee conversations. The weather was also so consistently and dramatically terrible for nearly all of last week that it was a relief for me to know he didn’t have to go out in it in the darkness of 7am, which is truly the worst.
But it means: I have no writing hours where I’m actually alone. I’m left to my own devices, sure, there’s no more understanding partner than Ian, but I can’t scream to angsty mid-aughts love songs about dysfunctional relationships, and a project like this necessitates that. More urgently, though, he can come in at any point, because we don’t have an extra bedroom and therefore my “office” is a corner in the single bedroom and he moves about pretty freely in this place since he pays half the rent etc. So he wandered in yesterday and, because I use my noise-cancelling headphones to feel the full impact of angsty mid-aughts love songs about dysfunctional relationships, I didn’t hear him come in. So there these pages were.
“I think I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see,” he said. He did. But, thankfully, what he saw was a fantasy sequence. His concern was not (primarily) what I’d written, but if that had happened. “Isn’t this a memoir?”
“Yes, it’s about [big lofty ideas not just indulgent erotica LOFTY IDEAS], so there’s a lot of fantasy in here.” Truth!
“Okay, but…”
“That didn’t happen.” It didn’t it really didn’t.
“Okay but—”
“Yes I wanted it to, which goes back to [lofty ideas]. But it didn’t.”
“What about other—”
“…Can we please not talk about the first draft? It’s a first draft.”
There were hugs with that last statement! I wasn’t being cold or unloving. But I do feel like I’m officially an asshole dude writer now. This is the part of nonbinary gender identity I never see talked about, which is also a big part of this project, but augh. Remember the title story in Junot Díaz’s immortal volume, This is How You Lose Her, where Yunior’s girlfriend Alma goes through his journals and,
Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her.
It’s one of my favorite books. I’ve listened to the audio version so many times that I often recite it from the beginning when I can’t sleep. It’s my favorite because it’s unfailingly real, because it’s fearless, because no one can end a paragraph like that short story master, but I’ve also known for years that it’s my favorite because I get it. I get that defensive sex-obsessed finger-pointing narrator turning to writing for salvation because actual salvation is either out of reach or simply not worth the trade-off of desire unrealized. I get Yunior down to the core of my soul. But I spent years avoiding my connection with his primary motivation, his overrarching characteristic: dude’s a player. So am I. I keep it in check better than he does, but we’re the same. Dìaz has never denied the autofiction elements of his work, and while he doesn’t directly address trauma in This is How You Lose Her, he wrote a soul-breaking essay years ago about his history of being molested as a child (a galling but achingly worthwhile read.)
So in the interest of a sudden burst of truth, I’m going to tell you two things I’m not in the habit of stating publicly:
1.) I find it shameful at best that the publishing industry chose an author of color, an immigrant author, and a survivor of exactly the kind of childhood trauma that collectively we’ve been loathe to acknowledge and made him the poster-dude of Big Publishing’s #MeToo facet. I’ll change my view immediately if rumored stories of predatory behavior in the Dominican Republic prove to be true, but I lost sleep scouring the internet for all the information I could find when that story broke. So far, all I’ve ever found is evidence that a brilliant and great-looking author who writes unsparingly about both being a player and being clueless with chicks, is, wouldn’t you know it, both a player and clueless with chicks.
2.) When I was first alerted to the above article talking about Díaz’s traumatic history, I immediately broke into tears and shouted “FUCK, NOT YOU TOO!” All I’ll say about that for the moment is that the predator I dealt with was not male, and this is why I feel very, very strongly about stories with female villains.
Honest to god I don’t remember why I’m telling you all this but this is the first moment that the time feels right. I’m going with it, because if I do have some far more intimate confessions to make in the future I’ll need to be strong. I can’t explain from a scientific perspective why having you all in my corner makes me stronger, but there is no doubt that it does.
Oh, and if, by the way, you end up picking up a copy of This is How You Lose Her, be warned that Big Publishing at that time was more concerned about “correct” spelling than about accurately capturing dialogue, so when Díaz, who’s half-Black, casually uses the n-word in the dialectical sense, there’s very much a soft a on the end that’s clear in speech, but there’s a hard r on the end when They print it, and that is fucking jarring. It’s the offensive and consequential version of how in Francesca Lia Block’s early work, the common California adverb “hella” is written out as “hell of.”
Anyway I guess what I’m saying is if you haven’t experienced This is How You Lose Her and you’d like to I highly recommend the audio version. He’s a great reader.
coda: When I was living in Boston, I was on my way to work and I saw him smoking outside of the collassal Church of Christian Science headquarters. He teaches at MIT so I thought I was prepared for that moment and knew what I would say if it ever transpired, but I wasn’t prepared at all. I literally halted and stood there, dry-mouthed, my only thought I can’t I can’t I can’t go up there I wouldn’t know what to say.
I once went up to Lou Reed just because I knew I’d never get another chance to be inane in his direction. I go up to everyone. The fucks I give are nil. But he occupies a plane in my consciousness that no one else shares. I can only explain it up to a point. After that point, who knows. Some people and their words, man.
