Hey again everybody. As I told you, I had surgery a week or so ago. Since then I’ve been too distracted by pain and the weird pain medication I’m on to concentrate on my own thoughts, so I’ve been reading like a demon to keep myself company. I find it interesting to note that for some reason, the type of writing I have the biggest appetite for right now is short-form memoir. Short-form memoir by women, that is. Women who are writing about grief and love, illness and death, their bodies and their families and their drug of choice. The blood and guts of their lives.
And god almighty, is there a lot of that kind of writing out there. I’ve been reading poorly edited junk on xoJane, the guilty pleasure web magazine I feel the need to “check” at least once a day when I’m bored. (Current headlines include: “I Hooked Up with Someone’s Boyfriend, and I Don’t Feel Guilty.” At least someone doesn’t feel guilty!) I’ve been reading better essays on similar (and similarly gendered) subjects in Lenny, Lena Dunham’s frankly excellent feminist email newsletter. In today’s issue the actress Amanda Peet has a smart, touching piece about her fear of aging, and the admiration she feels for her less-vain sister, who’s a physician. Plinking around the internet with no real destination, I discovered an Australian journalist named Julia Baird who writes for the New York Times‘ OpEd section, and I read a bunch of her stuff, including a recent piece about the cancerous tumors she had growing in her abdomen. I’m not usually much for medical details but I read all the ones she laid out in that essay, and it was pretty good. The writing, I mean, not the subject matter. That was pretty bad.
From there I found my way to a writer and Moth storyteller named Tara Clancy, who I hadn’t heard of before. She’s good too! I got a huge kick out of the essay she wrote about the neighborhood bar her dad took her to when she was a kid, and the oddball, loving community they found there. And just this minute I remembered about Samantha Irby, who is one of my new Internet favorites but who I have so far failed to write about on this blog. Not long ago I discovered hers, and found her to be one of the most refreshingly frank and funny writers I have ever read. I plowed through her book of essays, Meaty—it is hilarious and totally original—and am waiting (sort of) patiently for her to finish her second one, which according to Facebook she is writing this very moment. Keep at it, lady!
Let me be clear: I have always been more interested in women’s stories than in men’s, and I also favor autobiographical work to novels, though I do read a ton of fiction. Memoir is the kind of writing I do myself, in my essays, zines, and books. These stories give me life, as both a writer and a reader. In the week or so since I got sick I haven’t had the energy to read much long-form writing, but I have started one book: Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, which she calls a novel but is understood to be based on her own life. It’s as wonderful as I expected it to be, and even more unusual.
But I’m surprised to find how much I’ve needed it now, this female company. Why do I find it so comforting, and so useful, to hear women talking truthfully about their own lives? Maybe I don’t have enough female closeness in my life (though honestly, I talk to my mother so much, and so exclusively, that a pair of walkie talkies would be as useful to me as my overpriced cell phone). Maybe it has to do with, ya know, SOCIETY, and the fact that women’s behavior is so circumscribed that we don’t often say how we feel in a day-to-day kind of way. Whatever causes it, I have the the most intense longing to hear people tell the truth, and it never goes away.
Memoir is tinged with a certain sense of inferiority, at least in the eyes of the kinds of writers who think they need an MFA in order to be writers—though there are plenty of folks who break through the stigma of it in order to be respected as serious artists, as Myles has. (But then, she’s a poet first.) Writing fiction “from life” is looked down on, too. I think this attitude is stupid, and I have developed a pet theory about it as well: I think it’s sexist. So-called domestic fiction, “personal” essays—hell, anything where the writer cops to having, like, FEELINGS—these are so often the areas of expertise of women writers, and that is the only reason they are considered less worthwhile, less intellectual, less important. Don’t tell me it’s because there are so many bad memoirs. There is so much bad EVERYTHING, and you don’t rule out whole categories of experience because you didn’t like that one thing you had that one time. I’m not gonna stop eating pizza entirely because they make it too greasy at the place around the corner. STRETCH YOURSELF, PEOPLE.
Lucky for me, I don’t give a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut—I got that from the comments section on xoJane!—about literary careerism and elitist nonsense. That’s why I know that good writing is all around us, waiting to be discovered—because I’ll read literally anything, just to see what I think. Some of the best things I’ve read have been in zines and on blogs that few others have read, and were written by people who will most likely never find a large audience for their work.
Anyway, when all’s said and done, reading other people’s personal discoveries—whether those people arrive at them within the confines of a poem, or in the shimmering moments of a beautiful, lyrical novel, or at the end of a painful essay, like a birth—this gives me more joy and wisdom, entertainment and company, than almost anything else. It feels fucking good to write the truth, too. It’s like Myles says in Chelsea Girls: “I always think it’s such a secret story, this one, I just need to tell this story for me or else I will burst.” (Me too.) She goes on: “It’s lonely to be alive and never know the whole story. Everyone must walk with that thought. I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.”
And it does, it feels like a secret, it is a secret until you tell it.
Indicative Mood 