Okay, so we're doing this.
Crazed catharsis just became real work
Yesterday, I received my first professional feedback on the opening 20 pages of Why Am I Telling You All This?” which, along with some necessary and acute questions, contained a lot of praise I wasn’t ready for: the truth, the buried truth, is that I’ve spent my whole life secretly believing they all said I was a good writer because they knew I’d never be a ballerina, and the other truth, the one that’s less buried but not yet fully publicized, is that my mother’s determination to foist this Writer Destiny as Life Mission narrative on me from birth held me back. Intensely. We’ll put a pin in that one, but for the moment I’ll say never fucking talk to me about some ultimate Artistic Purpose. If it works for you, I’m guessing you found it yourself; you had a choice. I came back to writing when I realized I couldn’t live without it, but in those depressed years, the ones without writing, I thought, even in the depths of thoroughly unreadable misery, you were wrong, you were wrong, you were wrong.
The first draft of this memoir really didn’t feel like writing. It felt like desperately trying to unravel more gauze to dress a wound that was never going to stop bleeding. It kinda hasn’t? But I followed that released life force to a whole book, apparently. And now that I’m hooked up to a fabulous network in Georgia and no longer grasping at God knows what hoping that someone might like me because of my sentences, I can make my things into things. And this is where we’re starting.
I’m feeling a deep sense of sadness from all this vindication I’m getting, and I have no idea what it’s about. All I can guess — and everything feels like a guess — is that my youthful dreams of THIS REALITY EXACTLY had a lot of specific people in it, because of how supportive they’ve always been, and those people are either dead — my father, my grandmother — or not in my life anymore, no need to name those. I guess I’m also acutely aware that an unbroken heart wouldn’t have written this manuscript. Nothing provokes an existential crisis like the understanding that there’d be no project here without a very specific kind of enduring pain.
Because no other fissure in my little planet has made me want to write about it. My operation? My father’s death? My break from the childhood religion that a lot of young americans are determined to see as not-a-religion but I know its dogmas are dogmas because I left its church and got shunned by family and friends for it?
That shit’s not good reads. There may be stories there, but they’re not the stories I’ve ever been drawn to. You know what gets me every time, from the dawn of my readerly cognizance? Romance. And the thing about romance as a genre is that it has pretty much nothing to do with real life, so my 11-year relationship of growth and healing etc. with Ian isn’t one of those books. And my fictional romantic dynamics have heretofore just been…a lot of lesbians with problems. Or a robot and a guy with the problem of having to take apart the robot. I was bad at plot. I got careful-what-you-wish-for assistance without knowing what I was getting into: there were stakes. There were characters making bad decisions when the reader was shouting “oh my god, seriously? DON’T DO IT.” There were heart-melting montages with sparkling San Francisco landmarks in the background. There was crazy movie dialogue. There were dramatic monologues. There was fucking making out on beaches, like that’s even a thing that people do. It was like fourteen-year-old me wrote a screenplay about an idealized life in California. All that was missing was Save Ferris playing at the end.
I was going to say that 14-year-old me wouldn’t have planned on all this pain, but she begs to differ: she was adept at crying about thwarted romance before any of it actually took place. And, she reminds me, she was always writing about it. She did literally write romantic screenplays, truth be told, and they were always about romances that weren’t supposed to be taking place. What did hypervirginal little me know about that? Lessons learned from Pulp, a dangerous band for forming youthful consciousness:
Ah, the corrupting influence of British rock stars. Later in life, Jarvis Cocker’s still got it. If you’re into that whole performative-sexuality thing, which, sigh, I am. When Ian and I first became friends almost 20 years ago, I linked him to my favorite Pulp songs in a discussion of guys he considered sexy, and he said, “He’s trying too hard, I don’t go for that.” (The differences between us all these years later can be essentially summed up this way.)
I’m doing my best to perform less. It sucks, because the whole point of doing that was to cover up all the shit I didn’t want you to see, and now instead of resenting Ian for uncovering all of it I have to take that as the healing support of a solid life partner? Bullshit, but OKAY FINE. I guess! Sometimes! Not always! anyway I’m a peach to live with. Did I mention that I can barely do anything in the kitchen and Ian’s essentially a master chef of world cuisines? He also looks far better in an apron than I can dream of looking. Anyway this book is about gendered conditioning, among other things.
Thank you, as always, for being here while I do whatever it is I do.
