On Writing Memoir (Or The Lying Game)
[admin / April 25th, 2011 / Micro Cultures / Tags: memoir]I have a friend on Twitter. Well, I have 104 friends on Twitter as of today–a nice number given my account lockdown–but anyway, I have a friend who, last year, sent me some direct messages. I publicly vented my frustrations over writing memoir. I kept missing something, kept striking out when I re-read the work.
In true Twitter form, I fired passive-aggressive vitriol into the ether. She took me to the side and genuinely tried to help me. She offered worthwhile advice: writing in different narrative styles to unlock the block, if you will; narrow the scope for a more focused work. I tried to write about depression. I said, “I’m just a black man who’s depressed. Nothing special.â€
She said, “Black men are depressed and don’t know it–or are too afraid to admit help. How is that not special?â€
***
I write about my depression–indeed, anything involving my life–in broad generalities. No details, no descriptions, no names–no exposure. I can write four or five expository paragraphs about a house, a color, a feeling: so long as those things relate to fictional characters.
In my memoir pieces, my brothers and sister are named “my brother†or “my sister.†I carve out huge, significant swathes of time when writing about my first depressive episode: my ex-wife and our divorce; my second, and current, wife who saved me [I said as much in my vows]; my playing with knives; taking my car up to 100 MPH on a highway to let things happen; the suicidal sides.
Every memoir I write is a lie. Not like you-know-who and such-and-such. I lie by omission; I lie by cowardice. Or discomfort. To write it right, I must summon up an exposure analogous to my personality: secretive, private, silent–see the connection?
My Twitter friend said, “Maybe you’re better served writing fiction.â€
This bothers me a great deal. It fucking pisses me off.
***
But I’m not mad at my Twitter friend. Her conclusion is logical, sound. I don’t want to be that kind of fiction writer, though. I don’t want to write a short story and play coy, let a wry smile roll from corner to corner of my mouth–Grinch-style–and wave off the questions. “Nah, it’s not autobiographical†although it is to some degree.
It’s easier to create an asshole protagonist versus writing a memoir about my father versus telling my father, “Sometimes? You’re an asshole.†It’s easier to lie and lie and lie–play coward in memoir or play passive aggressive punk in fiction–than to tell the truth. The whole truth. All of that shit.
I wish I had the balls to willfully lie in a memoir–to say I attempted suicide versus contemplating it like a riddle. I toe the line, though. I’ll write about my father’s pistol and a night when I was home alone; I’ll write about finding the muted gray gun on the top shelf of his closet, about where he hid the plastic box of bullets; I’ll write about holding a bullet in one hand, the gun in the other.
But I stop there, digging into the scene and looking for value. I stop short. I held two equal parts of suicide’s sum, but I was too scared to bring them together. I feared Hell. I feared the unknowability of Heaven. I feared the end of life. I thought it silly to take my life because I was lonely, because my family fell apart, because a half Black/half Puerto Rican girl with the fat ass pretended like she didn’t love me–Evelyn–so I put the gun back, I climbed into the bed, I played music in my headphones and cried myself to sleep.
I try to show insight without tears; I try to show growth without pain and the precipice of madness; I try to show wisdom in the absence of vulnerability. My memoirs ring false.
***
My disease is a real-life secret, discussed publicly online because I’m attempting to connect. Everything I do online–ever since I signed on in 1997–is about connection. So far, with respect to depression, I haven’t achieved the connection. I’m a half-assed advocate. People need the details, the puzzle pieces to hold up and compare with their own problems.
It’s those details I struggle to share. It’s the vulnerability I won’t express. I coat my words–memoirs, blogs, tweets–with a steely ambivalence. I’m often in pain–most times emotional, sometimes physical–and connection assumes an exchange. I want to help people, depressed or otherwise, get through whatever shit that ails them. I don’t even know why. It’s a calling I discovered when I first started writing at age seventeen. But I’m trying to have it one way.
Maybe help is the wrong word. Here, from my landing pad in South Jersey, stuck in ennui surrounded by flea markets and farmland, I send out communiques to strangers. I try to reach across land masses and bodies of water to let you know I know–you know?–but it’s a one way affair. I won’t show the messy parts of me. I think the messy parts are worthless.
***
What’s messy is love. It arrives in the most inopportune times, but love–the true variant, the one which commits strangulation until submission–cannot be ignored. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Not really.
I could’ve told her, “Hold up. Let me finalize things with my wife first.†That was the responsible thing, the by-the-script method. My wife and I were in shambles; my first major depressive episode arose out of a single thought: I don’t want this life. I told her days before my 25th birthday, “I want a divorce.†She slapped me. I almost punched her–fist cocked, instincts alarmed–but I chilled and let the shock rumble through my left cheek.
Love made things worse. I met the love of my life while still married. Though we were friends for ten years, seeing the love of your life is a religious experience. My ex-wife said, “You’re going to Hell.†Maybe. I broke away from fissured vows; we weren’t going to make it, but some suggest when a marriage erodes, you stick it out to the end. These people aren’t married or remain trapped in shitty relationships, too scared and weak to break free. That’s a messy part of me–wanton anger and self-righteousness.
***
I thought about my Twitter friend’s assertion–sharing my depressive experiences for all the black men out there. I thought to myself, “But I can’t even admit to leaving my wife.â€
Memoir requires truth. Not just facts, but the messy parts, too. I write around the blood, the viscera, and I’m left with a bunch of words. Empty words. Lies.
@thomasdemary. @thomas demary.
Pryor’s entire stand up career can be looked at as a depression memoir. Sometimes the indirect method is best.
There’s so much about myself I’m not ready to admit. How the monsters in my past my have created a monster in me. How I’m afraid of anger, refuse to feel it thoroughly. I write non-fiction as deceptively as possible. I’d like to change that.
@ Rion…I agree. When I went to bed last night, I thought about the memoir “The Chronology of Water”. Lidia Yuknavitch alludes to sexual abuse as a child by her father, but she never explores it in depth. I think the indirect method worked here.
@ Ashley Same here. Writing this column was difficult in the sense that 1.) I couldn’t stop shaking as I wrote it and 2.) I posted it as soon as I finished, knowing if I sat on it, I’d chicken out and keep it to myself. There are many things I’d rather not admit–at all lol.
When I write about being suicidal as a teenager and young adult, I just never go far enough, as if the suicidal mindset was enough. It felt exploitative to myself; I felt no better than James Frey, highlighting or embellishing on a specific event. Wanting to take my own life was monstrous, but I chose life. I keep choosing life. That’s the part of my monster I want to show and mine.
Write your truth. The details of your life and struggle are unique and special. Forget the audience.
I’m working on it, Christine. That damn audience is hard to forget lol
I’ve wrestled with so much of this. Am wrestling. But Christine is completely right. Just go to your truth and express it however you want, and stop beating yourself up about how it won’t be good enough. It will be.
Thanks Lou. Admittedly, a part of it is being too hard on myself. Most of it, however, is being evasive in the work. And not out of an artistic decision, but because I don’t want to “go there” or expose certain truths.
…I’ll just shut up and thank you thank you thank you for reading
Sometimes it works for me to promise myself that nobody will ever read what I’m writing. Like I’m writing a diary. And then I go back later and look at it and try to pull out the pieces that maybe I could kinda sorta let out into the wild.
Cranking the motorcycle throttle wide open to see what will happen, and then thinking about letting go with both hands, just to see what will happen…been there.
Excellent analogy, Ray re: the motorcycle.
I have a lot of “diary writings” stashed on my hard drive(s)…and in them, I’m quite revealing of myself and others. I write them purely for catharsis, but you might be onto something…going back and carving things out with a scalpel.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Hope you enjoyed the piece.
Hi Shirley and Marla,First, I’m so happy Marla helped me with my Query and that she will be seaikpng at the Southern California Writers Association in October. My first thought was, Another story about childhood abuse. The reason I say that is because I have finally realized why my memoir has been rejected. I took the angle of my defiant teenager, and there are tons of books out about problem teenagers, and other subjects like autism, cancer survivors, divorce, etc. It has taken me 3 years to listen to a past Gotham Writers Memoir teacher, and agents, that what is unique about my memoir is not how my family got to Belize, but the fact that we did it. Therefore all the chapters about my defiant teenager aren’t as important as the fact that we uprooted our three kids and moved to experience adventure in Belize, and changed because of that.