In Whip Smart, Febos unflinchingly chronicles five years in her early twenties when she was a dominatrix and heroin user. But the book is about so much more than those details. It’s about living a lie—sometimes many lies at once. It’s about lying to yourself. And it’s about discovering truths about yourself in places you never expected.

I’m always interested in how writers’ parents react to secrets revealed in their memoirs—especially when, like me, the writers project fairly clean images to their parents. As far as Febos’s parents knew, her focus those years was on her studies as a creative writing major at the New School, and then at Sarah Lawrence. They knew nothing of her work at the dungeon, nor her drug addiction, until toward the end of the book, when she tells them.

Over dinner, we got to talk about her parents’ reactions to the book—which goes into much greater detail about her work and her drug use than she had when she revealed those things to her parents in person—and much more.

***

The Rumpus:  It might sound cliché or fawning to say that I loved your book, but what I want to convey is that I loved not only the story but also the writing.

Melissa Febos: Thank you!

Rumpus: A memoir like about your years as a dominatrix, in someone else’s hands, might be one of those where you have to trudge laboriously through the exposition until you get to the exciting or tawdry parts. But your writing is so beautiful. I was studying it, going back and back over it. The sentence construction is so great.

Febos: Oh, thank you. I’m sure we’d be hard up to think of a writer who wouldn’t love to hear that, but I like to think that I particularly like to hear that because of the sort of sensational content of it, which could so overshadow the actual writing. Which is not to say that I think it’s genius or anything, but nobody ever talks to me about my writing. They always just talk to me about my spanking.

Rumpus: You studied creative writing undergrad at the New School and then you got an MFA at Sarah Lawrence. Did you know while you were studying that the first book you would publish would be a memoir?

Febos: Oh, my god, no! The thought never crossed my little, drug-addled mind.

Rumpus: What were you thinking it would be that you would publish?

Febos: I started off calling myself a writer when I was five. The hubris started very early. Novels were my bibles. I’m not sure I knew what memoir was, although I probably read some memoirs as a little girl. It’s just that they were indistinguishable to me at that point. Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn’t really have anything to write about, or I didn’t know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural. When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, “Novels,” and she said, “You should be writing them then.” Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

Rumpus: Yeah, being seen. I’m as conflicted about that as I am about writing about other people.

Febos: When I was in graduate school for fiction it didn’t occur to me to write memoir until I was doing it.

Rumpus: A lot of people, especially with material that’s dicey, go with autobiographical fiction. It gives you a veil. Did it ever occur to you to go that route?

Febos: It did. I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true.  It didn’t sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That’s sort of the reason I write everything. That subject matter is so knotted that I think the veil of fiction that would have protected me from the public also would have obscured what I was trying to get a closer look it. It was hard enough. I already couldn’t see my subject matter clearly, and to further obscure it and give myself that freedom—I’m a hustler, the book is largely about that—if I give myself that trap door to avoid my own experience, I’ll take it every time. I had to pen myself in so that I could really just wrangle the subject matter in a way that was honest.

Rumpus: So you did consider a pseudonym.

Febos: I did. The other reason I didn’t want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone. I’m always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way. You know what I mean?

Rumpus: A few writers I know are very against mining their life for material as they are going along. I personally feel like I was sent here by aliens to get it all down, so I am taking mental notes through everything. As you were going about your life as a dominatrix and later attending twelve-step meetings, did it ever occur to you, This would be great material. I’m going to write about this?

Febos: Honestly, no. I don’t think people believe me when I say that sometimes. I understand that, but part of it is dissociation. Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people’s asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn’t have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it. I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I’ve been a writer since I was five. You don’t have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it’s kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.

Rumpus: I remember you writing in the book that you kept a journal.

Febos: Yeah. I saved letters from my boss. There are things in there that are directly transcribed. I was so glad I did that. Sometimes when I was writing the book I wondered if some little writer hobbit part of my brain was back there puppeteering that action. But it really never, on any conscious level, occurred to me that I would write about it. I will say, I thought probably some day there would be an ancillary character in some novel—not in the one I was currently writing—that would be a dominatrix or something.

Rumpus: So you were working on a novel.

Febos: Yeah, I was working on novels as an undergrad.

Rumpus: My number one obstacle is the fear of upsetting and offending my parents by revealing things about me they’d rather not know, or by revealing things about them, my father in particular. I get the sense in the book that your father wasn’t too affected by your admission about what you’d been up to, at the dungeon and with drugs. How did he react to the book?

Febos: My dad had a very hard time with the book in completely unexpected ways. And then I wrote about him having a hard time.

Rumpus: Where’d you write about it?

Febos: I actually wrote about it for Sarah Lawrence Magazine. It was a small venue, so I could choose not to show it to him if I didn’t want to. I ended up showing it to him and it was really meaningful. It’s funny, because he had this incredibly difficult time with the book and then we sort of moved beyond it but not completely, and then I actually set about wanting to very consciously make it up to him. I’m going to write a really nice essay about my dad, I thought. Then of course that didn’t happen. Instead I just told the truth of what was happening in our relationship, which was not at all what I had set out to do.

Rumpus: Oh, I so related to that desire to just write something that flatters your parents, and pleases them. I have that fantasy all the time. For about five minutes. So, you couldn’t fake it.

Febos: I guess the writer in me has more clout than the daughter in me. It wins every fucking time.

Rumpus: I need to choose between being a writer and a daughter. I know that I’m eventually going to be the writer and not the daughter. I’m hoping that I won’t get disowned or I won’t my father’s heart.

Febos: Wow. You probably don’t want more advice.

Rumpus: No, I do!

Febos: Cheryl gave you great advice. I would echo what she said to you: you don’t know how people are going to respond. But I would add to that, that getting your heart broken is not the worst thing and it’s actually quite unavoidable. I think in some ways I had to break my father’s heart and then face that in order to have a real relationship with him.

Rumpus: Right. I don’t have a real relationship with my dad.

Febos: No, and I didn’t either before I published this book. We were okay, meaning I placated him and then resented him for not really knowing me for twenty years. And he resented me and took personally my sluttiness in junior high school. Our relationship was us talking about movies on the surface, and these sort of seething wounds underneath the surface that motored our decisions. When the book came out, it was OUT. I didn’t write about our relationship directly, but I revealed things, I didn’t lie and I didn’t placate him with the narrative.

Rumpus: What about your mother? I love the scene where you try to present your work as a dominatrix to her in psychological terms, because she’s a therapist.

Febos: Yeah, I presented it as, like, this feminist, sociology experiment.

Rumpus: Right, and also as therapy. In the book, she and your dad don’t really react in a big way when you tell them these things. Is that how it really happened? Or was it a choice, to keep your parents’ roles small? And if so, was that to protect them, or because it woudn’t have moved the story forward in an important way?

Febos: You mean why I didn’t include more of how it affected my relationship with them?

Rumpus: Yeah.

Febos: Honestly, I included in the book most of our interactions around the subject, because we avoided it like crazy. I did not talk to them about it. That was it. I think what more I could have said in regard to how it affected our relationships would have come in the form of analysis of their reaction. I didn’t want to do that—to protect them, but also because I don’t think I needed to. I think it was also because that story wasn’t over yet. Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I’d never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

Rumpus: Did they know that you had this book deal?

Febos: Oh yeah, they knew about the whole thing all along.

Rumpus: You reveal a lot more in the book than you had revealed to them when you talked to them. How did they react to the galleys?

Febos: My mother called me at 7am the morning after I had given it to her. I was walking the dog and I was like, “Why are you calling me? You’re not supposed to call me until you finish the book.” Oh, let me preface this by saying that when I gave her the book, I said, “Look Mom, fair warnings, there’s material in here that you don’t already know about that is going to be painful for you to read,” and she said, “Tell me what it is before I read it.” I said, “No, I wrote a book because I couldn’t say it out loud.” Then she insisted,“You have to tell me. I don’t want to be cringing the whole time I’m reading it.” And I thought, Okay. And I said very little but enough that she knew. I said, “The drug use is a lot worse than anything I’ve ever told you about, and there’s some really intense sexual material of me doing submissive sex.” In the end I was grateful to her for that because then it wasn’t the first time we talked about it after she read the book. I wasn’t cringing. She read it in one night.

So she called me the next morning and said, “I stayed up all night reading it. I haven’t slept.” And I said, “Are you sure you don’t want to just wait and talk to me after you’ve processed it a little bit?” But of course she didn’t. I get a little teary sometimes when I talk about this, but she said, “I kept closing the book and turning off the light, and then I had to turn it back on because I needed to know that you were okay.” I said, “I’m okay, I’m right here!” And she said, “I know but the ‘you’ in the book,” which was really sort of raw for me to hear because there is so much that I experienced for the first time through the process of writing the book, because I was so dissociated the whole time.

I think that conversation highlighted the desolation that I experienced. No one had known. That was really painful for a lot people in my life, to know what had been going on when I was in regular contact with them and they had no idea. Then my mom started crying on the phone, and I asked, “What do you think?” And she said, “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever read in my life. I think it’s a masterpiece and I’m so proud of you,” which is amazing; the testament. She’s an amazing woman. We had other awkward conversations about it but—she’s a pretty great lady. My dad was not as easy.

Rumpus: Yeah, what was your dad’s reaction?

Febos: I tried to warn him and he scoffed at me and was insulted that I thought he needed a warning. His line is always, and I think I quoted him saying this in the book, but again he was like, “I’m the cool parent. Of course I can handle it.” I sent him the book and then I didn’t hear from him for like a month. I talked to my mom and I said, “What’s going on?” and she was like, “You should give him some space.”

Rumpus: Are they together? No? They’re friends?

Febos: They’re friends. It was kind of obvious to assume that it was the drugs and the sex that upset him. I wrote about a lot of things that no parent honestly should ever have to read about their kid. If I could have given them an abridged version, I really would have, but they’re not those kinds of parents.

Rumpus: I fortunately don’t have anything even vaguely along those lines to write about; it’s just about my perceptions of things, which are different from those of my parents, and those of a lot of other people in the world I grew up in. Oh, and cheating on my first husband.

Febos: It’s largely the same material I think. Actually, in terms of what mattered to my parents, it wasn’t the drugs or the sex for either of them. More for my mother, but that wasn’t it at all it turned out with my father. It was much more about him. He was so profoundly hurt by my portrayal of him which came as a surprise to me because I commented not at all; he’s barely in it, which he may have also found insulting.

Stephen said something really smart to me over the summer while we were talking about this phenomenon as a writer: he said that even when people tell you “write about whatever you want,” they are never saying “write about the parts of me that I don’t know about.” I think that’s what happened with my dad. He had one narrative in his mind about our relationship during that time, and his role in my life; I didn’t write any judgments of him but I just presented my own experience of it and it conflicted pretty dramatically with his version. I think he felt like I had stolen his memories and revised them. I sort of ruined those memories for him and he had thought that we had this really candid, close, easy, intimate relationship, and I basically shat all over it and said, “You didn’t know anything.” I was writing this story of how I tailored a version of my experience for other people to protect them and to hide behind and then sort of the devastating loneliness of that kind of hiding. What he heard was, “You didn’t see me.”

Rumpus: When you were writing, were you ever thinking, Oh shit, my parents are going to read this? And if you did, did it ever stop you?

Febos: No. It didn’t stop me and I think for a couple of reasons. I mean, one—and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, because I feel like it makes me sound like an arrogant asshole—but I really think that early on in life, I made a decision to let the writer win, you know?

Rumpus: That’s amazing.

Febos: And to always pick that. I don’t know, it’s funny because there are so many ways in life—and I think it’s true of a lot of writers and certainly true of a lot of women—that we just put ourselves last in line for the things that we want. And I do that in many other ways. I don’t attend tenderly to any of my needs, but I do pick writing over other people, over my hygiene, over dinner. I just made that decision early on and have managed to stick with it. Knock on wood.

So that is one thing. But I think that more so, my wonderful skill of dissociation came in very handy. I care very much what other people think. I’m a total pleaser. I want everyone to like me all the time. I feel like people who don’t feel that way on some level are lying, but particularly female memoirists. We want to be seen and we want to be forgiven. So that occurred to me very early on. I didn’t know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book—that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I’m glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.

I couldn’t have articulated this process at the time; I just sort of did it instinctually. But now when I talk about this with my students all the time, it’s one of the first things I address in memoir classes—that you have to put it all in because you’re writing your way into the ending of your own story. Even if you think you know what the story is, you don’t until you write it. If you start leaving things out you could leave out vital organs and not know it.

Rumpus: One of the things Nick Flynn said, actually on stage here, was, “You have to get it out and get it on paper before you can know if you need it. Wrestling with it in your brain is not useful.”

Febos: I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That’s why I’m a writer. It’s the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything. Another thing that I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you’re ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don’t have to show it to anybody. That’s what I did. I wrote this story. I put everything in and I looked at it and saw what the story was. It was so vastly different from the story I had thought I was writing. Thank god. It was a much better story: interesting, painful, humiliating. Then what I did was I put my mom-goggles on, and I looked at it and said, “Okay, how much is this going to hurt?” and I took out everything that wasn’t necessary that was going to hurt. I did that for everyone, especially the people who I still have relationships with. I measured the potential pain versus its function in the story, and I took it out. I took a lot out. It may not seem like I censored it very much, but I took a lot out that I thought would hurt people that was just being clever or just adorning it, or anything that wasn’t really essential that would hurt people.

Rumpus: In terms of your parents what were you more afraid of them reading about, the dominatrix stuff or the addiction stuff?

Febos: I think the addiction stuff, because I was already sort of outed in my family as a sexual person: as a sexually-adventurous and sexually-conflicted person and sexually-driven person. They already knew that about me. They knew that about me when I was eleven. My parents very consciously tried to provide an environment that would protect me from becoming a drug addict. My father was raised by a violent alcoholic. There was alcoholism in my mother’s family.  I’m half-adopted, and my birth father was a drug addict and alcoholic. So, I think they very consciously made decisions and parented me in a way that was aimed to help save me from that. So, I knew it would be particularly painful and it was, especially for my father.

Rumpus: What’s interesting to me is in a lot of places in the book you say to people that you are not doing sex work, and then there are scenes where there are men getting jerked off. Then there’s a scene where for $1,500 you’re fisting someone’s girlfriend. I’m thinking, Kind of seems like sex work… I wondered if you needed to tell yourself it wasn’t? How do you see it now?

Febos: Oh god. It was absolutely sex work. I knew it then. I know it now. I knew it when I was writing the book. I remember when I was thirteen, I had this excruciating interaction with my mother that really was a precursor to every conversation I depicted in the memoir, where I got into her car—and I’m sure that supposedly I had been hanging out with a friend of mine when really I’d been getting finger-banged behind the mall—but I got in the car and my mother, without looking at me, said, “You smell like sex,” and I said, “I’ve never had sex.” She said, “Don’t kid yourself; you don’t have to have intercourse to be having sex.” I’ve never forgotten that interaction.

I do think that was a narrative trick that I made with writing. The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in—or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things. I made a conscious decision when I was writing that book to depict in real time how I treated it, and how I thought about it, and how I portrayed it to other people, because I wanted the story to be one of change from that to a more honest appraisal, a more accepting appraisal of myself and other people in that world. But I knew, and this turned out to be true, that when people read it, it was going to be very easy for them to think, She’s kidding herself! Look at this cocky little bitch! Because I was, or at least that was the pageantry of it. That I had a really good argument or a spin or I thought I did. But it was largely bullshit. It was for me.

Rumpus: So, do you ever miss the dungeon or any of that?

Febos: No. I mean it’s been a long time now. I missed it for a while. It was very hard to leave. It was a tremendous relief to leave, and I missed it. I think partly it was like flying any nest. You have to separate in a radical way in order to leave. Early on I really cut myself off from that world. Even sexually—those practices—I really just drew a hard line because I had to in order to leave the parts of it I needed to leave. I missed it a lot because I had separated myself from some things that were authentically connected to me and part of my personality. I ended up circling back around to some of that and acknowledging them in a more balanced way. But I dream about it a lot. I dream about it not as much as I dream about shooting heroin, but in a similar way, like really heavy-handed symbols.

Rumpus: Do you think it is going to appear in future work?

Febos: Not for a long time. I said most of what I have to say about it in the book, and then in subsequent discussions of the book, and in discussions about Fifty Shades of Grey, which then restarted the whole conversation. I’m sure my perspective on it will change, but I need more time to get to a new perspective. I just have other things I want to write about.

Related Posts:

• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #13: Cheryl Strayed
• Process Talk
• The Rumpus Interview with Susie Deford
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #9: Elisa Albert

***

A frequent foil to my good girl image was a friend I’ll call Lilith—after the biblical Adam’s first wife, allegedly demonic in comparison to virtuous-until-the-fall Eve—or “Lily,” for short. (She’d kick my ass if I used her real name.)

Lily once said to me, “Break some rules or something, will you? You’re making me look bad.”

***

Lily didn’t keep it to herself when she had an abortion in her twenties. She knew she’d be shamed for it, but she didn’t seem to give a shit, or if she did, she wasn’t letting on. She needed someone to go with her, or at least someone to bring her home from the hospital so she could be released, so she spoke up and said, “I’m pregnant. I need an abortion. Who’s taking me?” She was on her parents’ insurance still, so they were bound to find out anyway.

Sure enough, afterward, some in her family who knew about it wagged their fingers at her. Lily hung tough; she barked back at them. “Fuck you,” she said. But I could tell it bothered her.

Cut to ten or so years later. In my thirties, I have had two abortions, six years apart. I tell no one, not even Lily, leaving her alone to flap in the breeze of her family’s vilification. I perpetuate the shame—hers, mine, and that of every woman who has ever chosen to terminate an unwelcome pregnancy—with my silence.

For years I told myself I’d withheld that information because it wasn’t anybody’s business, and maybe it wasn’t.

Later I told myself it was because the topic of abortion was unpleasant and difficult, and nobody wants to talk about it. That’s my husband’s take on it too. He was party to an abortion when he was forty, and although he is very glad it got him out of co-parenting with someone he didn’t want in his life any longer, he remains deeply conflicted about having gone through with it. Even to the staunchest of pro-choicers, the reality of abortion, the termination of something—someone?—that had gotten a start, is unfortunate and sad. It’s still so, so crucial to have as an option. It is an option my husband would choose again under the same circumstances, and one I would also choose again. But it is never a happy option, even when it provides great relief.

Whatever my reasons, I’m now of the opinion that I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by keeping quiet. Not Lily. Not the friends who wanted to talk about abortions—the abortions they’d just had, the ones they were agonizing over whether to have. Every time I acted as if I’d had no experience with pregnancy termination myself, I helped perpetuate the stigma, not to mention fear. I missed an opportunity, each time, to help another woman come to terms with that choice—and maybe even make that choice. I withheld information that could have informed someone, or at least comforted her and maybe kept her from feeling alone and like a “bad” girl for something that surely didn’t make her bad.

***

Recently, a nonprofit monologue writing workshop I co-run (tmiproject.org) held a weekend retreat for women. The participants ranged in age from nineteen to seventy-seven. At some point in the weekend, the topic of unplanned pregnancy came up, and nearly every one of the eleven participants had a story. One, against her parents’ wishes, kept a child she’d conceived at sixteen. Many had had legal abortion. The four oldest women confessed to having had illegal abortions in the sixties and early seventies, when those were the only option. One woman in another of our workshops talked about having to postpone her 1973 post–Roe v. Wade abortion after the provider was shot dead in front of the clinic.

It was a discussion that everyone wanted to contribute to, and which inspired those who were still keeping secrets about their own unplanned pregnancies to finally divulge them. The women who’d had illegal abortions shared their stories for the first times in their lives, and were relieved to learn they hadn’t been alone. They were so relieved that they cried and hugged.

The youngest participants had their minds blown. Most notably, one girl, a college junior, said the discussion opened her view on abortion, and the people who had them. “This is really changing my mind,” she said. “I never knew anyone before who’d had an abortion, and I had always had a dim view of people who did.”

Whoa.

Hearing her, I realized a crucial—maybe the most important—reason for talking openly about abortion: young women, first-time voters, need to know real women who’ve had abortions. They need to hear from women who’ve had to have them illegally, so they will be more likely to vote for candidates who won’t send us back to those dark ages, when that was the only way.

Finally, I opened up to the group about my abortions. The retreat was one of the first places I ever did. It was a relief to be a real girl instead of a “good” one, to be like the other women.

***

Alleged “good” girls, like the kind I used to be, are the worst. We are complicit in upholding ridiculous, unrealistic standards to which others ultimately are held. We stand by, pretending to possess neither needs nor unflattering emotions, all the while hanging realer sisters out to dry. We allow them to be vilified for asking for what they rightfully deserve, speaking out when they disagree, daring to take chances, making messy real-life mistakes—including ones that lead to abortion.

And often, we “good” girls are totally full of shit, secretly doing the things the other girls are doing, but never owning up to it. Having abortions of our own, for instance. Before that, acting like the purest of virgins a year into college, when we’ve in fact been sexually active since sixteen.

Imagine the look on my father’s face when he inadvertently learned that I, the perfect daughter, had a diaphragm. (Remember diaphragms?) He and his wife had driven me to a pre-op screening session at Albany Medical Center, near where I attended college, in preparation for a laparoscopy I was about to have. The doctor suspected I had endometriosis.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I might not want my father present in the room when a nurse performed a pre-op interview. I was so convinced of my own shining example, I forgot I had something to hide.

“Have you ever used barrier contraceptives?” the nurse asked.

My father and I seemed simultaneously to stop breathing. I could have lied, but maybe my answer had some important bearing on a decision the doctor might make regarding my surgery. I could try and tell the nurse the truth later, but would there be a later? Would I get that chance? Maybe not.

“Yes,” I answered. My father’s face blanched. His effort to conceal his upset only magnified it. He would never be able to un-hear this. Just breathe, I told myself.

“What kind of barrier contraceptives have you used?” This lady wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

Was I really going to acknowledge in front of my dad that I owned and operated a diaphragm? A diaphragm represented a much greater threat to a late-teen’s father—a man desperate not to have further shattered the illusion of his daughter’s innocence and virtue—than, say, condoms. Condoms take comparatively little thought. They represent impulse. “Okay,” my father might have been able to delude himself if my answer was condoms, “she’s tried sex. But maybe she won’t ever do it again—at least not until she is married to a nice, Jewish man.”

A diaphragm, on the other hand, represented a premeditated and significant investment of one’s babysitting money and a fitting by a doctor—a commitment to future sex.

The truth was, I had a diaphragm before I even had my period, which I didn’t get until I was eighteen. Come to think of it, that was kind of a responsible, good-girl move—making sure my first boyfriend took me to Planned Parenthood for reliable protection. I thank Whoever Is In Charge of the Universe that Planned Parenthood was there for me, because there was no way I’d go to my pediatrician, who’d probably tell my parents, and I didn’t yet have a gyno. At Planned Parenthood, I was able to get protection, no questions asked, confidentially, for very little money.

But I doubt my father saw my choice as a “good” girl move that day. Witnessing his reaction to what really shouldn’t have been too surprising for a normal nineteen-year-old made me even more reluctant to reveal certain truths about myself in the future.

***

That laparoscopy confirmed endometriosis and led me, inadvertently, to my first abortion.

In the years after that operation, I saw many doctors, in New York City, on Long Island, in New Jersey. One told me the endometriosis, combined with the pituitary micro-adenoma I’d developed, would prevent me from ever being able to get pregnant. I’d been divorced from my first husband for a few years when the doctor told me that. Single at the time, I didn’t give much thought to the implication that I’d never be a mother. Instead, I saw my condition as painful but convenient birth control.

A couple of months into dating someone, once our standard-issue New Relationship HIV tests came back negative, we ditched the condoms.

Oops.

When we were sure I was pregnant, there was no question in my mind what I’d do. Even though I was thirty, an age by which I’d once assumed I’d be a mom, I wasn’t feeling very much like a grownup. I made very little money, and lived hand-to-mouth in a tiny East Village hovel. For his part, my boyfriend wasn’t anyone’s idea of a beacon of emotional or financial stability. He was living off of me. We fought all the time, and I’d been waiting for him to save up enough money temping to move out of my tiny tenement. But he kept sabotaging opportunities for work and for apartment leases. He was not daddy material, and I was not mommy material. And I was too “nice” to kick him out.

I didn’t even entertain a moment’s thought of “I can do this on my own.” There was no thought necessary, or even possible; every cell in my body screamed, “GET THIS OUT OF ME.”

It’s not a feeling or thought I’m proud of. It doesn’t at all fit with my “good” girl image. I don’t enjoy the thought of myself as the kind of cretin who couldn’t love a newborn living thing she’d created, regardless of the rest of its parentage. I don’t relish the view of myself as someone lacking even a small vestige of a maternal instinct. But it turns out that’s who I am, and that was my first glimpse into that reality.

I felt strongly about my choice to abort, but I also felt guilty about it. I was deeply conflicted—this was a potential life—but not so conflicted that I’d consider for one minute not going through with it.

Easing my conscience a little was the doctor’s suspicion that the fetus wasn’t viable. Easing it more was the apparent miscarriage that began the day before my scheduled abortion: clotted crimson pouring out of me after a few sharp cramps. I called to ask the doctor whether that meant I could forego the D&C. Then I’d still be a “good” girl who hadn’t had abortion. But since I was at about the eight-week point, he said, the operation was still necessary.

***

In my book, you are only allowed one mistake pregnancy in which your own negligence and/or sheer stupidity play a role. Which is why I was deeply disappointed in myself, and even more ashamed, when I allowed a negligence/stupidity combo to lead me to a second one.

It was 2002, and it was with my 9/11 boyfriend, the guy I clung to after meeting him at a vigil, in Union Square Park following the terror attacks, when it seemed like the world was coming to an end. A guy who was really nice, but who was much younger than I was, not just chronologically speaking, and who lived in his van half the year. And who sort of didn’t know who the Beatles were. Seriously, his reference to the Beatles was, “Oh—I think my step-mother likes them.”

Somehow, in my oxytocin-addled, post–terror attack state of some kind of dementia, I decided it was safe to have unprotected period sex. Never mind that I still had an unbelievably irregular period, with intervals of six, eight, twelve, three weeks in between. I was hardly a candidate for anything vaguely resembling the rhythm method. But, well, you all know how much better sex feels when it’s unprotected—especially for the guy you, a “good” girl, are trying to please. And what’s the chance of fertilization, let alone implantation, when your uterus is violently wringing itself out to the point that you often find yourself doing Lamaze for hours at a time?

How I’d been able to have sex in that condition in the first place is beyond me. Ten years later—three years after a merciful hysterectomy—I have no idea how I did that.

Thanks to my supremely unpredictable cycle, I was eight weeks pregnant again before I figured it out. I didn’t think it was remotely possible. Then I had to get off the N train at 49th and 7th Avenue, halfway through my ride from my boyfriend’s place to mine, so I could puke into a garbage pail on the platform.

I was furious at myself when the faint line appeared in the window of the pee stick. My mind wanted to rely on the line’s weakness as evidence I’d registered a false positive. But my sore boobs knew better. They’d reached a level of soreness that I’d only experienced once before—the last time I’d been pregnant.

Again, there was no question I’d abort. That GET THIS OUT OF ME feeling was back. I called the same doctor who’d performed my D&C six years before and tearfully, shamefully pleaded with the receptionist, “I’m pregnant AND I NEED NOT TO BE.”

Again, my fucked-up plumbing conspired to help me feel a little bit less guilty about not only choosing to terminate but also feeling DESPERATE to do so, heartless, non-maternal alien that I seemed to be: the reason the pee-stick line was so faint, and the reason I’d been experiencing sharp pains in my lower right pelvis, was that this pregnancy was ectopic—specifically, lodged in my right fallopian tube, apparently common for women with endometriosis.

I had no choice, this time, but to abort, so I could feel a little less bad about it. I also didn’t have to have it done surgically this time; ectopic pregnancies are eradicated through chemical abortion.

The next day, at the doctor’s office, he injected me with the chemotherapy drug methytrexate, and then, using a speculum, inserted some ground-up ulcer medicine into my uterus. Only a few hours later, my body would begin to expel the embryo.

“It’ll be like bad period cramps,” the doctor explained. I wondered what that would mean for me, someone whose period cramps had always gone to eleven to begin with.

Still, I didn’t cancel dinner plans I had with my family at a restaurant in the East Village for the next evening. I didn’t want to tell them what was going on with me, that that night as we were dining, I was aborting the next generation, that I wasn’t the “good” girl they thought I was. I could have said I was having a bad period, but they knew that pretty much all my periods were bad, and that frequently I pushed myself through them to show up for work or other obligations. I couldn’t imagine canceling the plans, having them come up to my apartment before or after they all had dinner without me. My mother would get hyper-concerned and grill me about when was the last time I went to see the doctor about my endometriosis, and I didn’t want to lie to her, or raise any suspicion. So I went to dinner. Writhing in my seat, excusing myself to go to the bathroom often, I went through three super-maxi pads.

***

Recently, I had lunch with my mother in my hometown, where she still lives. Over seafood salads, we caught up and then moved on to talking about people in our lives. She said she’d just learned that a close friend’s daughter was unexpectedly—and unhappily—pregnant for the second time, but only by a few weeks.

“She’s terrified of having to have another abortion,” my mother said of her friend’s daughter, “and she’s afraid her insurance won’t cover the cost.”

I silently wrestled with myself as my mother told of this woman’s anguish. I wanted to tell my mother to tell her friend that, especially at such an early phase, her daughter could probably have a chemical abortion like I’d had the second time. It would probably be much more affordable, even if her insurance didn’t cover it. It would be less traumatic.

I wanted desperately to help put another woman at ease, and to let her know there were other possibilities, other choices. But if I spoke up about it, my mother would ask how I knew, and it would be difficult for me not to tell her it was because I’d had one. Telling the women at the writing retreat was one thing. Telling my mother was another entirely.

Finally, I came down from my high, high horse.

“You know, chemical abortion is an option these days, when it’s early on,” I said.

My mom looked at me with an expression that said, “How do you know?”

“I had one,” I admitted.

“You had an abortion?” she asked, clearly in disbelief. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” She seemed to feel betrayed.

“I just . . . couldn’t,” I said. “But I’m telling you now.”

There was a pause.

“I’ve actually had two,” I said.

She asked a few questions. Then it got quiet.

My mother looked sad. Not only had she been disillusioned about her “good” girl. She’d just learned that I had been able to get pregnant. I imagine that must have been hard for her. She’d wanted me to give her grandchildren. The surgeon who’d performed my hysterectomy assured me that the condition my uterus was in when he removed it—the combination of severe endometriosis and extreme adenomyosis—indicated I’d never have been able to carry a baby to term. That had helped me to make peace, at the time, with not really wanting to have kids. I was off the hook.

And I suppose the knowledge that I couldn’t have them helped my mother make peace with the lack of progeny coming from my very compromised womb, whether I wanted them or not. For her to learn I was capable of getting pregnant, even if I didn’t seem equipped for staying pregnant—it seemed to, in rapid succession, raise and dash some hope in her.

But then, a few minutes later, the topic shifted. We were done with the revelation that Sari, the “good” girl, had been no better than the alleged “bad” girls, and we were on to the ins and outs of chemical abortion.

“It’s really not so bad,” I said. “It’s kind of like a bad period.”

I was offering information that could put my mother’s friend’s daughter at ease, informing her of another option, in case she needed it. Instead of protecting my insidious “good” girl image, I was using the truth of my real, very human experience to help someone else. So what if that also meant my mother’s friend would know. And her daughter. And whomever else my mother chose to tell—my mom’s a bit of a yenta.

“By the way,” I added, “she probably won’t want to, like, go out for dinner the next night.”

I started to feel good—a different kind of good—relieved of a tremendous burden, and useful.

***

This essay is excerpted from Get Out of My Crotch: Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health, edited by Kim Wyatt and Sari Botton. 

Related Posts:

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• Get Out of My Crotch!
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• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
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Actually, this column was born out of a burning desire to get Stephen Elliott and Shalom Auslander together so they could indulge me in some kind of Talmudic debate over just how much editorial discretion and compassion to extend to parents with whom you have difficult relationships. (I remain determined to make this happen some day!)

Now there’s a competing desire: to gather a panel of three members of the hyper-literary Roiphe/Roth clan, and have them hash out before me the imperatives – and perils – of writing about family.

I’m referring specifically to: 1) Marco Roth, an N+1 founder and editor, and author of the excellent recently published memoir, The Scientists: A Family Romance; 2) Anne Roiphe, Roth’s aunt, and the author many books including the compelling family saga memoir 1185 Park Avenue; and 3) Emily Carter, Roiphe’s eldest daughter (one of Carter’s sisters is cultural critic Katie Roiphe), and the author of the wonderful, largely autobiographical story collection, Glory Goes and Gets Some.

Over the course of the past year, I confess, I’ve become utterly fascinated with this family and the way they handle writing about blood relatives, including one another. Disagreements naturally arise over conflicting accounts of events. Feelings inevitably get hurt. In the past, at least one person got disowned. But in the present, for the most part, despite the assorted conflicts and bruises, they all seem supportive of each other’s right to their version of the truth. And they still gather for holidays, public readings and other occasions.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of the ways in which their stories have intersected: When Anne Roiphe was disowned in the 1960s or 1970s for writing autobiographical novels that upset her father and other relatives, she probably didn’t anticipate her own child later writing autobiographical fiction that would upset her. Then, in 2000, Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some – initially labeled a memoir by its first publisher – portrayed a very Roiphe-like character as a bourgeois, controlling Jewish mother, and caused a short-lived rift between Roiphe and Carter. Soon, though, mother forgave daughter, and said she respected her right to write whatever, and however, she wanted.

That same year, Roiphe revealed in her memoir, 1185 Park Avenue that there was evidence to suggest her brother Eugene – Marco Roth’s father – may have been secretly gay or bisexual, and contracted the AIDS that eventually killed him not in the way he insisted – via an accident with a contaminated needle in the blood lab where he worked as a hematologist – but “in the more usual way.” This revelation, never otherwise communicated to Roth before a galley of his aunt’s memoir landed on his Brooklyn doorstep, blindsided him, and ultimately led him to try and set the record straight with a memoir of his own.

The Scientists, Roth’s resulting smart, sometimes poignantly funny memoir, turned out quite different from the revenge screed he’d initially imagined. The book recounts the many years he spent trying to make sense of his father’s motivations, and to determine whether he led a secret other life. He grills his mother. He speaks to his father’s closest colleagues. After those efforts turn up little conclusive evidence, Roth, while pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature, turns to books – the ones his scholarly esthete father introduced him to – for clues. In the end, (spoiler alert) Roth’s mother – who’d objected to her son writing the memoir, but has made peace with it – comes clean about having known her husband had been sexually involved with men.

Whew.

I recently got to chat with Roth about all this at a café in Chelsea. (Incidentally, he is the second member of my dream panel with whom I’ve spoken. Last year, I sat down with his cousin, Carter, for this column.)

***

The Rumpus: I feel like I really want to get you, Emily and Anne in a room and just talk about writing about family, because it’s something I’m forever struggling with, and it’s also something you all have dealt with from different angles. I mean, first you have Anne getting disowned by her father and various other family members. That’s compelling to me because I have this father who has been sort of silently, obliquely threatening to disown me my entire life. He has a history of disowning family members, like his father and his sister. Bear in mind, though, that disownership in my family doesn’t mean what it does in yours, because we really don’t have any money. It’s more like…

Marco Roth: Like people not talking to you?

Rumpus: Yes, it’s like a torn lapel—“I have no daughter…”

Roth: “You’re dead to me…”

Rumpus: Exactly. Perpetual shiva. The underlying threat is: Do the wrong thing and you can get cut off. You also nearly got disowned by your father at one point, for initially choosing to attend Oberlin instead of Columbia. Which was kind of ironic, in light of your parents giving you Free To Be…You and Me. I had that record, too, and got the same mixed message of “Be whatever you want! No! Do what I want you to do, or you’ll get disowned!”

Roth: Aha, so you also lived with that paradox.

Rumpus: Yes! I have a feeling a lot of other kids did, too. Then Emily wrote a not entirely flattering character very much like her mother in Glory Goes and Gets Some, but then Anne forgave her, acknowledging that this is what writers do. Next, you have an issue with Anne writing about your father in the way that she did – and not warning you. But then you go and write about a lot of stuff about Anne.

Roth: Right.

Rumpus: How did you reconcile that?

Roth: I think by the moment that I was writing, there was a record of family writing about family. I understood that nobody could really have the expectation of remaining hidden on that side, on the writers’ side of my family. For my mother it was a different story.

For writing about Anne, I felt that the only thing that I could do as a writer was try to be as fair as I knew how, to her and what she was going through, or what I thought she was going through. I had real ambivalence in that I loved her a lot, I still do. She’s been important as an influence in my development as a writer, and my development as a person. Her late husband was great to me in lots of ways. In the book, I wanted to conjure as much of that ambivalence as possible. I had the sense that it’s not always the case that two betrayals make a right. But I didn’t feel that I was betraying anything in her case. She knew what I thought about her memoir. I had said to her, “I wished you had written something more like Henry James.” I think her response to my book has been very heartening for me, because in some ways she feels vindicated. I guess I would have preferred for her first memoir that she had at least talked to me first. Or, not written the book.

Rumpus: Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

Roth: My wife said this funny thing: “Now I understand that in your family you have to write a book in order to be taken seriously as a human being.” And that is sad, and true. And we probably could do a better job as a family not having to write books in order to consider each other as human beings.

Rumpus: Everyone seems to need to publicly tell their version of things. It’s not enough to talk to each other. Although it’s probably because it wasn’t easy to talk to each other. I relate to that – I sometimes feel like I need to tell my story to the world because I’m not really being heard by the other people in the story.

Roth: Yeah, there was such a weight of oppression and such a code of what you could and couldn’t talk about, especially between my father and Anne. There were so many taboo topics that could lead to explosions and you just didn’t know what they were going to be. They would have a period of détente, but then my father would read one of her books that she was working on and correct a factual error – she would get some science term wrong – and this would bring up every instance of their sibling rivalry where she was feeling that he had lorded over her, even though he was the younger brother. And he would feel that she was always luring him in and then trapping him into doing something that would betray himself. It became clear to me only after I finished the book that they really suffered a lot together, and they had an alliance that was flawed from the beginning because there just wasn’t enough love in the family to go around, and they were fighting over the little scraps that were thrown from the table. But they also got each other through it. And to listen to Anne talk about my father after I published my book, I understood a side of their relationship – that she still has these conversations with him even though he’s dead. So for her that loss is really extreme and she had to deal with it in some way. And the way that she knows how to deal with that is by writing. And writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don’t have religious consolation available. Therapy will only take you so far.

Rumpus: So after writing and publishing your book, do you have a different feeling about Anne having written 1185 Park Avenue?

Roth: What bothered me about 1185 Park Avenue was the way that it functioned as an event in my life and my family life—and I write about this. It wasn’t just a book. I felt that I was somehow required to act. I felt that I was this mediating figure between my aunt’s side of the family and my father’s side of the family. I kind of romantically cast myself as the go-between at a certain point.  And my mom somehow completely internalized my father’s will to privacy, but also his off-the-cuff critiques of Anne’s writing. So I felt like my mother was just kind of becoming my father when Anne’s book came out. I was like, Somebody has to take a more reasoned approach to this. Also, I was like, Well actually nobody in this situation is really thinking about me. And I wondered, Do they even know who I am? Do they imagine that I couldn’t handle the news that my father might have been bisexual?  That I somehow needed to find out about in this indirect way?  Did they think I was gay?

There was so much tiptoeing around me at the same time that all this stuff was happening very publicly, that I just thought, Do I exist here? and I kind of carried that, thinking, Maybe this book was written to kind of write me out of existence. I had a fantasy of myself as a ruthless person who’d be like, Okay, this whole family drama is dead to me. But ultimately, that wasn’t me. There are people who are very good at disconnecting themselves and becoming other people, and separating from their family lives and going on. They change their names, they become someone else entirely, maybe out west. But I wasn’t ruthless enough, probably to my benefit.

And I wanted to write about the fantasies that were running around in our family.

Rumpus: So you initially felt vengeful, but then something shifted?

Roth: I really wanted to get out of that cycle in our family where somebody’s taking revenge on somebody for some slight that happened thirty years ago, and the only way to assert one’s existence is by climbing over the body of an unfortunate sibling, or with a fellow family member, and you end up even unconsciously rejoicing in the other person’s unhappiness and being like, I am happy because I can see how unhappy these other people are.

There really needed to be some way to break this unprecedented situation where several generations of writers were writing against each other and with each other.

Rumpus: I met you last year at an Emily Books event at Word in Brooklyn, where your cousin, Emily Carter read, and then you interviewed her onstage. You were there, she was there, your aunt was there – you were all there in that small room, despite the various disagreements and hurts. In one scene in The Scientists, you go to Anne’s apartment to discuss with her your misgivings about her book, like a civilized human being. Then you write your book, and maybe Anne had some issue with it, but everybody is still in the family.  There’s no “You are dead to me.”

Roth: I guess that’s the promise of a kind of psychoanalytic liberal culture where we’re supposed to be like, We know that we all treat each other horribly but at least we can talk about it to some extent. When we couldn’t talk about things directly, the writing space always existed. But it’s not like everybody should grow up to write books about their family, and everything that’s wrong with their family, and this is the way of dealing with it. There is something to be said for the openness to form, and literary form because it forces you to actually think about the other person, and their motivations, and to try to see them from all sides and to really write about them not as caricature.

Rumpus: Right, consider them as whole human beings with feelings.

Roth: Yeah, and that’s the ethical dilemma for the writer of memoirs. I know in her interview with you, Emily talked about how you can tell that certain memoirs are written as revenge pieces, and there is a kind of sadistic glee that the reader can get from this. But then there are also the memoirs that are really acts of conversation — thwarted conversation.

Rumpus: Did you strongly consider not writing a memoir? Incidentally, your aunt sort of subtly tried to discourage you from all this, from being a writer.

Roth: She’d say things now and then like, “Oh, the men in our family—we used to have men in our family who made money. What happened to those people? Why don’t you become one of those people?” And also, why didn’t I go do good in the world like my father did. These are things that I’m still in conversation with myself about.

Rumpus: No, no, no, I feel like writing a memoir is doing good in the world. Memoir gets such a bad rap and I think part of it is because there are such trashy memoirs—celebrity memoirs. But I get so much out of reading them. I find so much identification and comfort in them. I think they’re worth writing and reading. So I guess I’m saying you have done something good in the world. It was a worthwhile pursuit! Are you still having ambivalence about that? About whether publishing a memoir is a worthwhile, or honorable?

Roth: I think I’ll always have that. That said, I think you’re right, that the contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it’s a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone. I wanted to write this as an education memoir.

Rumpus: It really is. I’m an embarrassingly poorly read English major, and I found myself making lots of notes.

Roth: Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people’s relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn’t make it good or bad, it’s the execution. I think what we’re now seeing is that there is this also the investigative memoir that is developing and being pursued more, and it’s an interesting genre to be working in.

Rumpus: So, when you were finished writing, did you show the book to Anne before publishing? Or your mom?

Roth: I showed the submitted draft to my mom.

Rumpus: Did you give her any kind of permission to nix any of it if it made her uncomfortable?

Roth: No, I didn’t. I asked her to read it and tell me what she thought, but that was it. I mean, she was uncomfortable with the whole thing, but she allowed it to go ahead. I didn’t really didn’t want her to have control over the creative process or be like, “Could you find some way to write this without narrating our conversation when you threw the wineglass at the wall again?” I just couldn’t do that, because the story requires that, and I didn’t want to open her up to that game of disappointment which is something that Anne actually used to do, where I think she’d send books to my father and say, “Is there anything you want taken out?” and he’d be like, “Yeah, this part,” and she’d be like, “What?! I’m not taking that one out.” At that point it seems to become unnecessarily sadistic.  So, I did ask my mom to read it. She had some factual corrections. Like, the ceilings were actually twelve feet not fourteen feet, you know. She also told me useful information like how much they paid for the apartment in 1969, this kind of stuff. But then I also realize there are things that we remember very differently.

Rumpus: How did you handle those?

Roth: Some things weren’t so divergent. What was interesting to me was how much consensus there was; there were things where she was like, “Oh I remember this exactly the way that you remember this.” But there were other moments where she said—particularly with my father’s death, she was like, “It’s exactly the way you describe it, but it wasn’t a seizure,” and I was like, “What was it? What would you call it if you agree that it was exactly the way I described it?” So she clearly had some other narrative that she needed to have, and yet she could agree that the description was accurate. Fortunately there wasn’t anything where we parted ways about what actually happened, or the order of events.

Rumpus: There’s a writer in Woodstock, Martha Frankel. She has a memoir called Hats and Eyeglasses about her family history of gambling, and gambling addiction. When she was done with it she sent it to her sister and said, “Please read this and make sure I didn’t get anything wrong, and let me know if there’s anything you object to.” And her sister called her and said, “It’s all bullshit. But I don’t have a problem with any of it.” It really is amazing how we can all remember things so differently. By the way, yours is one of the few memoirs I’ve read recently where there wasn’t a disclaimer in the beginning that “this is as close to the truth as I remember, and I’ve blurred people’s identities.”

Roth: Well certain identities were blurred, in fact, largely for a combination of editorial and legal reasons, but I don’t think I was ever asked to put a disclaimer on it, and I think it goes without saying that this is the way that I remember it. When memories are fuzzy or uncertain, I am very careful in the book to say that I’m not exactly sure what the mechanism is by which I remember this. Like the story about my father, how he told me he had AIDS. I mean, there are four versions of this because I’m not one hundred percent certain.

Rumpus: And there are different versions of how he gave you different books and what gift wrapping they were in.

Roth: Right, like, I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that’s one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That’s the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection.

Rumpus: So, back to your mom. Are you estranged from her? It seemed that way toward the end.

Roth: No. I mean, we’re estranged from each other in the sense that we have a very difficult time talking about the things that are really important, and that was true during my childhood and that was true when I was writing the book. We’re actually getting better at it. I have had trouble calling her, she didn’t have trouble calling me.

Rumpus: The portrayal of your mother is not entirely flattering. I mean, it’s just very real. And I appreciated that you put your difficulty with her out there. That’s the biggest challenge for me – putting some of my difficulties with my father out there. But writing about that is the only way I know how to make sense of it for myself, and apparently for other people, because on the occasions when I have put that stuff out there, I’ve gotten a tremendous response from people who could identify. I just think these things are important to write about, because they’re not just about us, the people writing. Like, in my case, there are so many daugthers of my generation who are having the same difficulties with fathers of my dad’s generation. It feels so worthwhile exploring but, it’s hard to get them to see it that way.

Roth: But you published a couple of essays with him in them.

Rumpus: I wrote them before I realized what his reaction would be.

Roth: How did he respond?

Rumpus: Oh, he’s still freaking out, five years later. What happened was, I’d been afraid to write about this stuff, I’d sensed that he would have a hard time with it. And then one day he said to me, “What are you waiting for?  Why don’t you just write already?”  And he didn’t know what I was thinking of writing but he said, “Why don’t you write something about your crazy old man?”

Roth: Oh…

Rumpus: Yeah. And I thought, Wow, he’s giving me permission.

Roth: He was really asking for it. He has no right to complain.

Rumpus: When I told him I was going to have one piece in particular published, in the New York Times, and I told him what it was about, he didn’t really hear me say what it was about. All he heard was, “My daughter’s going to have a piece in ‘Modern Love!’”

Roth: That’s this weird, great irony of Jewish families. It’s like, “She’s gonna be in the New York Times!” My mother, who’d objected to my book, would call me up and be like, “So-and-so called me to say that they saw your, the review in the Times!” There’s this kind of combination of kvelling and separation from content.

What I liked about the pieces you wrote about your father, is you fit them in the comic register.  And in some ways, until something terrible happens, it is a comedy, especially because comedy has traditionally been about fear of embarrassment. Now my family’s story would have been comic but it actually is a very classic tragedy, in that my father did not really come to terms with himself as a bisexual. Who knows whether he might have gotten AIDS anyway if he were out about it? But because of the levels of secrecy, who knows the kinds of people he was sleeping with? Who knows whether there was a regular lover? We haven’t found one. Sometimes I would fantasize that there was one, and I could find that person, and learn more. But my story follows a very classic tragic paradigm in which you learn things too late for them to be of any use, and by keeping silent about the thing that you’re terrified of, you bring it about – and even worse. It misses more my mother’s tragedy, which is that if my mother didn’t want me to write this book, she had a really easy way, when I was 24, to prevent me from ever writing this book.

Rumpus: Which was…

Roth: …to just tell me. The book exists because she couldn’t do that. I think she honestly felt that what happened was not my business, and the tragedy is that by taking that approach she made it impossible for us to have a certain kind of relationship that she wanted. She never somehow put together like, “Oh, like, I can be friends with my adult son, but only if I’m honest with him about the choices that I’ve made in my life, because otherwise how is he going to trust me and talk about the choices that he’s making in his life.” And so, we had these kinds of conversations where we’d talk about everything but ourselves. But I could stand this for only about half an hour, and then it would drive me crazy.

Rumpus: So, ultimately, you needed to write the book not only despite her fears and apprehension, but because of them.

Roth: You know, I would gladly protect my mother from some evil man on the street if there was somebody who wanted to do her any kind of injustice. I would be there as much as I could. But there are certain things that I can’t protect her against. I can’t protect her against the past, and I can’t protect her against her own feeling of vulnerability over these things.

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• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #6: Jillian Lauren
• Get Out of My Crotch!

The people in Al-Anon were “addict addicts,” who needed others in the worst possible way and yet would counterintuitively go for only the most unavailable, most uninterested, meanest people around. I, of course, did not see myself that way—I, who was addicted to alcohol not by mouth but by nose, specifically on the breath of a difficult man.

Joey, my friend in AA, suggested I try his meetings instead.

“I’m not an alcoholic,” I pointed out.

“Here’s what you do,” he said. “Lock yourself in a room with a case of Jack Daniel’s and don’t come out until it’s all gone. Then go directly to AA.”

I thought about it. While I was at it, I might try writing, too. I’d always wanted to try writing drunk. I imagined it would free me from my crippling, good-girl inhibitions.

I couldn’t, though. I’d sworn off drinking nearly four years before, ostensibly for holistic health reasons. But also for a guy named Matt. I kept my vow of sobriety as I moved on to Jimmy, and then to Michael. How on earth would these poor men stay on the wagon without my selfless support?

That right there is what kept me hooked. How vital I imagined I was to another’s well-being. What power I could have. All while appearing saintly and superior. Trade that in for the occasional glass of wine? No way. This was much more intoxicating.

Except the buzz never lasted long. In a matter of time, each boyfriend would return to drinking, and I’d feel like a failure for my inability to prevent that. The relationship would bust apart—sometimes for a while, sometimes for good.

 ***

Michael and I went back and forth a few times over the years. Of all my men, Michael had the hardest time staying sober, and I had the hardest time walking away from him. A long-haired musician with handsome features, he was always surrounded by women and had difficulty being faithful. He reminded me of my grandfather, the original drunk in my life, alternately affectionate and icy, and unfaithful to my grandmother.

Pappa could put away a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red a day. I knew this because I worked for him at his Seventh Avenue sportswear business. When my cousins heard I’d started working there, they joked, “What do you do, pour scotch all day?” That was one of my jobs. It started at 10:30 am. He’d ask me to wash a glass, grab some ice, and pour some Johnnie. I did that over and over until it was time to catch the train home to Long Island.

I knew that smooth, perfumey, malty smell so well. I had been inhaling it since I first sat on Pappa’s lap as a little girl. It simultaneously tantalized and lulled me. Michael’s breath was infused with vodka rather than scotch, but it worked.

My last go-round with Michael, beginning in the fall of 2000, could have been avoided. It’d been five years since I’d seen him, and in my mind, whatever appeal he had—the powerful sway he once held over me—was long gone. I thought I’d finally learned my lesson. But it turned out I had overestimated my recovery from this particular addiction.

 ***

We made plans on the phone to meet at his band practice in a rehearsal space off Sixth Avenue in the West Thirties. His deep baritone voice had previously bemused me, but now it came with the memory of the way he’d get by the end of most nights—the verbal nastiness followed by incoherence, followed by his nodding off midsentence after so many beers and vodka shots. Not to mention the memory of his hitting me. It was hard to believe I ever wanted to be anywhere near that.

I didn’t even think of the sex, the amazing sex, Michael’s specialty. It eventually fell by the wayside anyway. Every time we’d get together again, the sex would be there for a while, and it would be good. He knew how to make me feel just the right combination of beautiful, special, sexy—even if I saw myself as a mousy good girl. Probably because I was a mousy good girl. But once the sex wasn’t new anymore, his drinking would pick up. He’d lose interest and eventually switch his focus to another fawning fan of his band, another mousy good girl desperate to catch a glimpse of her inner sexpot in the mirror of Michael’s flattering attentions.

I was getting together with Michael that night, I honestly believed, to clear the air after so many years of silence following a fight we’d had. I’d gotten sick of his shit and moved on to someone else, and he had hung up on me. I figured five years had passed. We’d known each other since we were kids. We had close friends in common. Enough already.

Okay, maybe I was also interested in trying on—and showing off—the mantle of just how over him I was. I was thirty-five and, yes, on the rebound from a relationship with another alcoholic—one not nearly as far gone as Michael.

The attraction/repulsion ratio shifted the tiniest bit inside the rehearsal space. I was put off by the sight of the forty-ounce Budweiser Michael swigged at every break, in every song. The man was thirty-seven now. He came from Upper East Side affluence. Time to stop posing as a kid from the streets of Chicago, where he went to college. Realizing he was still stuck in that groove made me feel sorry for him. In that detail alone there was danger for me.

He smiled the warmest, most welcoming smile when I entered the studio. It was probably the nicest reception I’d gotten from him in the more than twenty years I’d known him. I felt something inside me, my resolve maybe, loosen and resettle at a slightly different angle.

Remarkably, despite his continued drinking, Michael looked good. He still had some of his summer tan. He was fit—an indication that he was likely still rising at five most mornings to get on his exercise bike and sweat out the rest of the booze from the night before. He still wore his black, corkscrew hair long. It swung back and forth each time he rocked on his feet to the music. He caught my eye, once, twice, again, again, smiling warmly each time, and that’s when I started to feel it: the love.

In that moment I was of the opinion that it was a friendly love, the innocent love of acceptance and mutual forgiveness between two old friends who met as teens and were something like siblings before becoming lovers.

One potent ingredient of that love was pity. Unfortunately, that night I didn’t recognize what a slippery slope that presented for me. It was a key component of my attachment to one beautiful mess after another, this feeling sorry for them. It nudged me to absolve them of all responsibility and opened the door for me to wrest control. It was a subtle, unspoken transaction. My internal superhero emerged from the shadows to earn credit for saving them, whether or not they wished to be saved. Often they stated their preference not to be, which had the opposite of the desired effect: I only became more insistent. Do not try to stop me.

Even though I was feeling warmly toward Michael at the rehearsal space, I still thought I was safe. But then we went—where else?—to a bar in his neighborhood. I was not drinking, a habit I still maintained post-Jimmy. I’d assigned myself the role of the nondrinker girlfriend to drinker boyfriends, apparently even when I no longer had a boyfriend.

At the bar, Michael drank one glass of house white after another. He said he’d recently replaced vodka with wine, to good effect—he didn’t get completely blotto. That was something he’d figured out after an unsuccessful stint in rehab.

Then a strange thing happened. Michael told me about the girlfriend he was involved with when he went to rehab—Sheila, a drug and alcohol counselor who had driven him to the rehab facility in the lush hills of the Hudson Valley and then dutifully showed up to get him at the end of his stay with the can of Foster’s he’d requested. As he relayed this story, Michael became visibly and audibly tipsy. He pronounced a few words just slightly incorrectly. His eyelids got heavier. As he got drunker, I got illogically, emotionally intoxicated myself—most likely a by-product of my competitive feelings toward Sheila. She brought him beer after his time in rehab? Amateur! I could do so much better. I could really save him, cure him of his addiction, given the chance. A tragic, codependent drug and alcohol counselor was no match for me and my virtue, my selfless love, my uniquely, magically medicinal vagina.

Michael must have noticed this shift taking place in me, because he made his move. He took hold of my hand across the table. He gave me another of those smiles, and then we went back to his apartment. What was one night for old time’s sake?

In the morning, Michael’s stale white-wine breath filled the room and turned my stomach. I found the presence of mind to tell him (and myself) that more of this kind of thing would be a bad idea, especially if he was still drinking. He looked wounded, and as flattering as I found that, I was pretty resolved.

Whew, I thought when I left. Dodged that bullet.

But days later he did what I always thought I’d hoped he’d do: He begged.

“I need to do this—I need to get sober for you,” he pleaded, and I was nauseated.

“But they say it never works when you get sober for someone,” I reasoned. I also instinctively knew that he wasn’t ready, and I doubted he ever would be. There were too many other women around him who were eager to make transactions similar to mine, to let him do whatever he wanted in exchange for his making them feel important and powerful, too.

“Please?”

He was serious.

“And promise you won’t leave me if I fall off the wagon? Promise to stick around and help me back on?”

Holy shit. He was truly recognizing my great power. What he was requesting was the opposite of the much advised tough love. But fuck that! I was so in.

Things were great for a few weeks. Michael was eager to try, and he replaced his fixation on alcohol with a fixation on me. He wrote me songs, wrote love letters thanking me for being the only one courageous enough to insist he stop drinking.

Michael was sober, and I was higher than a kite, strung out on his intense adoration.

But right on schedule, he fell off the wagon. Hard. He’d never made it longer than a month, and we were rounding three weeks. Just in time, his last girlfriend, Sheila, the drug and alcohol counselor, sent him a Christmas card. He met her for a “friendly dinner.” He called me that night and tried to hide his slurring.

“I can’t talk to you like this,” I said.

“But you promised you wouldn’t leave me if I fell. You said you’d stay and help me get up.”

I did. I went to Al-Anon, bristling as people whined. When Michael stopped going to AA, I dragged him there myself, holding his hand the whole time. After meetings, he’d sneak off. He always had to be somewhere. I knew where. In 2000, cell phones were not yet ubiquitous; Michael called from pay phones, and the names of the bars they were situated in came up on my caller ID. They were often bars in Sheila’s neighborhood.

Michael’s drinking got worse—so bad that he passed out as we were eating dinner at a Thai restaurant in Midtown, snoring with his head on the table as people tried not to stare.

Suddenly I was the enemy. “At least Sheila will drink with me,” he argued on the phone one evening. “You’re. No. Fun.” He had this way of punctuating his words when he was sloshed, in what seemed like an effort not to sound that way. “If you’d just come with me to the bar . . . ” He fell asleep.

 ***

Okay.

I’d go with him to the bar.

Maybe sitting there across from him, sober, I could appeal to him. And get him to go back to AA. And change his ways. And save his life! And save our love! Because I was just that awesome and powerful.

For a guy who clung to the mid-nineties grunge look, Michael had weird taste in bars. He liked these shiny Midtown tourist traps on the ground floors of hotels, which especially appealed to high-class hookers and their businessmen-in-from-out-of-town clientele. One well-dressed flight attendant type came back with three different men in the course of an evening as I sat and watched Michael down seven pints of draft beer, each one followed by a shot of chilled Stoli.

I stared as he pounded, wondering what it felt like inside his brain. I was fascinated by the idea of being blissfully anesthetized but not quite tempted to go there myself. I found myself torn between wanting to be fun like Sheila and wanting to get serious and save Michael. One minute I was laughing at his stupid jokes, positioning myself just so to receive his sloppy, fragrant, vodka-tinged kisses, and the next I was crying, pleading, “When will you be ready to get sober again?”

“This is just a bender, babe,” he said, holding me tightly, alcohol fumes wafting from his mouth and off his skin, enveloping me, caressing me. “I just have to go all the way through this to get to the other side. Stay with me. We’ll get there.”

There was more drinking, more dragging Michael to meetings, after which he would run off. Then the confession.

“I cheated,” he admitted.

I punched him in the stomach. I stopped taking his calls.

“What about me?!” he shouted into my answering machine. “I want to kill myself, and you won’t even pick up the phone. Would you even cry if I died?”

Whoa. By just answering the phone, I could save his life. But I was tired of being so powerful.

Still, I went back. I should’ve been done with him the night he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, hard. Or the night he grabbed me by the throat in a bar. But it wasn’t until the night he canceled our plans so that he could stay at Sheila’s and drink that it was finally over for me. (Apparently I was less concerned about bodily injuries than I was about injuries to my ego.)

In agony, I decided to try Michael’s antidote for that. I needed to know what it was like, what he and Sheila felt when they were knocking back shots. I went to Detour, the jazz bar across the street from my East Village tenement. I hadn’t had a vodka drink since my eighteenth birthday, when a single screwdriver yielded bed spins and a terrible hangover. But that night I wanted vodka. I knew the smell. But I wanted to know the taste. It was my chance to finally try writing drunk.

There was a woman about my age singing old standards accompanied by a guitar and bass. I ordered a vodka martini. I liked the way it looked in the glass—clean, simple, all business. After four years with not a drop of alcohol, I sat at the bar and sipped it slowly. It went right to my head. I felt like I was in a bubble. The edges on the bar sounds softened. Everything moved more slowly.

Once I finished the drink, a man at the end of the bar sent over another. I smiled at him, not feeling the least bit flirtatious or amorous. This stuff made people want to rip each other’s clothes off? The appeal was lost on me.

Sip . . . sip . . . sip. I felt out of it. Removed. Numb.

I stumbled back across the street to my apartment. As I lay down on the couch, exhausted, I noticed my journal on the coffee table. This was my chance. Inhibitions be damned.

The next morning I woke up with a crushing headache. The journal was on the floor. I picked it up. There were only two lines: “I drank vodka tonight. I can’t feel my face.”

 ***

In the year after we broke up, Michael tried several times to reach me, including on 9/11. He called once after midnight, drunk, from a bar. I hung up on him.

I’d finally had enough of it all, my ridiculous sense of greatness and what it cost me. As painful as that last round with Michael was, I think I needed it to cure me, and to kill my romantic notions. It’s now been more than a decade since I’ve spoken to him. Two years after our ending, I met my husband. Michael was my last alcoholic boyfriend.

According to twelve-step wisdom, you’re never fully recovered from an addiction, only forever recovering. Maybe I’m naive, but this time I believe I’m truly, fully recovered.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

***

“The Sweet Smell of Excess” by Sari Botton has been excerpted from Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up edited by Leah Odze Epstein and Caren Osten Gerszberg. Available from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2012.

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• Confessions of a Good Girl

Typically an advice column might not be the first thing to come to mind when considering examples of fearless first-person writing. But Cheryl’s Dear Sugar column is a major exception in that way. In the majority of her column entries, she boldly delves into her own life, to places where she’s had to overcome obstacles similar to those her letter-writers have experienced. Her understanding and compassion are real and hard won, rooted in her own experiences. And so is her sometimes butt-kicking advice. “If I was able to do this,” she seems to be saying, “so can you, sweet pea. Now get off your ass and do it.”

The stakes may have seemed lower when she was writing the column anonymously. But Cheryl says she always knew she’d eventually reveal herself – which she did in April. Now many of her best Dear Sugar columns have been gathered into Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection that goes on sale this week (and is available through The Rumpus). Her name is on it; the revelations, the fearless admissions are hers. And I’m awed.

I spoke with Cheryl via Skype last week, about how she keeps finding the courage to be honest in her work – about herself and others around her.

***

The Rumpus: I was reading on Oprah’s site the other day about the things that you left out of Wild, and it just dawned on me how mind-blowing the whole Oprah thing must be for you. I mean, that’s like the kind of wish you paste onto your “vision board” collage when you’re doing The Secret™:  “Oprah restarts her book club for my book…” accompanied by magazine cut-outs of Oprah and some books.

Cheryl Strayed: Yeah, it’s sort of beyond whatever I had let myself fantasize about. It was very exciting. She called me on my cell phone just out of the blue in April and told me she loved Wild and wanted to restart her book club for it. And then I had to keep it a big secret until the news was announced in early June. That was tortuous.

Rumpus: I know what you mean – well, this is hardly on the same scale, but I knew for a long time that you were Sugar, and had to keep that secret. It wasn’t easy. I can be kind of a yenta, but I managed to keep that under my hat. I’m actually very proud of that.

Strayed: You know, it was really fascinating; some people were terrible at keeping that secret and other people were just great at keeping it. Toward the end, a lot of people were figuring out it. If they read the work I’ve written as Cheryl, and then read Sugar, it became pretty clear.

Rumpus: So, your first book, Torch, is often described as an autobiographical novel. One of the things I personally wrestle with is whether or not I should fictionalize my own story. To some degree, it would be an artistic choice for me, to give myself lots of creative latitude, but the biggest factor is always protecting people close to me – either from what they might learn about me, or from having things revealed about them that they’d rather not. When you wrote Torch, was it an entirely artistic choice to make it a novel?

Strayed: So many people ask about this and it’s so interesting because I never, ever, ever, ever, ever thought of Torch as anything even remotely resembling a memoir. It wasn’t as if I took real life and then I fictionalized it to make it a novel. It was more the reverse – I was writing a novel, and then I used parts of my life in it. A memoir is your story, and in Torch I wasn’t interested in telling my story. There was one young woman character with whom I have a lot in common, but she’s absolutely not me. I mean, the situation in the story is very similar to a situation I was in, my family was in. Obviously my mom died of cancer, and I would say that that piece of the novel, which is a big piece – well, if you read Wild, you can see the echo.

Rumpus: Yes, you can.

Strayed: In some ways, in a couple of cases, it’s almost like the same scene, but slightly different. In Wild I stuck to what really happened and in Torch I did whatever I wanted. But because there’s that situation, the death of the mother, and also the setting is a fictionalized setting based on the place where I grew up – because there are those two big, bold kind of sweeping autobiographical elements – people read all the rest as if it’s nonfiction or close to it, and that’s not the case. To take you back to my process, when I first was writing, nonfiction wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t thinking of myself as memoirist. I was really very much a fiction writer and I felt free, the way fiction writers throughout time have, to draw heavily on experiences in real life. That whole “write what you know” thing. It was only once I was pretty deep into Torch that I realized I was sort of forgetting who my actual mom was because I had so much made her into this fictionalized character, Theresa. So my nonfiction was born out of that fear. I woke up on the fourth of July in 1997 and I realized I was conflating my mother and Theresa, and I didn’t want to do that. So I spent the day writing the real story of her death, and what ended up coming out of that was that my first essay, “Heroin/e,” which was later published in Double Take and in Best American Essays 2000. That’s when I first started thinking, oh, okay, I can use real life that way in my literary work. But it was still long before I ever really thought, I’m going to write a memoir.

Rumpus: But it’s interesting that there is some clear overlap between the two books.

Strayed: Well, that story of my grief around my mom’s death, it’s like I’ve just had to keep telling and telling and telling and telling that story, and anything that I was writing, it would appear in. It would appear in Torch, in Wild, in numerous essays I wrote, in several Dear Sugar columns. It’s been like my obsession, this story that wouldn’t let me go. In one of my Dear sugar columns, I write about the death of my mother and how the last word she said to me was “love,” and I say that’s like my Genesis story. I think that’s true. In some ways it’s like every story I tell winds back to that one. And so I keep having to tell it, even though the form varies. You know?

Rumpus: Yes, I do know. There are certain stories that I always just keep coming back to and back to, in things I’ve published, and in things I’ve not yet. And I think if I do publish a memoir, I will still have to write about them.

Strayed: A lot of writers do that. You look at the bodies of work of some of the writers I admire most – Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro. They’re each telling like a family of stories over and over again. I mean, some writers manage to be incredibly diverse. But most writers have a sense of what their territory is. And not that they don’t deliver something unexpected – they do – but they deliver something unexpected within the context of what we know belongs to them.

Rumpus: You describe in Wild how you chose your last name – Strayed. I wonder though whether to some degree you were also choosing it as a pseudonym, knowing you were hoping to write. Was there any aspect of hiding from people from your past?

Strayed: No, no. I never thought of the name as a pseudonym. I thought of it as just a name change.  And I broadcast it to everyone. I sent out a missive saying, “Now my name is Cheryl Strayed.” Actually, one of my fears when I changed my name was that I didn’t want people to lose track of me.

Rumpus: The idea of a pseudonym is something I toy with a lot. I just recently published on xojane.com a very revealing piece about myself. My father is a clergyman and also a former school teacher and he’s got all these very worshipful former students and bar/bat mitzvah kids. Today got an email saying, basically, “I love your piece about how you hate condoms and cheated on your first husband! By the way your father bat mitzvahed me, and I love him!” Oy. So, I wrestle with being this daughter of a clergyperson and writing really very raw, personal stuff, and also revealing stuff about myself that I think that my family probably would rather not read. But I also feel like, fuck, I don’t want to have to change my name, I don’t want people to not know it’s me. I want to have the courage to own this shit. But if I changed my name, I might feel as if I get to say whatever the fuck I want. Anyway, this is challenging for me!

Strayed: It is. You know, I’m always talking about taking risks and being fearless and all that stuff, but also always acknowledge that different people have very different situations – family situations.  One of the liberations of having a dead mother is that your mother is dead. One of the liberations of having a father who is not in your life is that your father is not in your life. Those are hard and sad things that I’ve had to come to terms with over the course of my life, but as a writer they are frankly liberating. I get to say whatever the hell I want to say! Of course, I mean I’m overstating that. I should amend that and say there are absolutely things I don’t write because I fear I would hurt someone’s feelings, invade their privacy. So there are lines I draw. Trust me, there are many, many, many stories that would be very interesting to readers that I didn’t tell in Wild because they have to do with certain people – family members and such. I didn’t write everything there is to say about all of the people I mention in Wild, and it was because I had those considerations. I try not to hurt people’s feelings, I try not to expose people who aren’t asking to be exposed. I do think people have a right to privacy, and that if I’m going to expose anyone it’s going to be me. Of course, what happens is sometimes when you expose yourself, you end up having to write about other people, and that’s what’s complex. But like, in your case, you have this very different family system than I have. Your father has this public role. There’s a different kind of fallout and different consequences.

Rumpus: Yeah, I want to “write like a motherfucker,” but, I have to be careful not to be a clergyman screwer-upper. What about your dad? Do you think your dad has seen Wild or Tiny Beautiful Things – your collection of Dear Sugar Columns that’s out this week – or knows about them? I mean, you’re kind ubiquitous right now.

Strayed: I haven’t heard from him.

Rumpus: There’s an entry in Tiny Beautiful Things called “The Empty Bowl.” In it, you write about your father, and deciding you couldn’t sustain a sort of fake, surface-y relationship with him without any acknowledgment or resolution of the past. I feel like I’ve got an Empty Bowl-related conversation on my horizon.

Strayed: As I write in that piece, the last time we were in contact was that email exchange we had right before I turned thirty-nine. He’s tried to friend me on Facebook a couple of times since then, but I’ve declined. One thing that’s really true is I do not want to hurt my father. I have absolutely no interest in harming him. I wish him well, actually. I really do. I feel like I’ve really completely healed all of the difficult things I’ve written about when it comes to him. I’ve moved beyond it. When I think of him, I hope he’s well. I hope he’s at peace. I don’t want my writing to hurt him.

Rumpus: But you also feel like it’s important to write what you need to write about those situations.

Strayed: Well I can’t lie. I can’t pretend that I had a great dad. I think the fact that I didn’t have a great dad forms the person I am, and it tells a story that only I can tell. So I have to. I have to tell readers about that. Just, I have to.

Rumpus: I’m really glad you wrote all the father stuff, in both books, because that really informs me in a way that I need to be informed – I’m working some of that same stuff out myself.

Strayed: I want to say a couple things to you. I mean, I am Sugar, so I’m going to give you advice.

Rumpus: Oh, shit.

Strayed: One thing I will say is that you don’t know what will happen if you write the truth. You don’t know what will happen if you decide to write what you feel really compelled to write. You think that there might be this consequence but there might actually be a different sort of outcome, and it could be a positive one.

I was a little bit worried about my brother and my ex-husband’s reactions to Wild. In the case of my brother, there are some difficult things that are said, and he’s certainly in some very difficult scenes. And in the case of my ex-husband, I don’t say anything negative about him, but here I am writing for this national – really international – audience about our marriage and its demise. I just really felt like, oh my god, I don’t envy anyone who’s in anyone else’s memoir, even if nice things are said about them. There’s this funny feeling I imagine one would get because one is being portrayed by someone else. I could see how my ex-husband might think, oh, just please leave it alone. And so I felt kind of sick to my stomach about the idea of him having to read my book. But what happened was amazing. We haven’t been in touch for years, even though there aren’t any bad feelings between us. We’re just not in touch. But he sent me an email telling me he read Wild, he really loved the book, he thanked me for the way I wrote about him and us. My brother, too. He said he felt like we reached a new place of understanding. I hadn’t anticipated that, so, you know, you can’t necessarily predict people’s reactions.

Rumpus: Wow. That’s actually sort of comforting. And inspiring.

Strayed: I saw my stepfather in Duluth when I was there on my book tour, and you know, there are some painful aspects of that relationship that I write about. And he hugged me and told me he loved me. We didn’t talk much about the book. But what I mean to say is, you don’t always know that there are going to be negative consequences. All of those people I just named, I wrote about them with love.  I wrote about them with a real sense of the fullness of their humanity and our relationship, and I’m so pleased to see that they understood that. They knew I wasn’t trying to go after anyone in my book, and I think that sometimes actually writing truthfully about something can bring people together or bring you to a new level in your relationship.

Rumpus: I think you’re right about that. I also think sometimes you have to weigh whether going forward with work that might inadvertently offend or hurt that one person is ultimately worthwhile, because there’s something really valuable for other people in your story. For, example I’ve written some things about my relationship with my dad, and with other people in my life, and I’ve had so many women write to me afterward and tell me that what I wrote resonated with them and helped them. But still, people get hurt. In the piece I mentioned on xojane.com, I tell a story about something that happened with my ex-husband more than twenty years ago. It’s not a story that’s flattering to him. I also reveal that I cheated – something I never told him. But we have been out of each other’s lives for twenty years. Before publishing it, I hemmed and hawed – do I need to drop him a line and say, “Hey, how have the past two decades been for you? Oh, by the way, at the end of our marriage, I cheated.” But a lot of women commented on that essay, saying they identified with my experience. And I got a lot out of writing – and publishing – it. Somehow I seem to keep flying under the radar. You know how they tell you in writing workshops, “Write as if everyone you know is dead”? Elissa Bassist once tweeted something about how she writes as if no one in her family knows how to read. I tend to write as if no one in my life knows how to Google, which is pretty much the case. But I don’t know for how long I can get away with that.

Strayed: I understand what Elissa is saying because I, too, think that when you’re writing that first draft, yes, write as if everyone is dead. Things are going to come out in the work that are really important. There’s that liberation – taking risks and just telling it like it is – and that’s really important. But I will say in the revision, that’s when you have to think, who isn’t dead? What are the consequences of what I’m saying? I think that you know there’s a place to ask those questions as well.  But also, you say that so many people wrote to you because your work helped them, and I have that experience a lot as both Sugar and Cheryl. So, I agree. Sometimes taking that risk and hurting that one person’s feelings because you’re telling the truth about a relationship, is really worth the good that comes about from your writing. I will say, too, a lot of times the people who object to what you’ve written? They would object to anything you’ve written.

Rumpus: Yeah, I think that’s true. I’ve experienced that. Some people are also just not fans of memoir and first-person writing. The whole idea of it makes them uncomfortable.

Strayed: You need to assess that. Like, is someone rightfully saying, why would you say such a nasty thing about me, or what right do you have to write about my cocaine addiction or whatever? If you’re writing about a sibling or a cousin or whatever and you’re telling about all the terrible things they’ve done, I think maybe you don’t have a right to expose that person, who really isn’t a public person. On the other hand, if you’ve got a family member who essentially just wants to silence you – who, unless you write, oh we just had such a happy family and my childhood was just great, is going to complain – then you can’t listen to that person. They’re not going to be any kind of accurate gauge of what is reasonable and you need to just move forward and do the work you need to do.

Rumpus: Part of me wishes I could just publish my memoir or collection of stories as a series of Rumpus Letters in the Mail. It was such a good experience writing the one I did – partly because I knew I was writing to a very limited audience of 2,400 subscribers, none whom, as far as I knew, were related to me, or exes of mine. I felt like I could put some really personal stuff in there.

Strayed: Maybe you can. Or at least you can trick yourself into taking risks by telling yourself you’re just writing Rumpus Letters in the Mail. And when you’re done with it, you can see what you have, and where you can take it next.

I do think that when it came to writing personal, intimate things in my own work, it wasn’t like, rip the band-aid off all at once. I did this, and then I did that, and then I did the next thing. It’s like anything – you build a muscle. You build a sense of strength around it, and you also learn how to set boundaries. Where have you crossed that line that you don’t want to cross? People are always asking, how do you write so openly and intimately, and I’m always like, well, what the hell else are you suppose to do? I don’t understand how to write any other way, and maybe part of that is really just borne out of years of practicing doing it. Maybe your secret is the Rumpus letters; you know, you write a collection of them, and see where it takes you.

Rumpus: Yeah, maybe. That could be the way to at least frame it in my mind.

Strayed: Letters to two thousand and four hundred people.

Rumpus: Oh, yes. That’s my title: Letters To Two Thousand And Four Hundred People! So, back to the idea of using pseudonyms versus writing under your own name. In April, you revealed yourself to be Sugar. Now Tiny Beautiful Things is out there with your name on it. When you first started writing that column, did it occur to you that you might at some point reveal who you are? Because you really reveal as much about yourself in Tiny Beautiful Things as you do in Wild, if not more.

Strayed: Oh yeah, I knew from before I started writing the column that I was going to reveal my identity some day. There was never any question about that. I definitely always wrote it with the consciousness that you would know who I was some day. When people knew I was going to reveal my identity, some would say, oh, no, don’t do it! It was because they were so afraid I would write the column differently and be more hidden, and I was always like no, no you don’t understand. From the very first column, I wrote it with the consciousness that my name would be on it eventually. I didn’t write it from the vantage point of a secret person who could say anything and never have people know who she was. No, I always wrote it as Cheryl in my heart, and I just put the Sugar name on it. And I knew I would step out someday.

Rumpus: You reveal a lot about yourself in Tiny Beautiful Things, and also about other people– like for example, “A bit of Sully in your sweet” is about you learning that you’re husband, before he was your husband but was your boyfriend, cheated. So you’re revealing that about him, and now we know who he is! How does he feel about that? And were you concerned about that at all as you were writing?

Strayed: I asked him before if it was okay to write about it. I wouldn’t have written about it if he had said no. I knew that it was an important story to tell, and I was nervous about telling it, and he was nervous about me telling it. But we also thought that the greater good would be served. That it was a piece of our relationship that so many people could relate to and did. And so pretty quickly when I said I want to write about it, he was just like, “I trust you. It makes me feel a little sick, but I trust you.” Being involved with a writer does require some bravery. Luckily Brian, Mr. Sugar, understands the work I do. He’s an artist to. He’s a documentary filmmaker and he understands the endeavor and he really trusts me, that I’m not going to violate him or us in any way.

There are also a lot of things that aren’t in the column or Tiny Beautiful Things. One thing about writing really personally in Wild and in the Sugar columns and in my personal essays that I always remind people is, while there’s a lot of intimate stuff that felt very risky for me to expose, there’s also a lot of stuff that’s not in there. It’s not as if I take my entire life and open it up to public scrutiny. There are things that are private that I don’t write about or not yet, like maybe someday I will. Maybe someday I’ll be ready to tell this story or that story. I guess that’s the difference between confessionalism and what I do. That kind of truth telling in writing is not just about going online and blabbing everything that ever happened to you. It’s really about considering why you’re telling any particular story. And I had a good reason to tell the story of what Brian and I went through with his infidelity before we got married. The greater good was served, and so I did it.

Rumpus: You also reveal a bit about him in the “Thwack, Thwack, Thwack” piece, in which he mistakenly assumes you wanted to be spanked, which made me laugh so hard. I have been there! He comes off well in the end of both pieces. I’ve written about my current husband a couple of times too, and he’s been really understanding about that – a really good sport. Sometimes it’s just light stuff, but other times it’s been stories where something difficult has happened between us, and he doesn’t look so good at first, but he comes around in the end and he realizes what he was wrestling with. Like this one experience I wrote for an anthology about body image called FEED ME. Early on in our relationship he made some comment about how I was the most full-figured woman he’d ever been with, and how he never knew he could be attracted to that, and he was, like, so proud of himself for now being able to. He was trying to say that there was something different and positive for him in our relationship, but he was saying it in a way that was hurtful – that he didn’t know was hurtful. Like with the world’s biggest foot in his mouth. And what we came to was a realization that he had been as negatively affected as I had by the media’s obsession with certain body types. It was actually very eye-opening. Well, initially it was kind of maddening and heart-breaking, but then, we got to a place where it was eye-opening, and bonding. And it felt like a story worth sharing.

Strayed: By the way, that experience in “Some sully in your sweet,” as terrible as it was, I feel lucky for it. I think it made us stronger and it made us look deeper and it made Brian confront some of his issues. It’s not like the only hard thing we’ve come up against in our relationship. I think in some ways having that experience early on helped us get through other things. Just like what you just said about your husband and that conversation. As painful and hurtful as that was, it sound like he was speaking out of like an honest place. That allowed you to kind of go deeper, right? I mean, it could have been the place at which you just basically said fuck off, and broke up with him but it was this place where you guys decided to go deeper and that’s important.

Rumpus: It was really important that we went through that.

Strayed: It’s a good thing he said that – he was telling his truth.

Rumpus: So we are both blessed with husbands named Brian who don’t mind being written about. But there are inevitably going to be people who don’t want be written about. It’s nearly impossible to tell a story about yourself without having other people in there, at least for context. What’s your philosophy about where you have the right to tell your story?

Strayed: I think you have the right to tell your story and like I said I think you should do what you can to protect the privacy of those you write about. For example, in Wild I gave my ex-husband a different name and I wouldn’t tell you publicly what city he lives in, just in case he doesn’t want to raise his hand and be like, hey I’m the ex-husband in Wild! I want to respect his right to privacy. Now obviously it wouldn’t take many research skills to find out who he is and there’s legal records and such, so it’s not as if its some deep secret. It’s the same with my father. I don’t name my father in Wild and I have no wish to sort of out him in any way. So I did my best to just write about him truthfully while also not blatantly exposing him, if that makes sense. I think you can do those things. So, for you writing about your ex-husband, I would just make sure not to tell anyone who he is actually.

Rumpus: I’ve changed his name. Of course, anyone who really knows me or him knows the identity of the guy who held the title of “first husband” in my life.

Strayed: But ultimately, what you’re really trying to do is tell the story of who you are. Sometimes you have to include other people, but mostly it needs to be about you. For example, I didn’t want to write about my father in Wild. I don’t enjoy the passage that I wrote about him where I tell about some of the difficult and painful aspects of my life with him. I took no pleasure in that, but I had to tell that piece of the story because I was trying to tell you who I was. You can’t write a memoir without accounting for your mother and your father – even if your father was absolutely never there. You have to tell who they are, what happened, what your relationship with them is and so I had to do that. We need to write about other people in our lives. What I always say is, you just have to do that, and then do your best to take out what isn’t necessary. Through every draft of Wild as I read it, I would take out a teeny bit more. Each time I went through, I would take out a little more about the people I wrote about, because it had to meet two tests. 1) Did the piece of information that I was revealing about this other person contribute to the story? And 2) was it necessary. Like, did you have to know that so and so was addicted to cocaine? If the answer is no, it doesn’t need to be in there. And also, are there consequences? If I do determine something is necessary, what are the consequences of including that – for me and also for that person? If you’re writing about somebody and saying that they are a cocaine addict, it actually might have negative consequences in their lives. To what degree are you willing to take their life into your hands in that regard? Those are questions I was asking a lot when I wrote about other people in Wild. And you know, I didn’t necessarily find a perfect path through it. But I think I found a pretty solid one. Nobody who’s in the book has written to me to complain about what I wrote about them.

Rumpus: Did you let anyone see it before hand? What’s your policy about that?

Strayed: I gave a copy of Wild to my brother back in September just because I wanted him to have that kind of advance notice I guess. It was great because we got to have this really great conversation about the book and it was before it came out and before all of the more public things happened. But he’s the only person I sent it to ahead of time actually, for that purpose.

Rumpus: On a different note, I’ve been wondering how you decided which details of your life should have been in Wild, and which in Tiny Beautiful Things. For instance, in “The Baby Bird” in Tiny Beautiful Things you talk about what I would categorize as sexual abuse on the part of your grandfather, and it was interesting to read Wild and not see that there. I think that your character in Wild, I mean if I can call you a character, clearly has issues with sexual boundaries. Everyone I know who was sexually abused as a child has them. I wondered why you chose to leave that out of Wild.

Strayed: It was originally in Wild. What’s really fascinating for me is Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things were essentially written at the same time. What happened is I finished the first draft of Wild, sent it to my editor, and that same week, Steve Almond emailed me and asked me if I wanted to write the Sugar column. I was waiting for my editor to get back to me with her notes on the first draft which you know are always significant – you’ve got to do this big revision and everything and so that’s when I began the Sugar Column and I didn’t know I was writing Tiny Beautiful Things as I was writing the Sugar Column. The reason that the sexual abuse stuff is not in Wild is that it was everywhere I would put it. Like I kept rewriting it and putting it here and then putting it there and putting it elsewhere and it just kept coming up as too heavy handed and too much as if I were saying, I’m like this because I had this experience. And that really made me feel uncomfortable. It didn’t feel true that there could be a direct line drawn between what happened to me with my grandfather when I was so young, and the young woman I became and the way I behaved sexually. It just kept not working and my editor felt strongly about that too. It felt in the end not necessary. But it worked for Sugar. Tiny Beautiful Things, even though its full of advice and other people’s stories, is also full of stories about me, so it’s a kind of strangely anecdotal memoir. Some of the same stories are also in Wild. In a way, Tiny Beautiful Things gives a deeper sense of what was happening in Wild. There’s a very strange symbiotic relationship between the two books.

Rumpus: Yeah. It’s sort of like reading companion memoirs. And you were very brave in writing both of them. I draw a lot of encouragement from them. Although, of course, I’m still trembling, as always.

Strayed: One thing that I think is important when it comes to bravery, is that it’s not necessarily about doing something and not being afraid. It’s about doing something even though you are afraid, and I think that idea has been very powerful for me over time. Whenever I’ve written something that makes me scared, which I write an awful lot, I remember that being scared is not an indication that I shouldn’t do it. It’s actually an indication that I should.

***

Photographs by Brian Lindstrom.

If you’re in the Bay Area, join us at The Rumpus Release Party for Tiny Beautiful Things on July 27th.

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My husband, Brian, must too. He’s quick to defend his listening to The Odyssey, narrated by Ian McKellen, while on a long drive to Canada with his brother several years ago. “The Odyssey was meant to be told, as part of the oral tradition,” he will assert when it comes up.

Brian’s widowed 90-year-old mother, however, harbors no shame about her affection for audio books – nor for a particular audio book narrator, Scott Brick. (She also read-reads books. She goes through about five titles a week, a few in print, a couple on tape or CD.)

Shortly after meeting Bridget in 2003, I started hearing of her love for Brick’s smooth baritone. “When I take her to the library,” my sister-in-law told me, “she asks the librarian, ‘Do you have anything read by Scott Brick that I haven’t listened to already?’”

Anytime someone in the family would mention Brick’s name, Bridget would get moony. “He could read me the dictionary…” she’d say, batting her eyelashes and staring off wistfully – totally milking it – and we’d all melt.

In the summer of 2006, as we were approaching Bridget’s 85^th birthday with a dearth of gift ideas, I came up with a long shot: I could try to contact Brick and see if he’d send her…something. Anything. An autographed photo maybe, at the very least.

When I emailed Brick via the contact button on his website, it occurred to me he might not respond. He turned out to be kind of a big deal in the audio book world – A Publisher’s Weekly Narrator of the Year! Over 40 Ear Phone Awards! “A golden voice,” according to the Wall Street Journal! – and also an actor and screenwriter. And even if he weren’t too busy to answer his own mail, it dawned on me it was entirely possible he’d be creeped out by some old lady in upstate New York swooning at the sound of his voice.

But a day later, he responded, and was clearly touched. He offered to send Bridget a special birthday package. We spoke on the phone so I could provide details. (He really did have a nice voice…)

He sent the birthday present to me first. It was torture trying to keep it under wraps for the week or so I held onto it. It contained an autographed photo, a collection of audio books he’d recorded that weren’t yet released, and the highlight: a half-hour tape in which he narrates various points throughout his day (“I’m at the studio now, and I’m about to start reading a Nelson Demille book…”) and ends by reading her a couple of entries from the dictionary – “happy,” “birthday,” and “Bridge,” because I told him that her nick name at the orphanages and convents where she grew up had been “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

Oh, did I neglect to mention that Bridget grew up in orphanages and convents? Yeah, that kind of makes the story even sweeter, doesn’t it? She wasn’t a true orphan, actually. When she was about three, the Catholic Charities took Bridget and her siblings away from their parents because they lived on a tugboat in New York Harbor. The Catholic Charities felt that wasn’t a good way for kids to be raised, so they swiped them and sent them off to orphanages run by nuns. But that’s a whole other story. (That’s whose memoir I should be ghostwriting, or co-writing.)

Anyway, if you think there’s something deeply satisfying about providing an adorable 85-year-old with a gift you know she’s going to love, imagine if that 85-year-old grew up in orphanages and convents until she was old enough to be on her own. The satisfaction is exponentially greater. In case you aren’t already deeply touched (or thoroughly nauseated) here’s a video of Bridget opening Scott Brick’s present on her 85^th birthday. (Sorry about the loud, shitty music playing in the background that day.) We’ll never top that gift. The following year, we gave her…I don’t know, a scarf? And a brick with “Scott” written on it.

A couple of years later, when I took an adjunct journalism professor job a little over an hour from my home, Bridget suggested I might try listening to audio books on my commute. With more than four hours of driving to get through each week I figured, sure, why not? Of course, I had to start with my mother-in-law’s favorite narrator.

On Audible.com, I found a vast selection narrated by Brick – classics and thrillers and sci fi. The one that seemed most in keeping with my taste – literary autobiographical-ish fiction, about writers – was Keith Gessen’s novel, All The Sad Young Literary Men.

I was excited to give it a try, but first I had to get through Apple’s cryptic, byzantine process for putting audio books you’ve downloaded to iTunes onto your iPhone. Once I figured that out (I have not been able to replicate it since), Gessen’s book turned out to be a good first choice. I enjoyed it, and appreciated Brick’s ability to make each character sound different – especially since some of the characters bear strong similarities. I felt as if Brick’s interpretations of the men and women, the subtle differences he gave them in their accents, tones and speech patterns, helped me understand them possibly better than if I’d read the book.

When I was done, not eager to deal with the iPhone uploading issue again, I headed to my local library in search of audio books on CD. They had the John Cheever Audio Collection, with stories narrated by Meryl Streep, Blythe Danner, Peter Gallagher, George Plimpton, Cheever himself, and others. I was watching season three of Mad Men then, so it was good timing. I had read some of those stories before, and loved them. But I loved them even more read by the actors and writers performing them.

This listening-to-books-while-driving business was working out pretty well. I was using my commuting so time efficiently, filling my brain with literature as I drove.

Next, I went for The Sun Also Rises, narrated by William Hurt. As good as Scott Brick is, it’s probably no surprise that Hurt gives him a run for his money as a narrator, making every character, major and minor, sound notably distinct. Again, to my surprise, the audio book format brought the story to life for me in a way the print version hadn’t. (Granted, I’d been in high school when I read it.)

It seemed to make sense to try audio versions of other books I hadn’t fully connected with before. It felt a little like cheating, like a short-cut, but who would know? I’m embarrassingly poorly read for an English major, and here was a chance to catch up on wide swaths of the Western cannon that I’d skipped – or skimmed – over. Having recently loved reading Anna Karenina, I signed out the audio version of War and Peace.

I didn’t realize, though, that I’d picked up a dramatized edition – a recording of a staging of Tolstoy’s novel. I found that without narration, I was having a hard time keeping track of the characters, plus I kept getting distracted by things on the road, like, oh, other cars. I’d lose my place, and have to rewind, nearly crashing a couple of times.

I gave up on the dramatized edition of War and Peace two disks in. And then I never picked up another audio book. I stopped teaching after a couple of semesters; it was costing me almost my entire paycheck just to fill my gas tank each week. I realized I like listening to stories in the car. But now I’m rarely in it longer than the length of a Moth podcast, or maybe a This American Life episode.

Bridget, though, keeps tearing through the audio book section of the Oneonta Library, plus the shelves stocking the true crime and crime fiction. Those are really her favorites. For Mother’s Day we got her True Crimes of Passion: When Love Hurts, a nonfiction anthology with a lot of blood and guts in it. She loves Court TV, too, especially when there are murder trials. One of her daughters will say, “Mom’s glued to The Headless Torso channel again.”

She’s listened to pretty much everything Brick has recorded – even Gessen’s novel, which I got her last year for one occasion or another. “How’d you like it?” I asked. “Pretty good,” she said, “for a book with no murder in it.” (If that’s not a potential blurb for future editions, I don’t know what is.)

Bridget will turn 91 in August. I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping Brick has recorded something new by then. Otherwise, I’m at a complete loss as to what to get her – and taking suggestions.

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A few days after an article about cookbook ghostwriters ran in the New York Times Dining section, Gwyneth Paltrow took to Twitter to deny that she’d had a ghostwriter for hers, My Father’s Daughter: Delicious Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness. The article’s author, Julia Moskin, identified Julia Turshen as Paltrow’s ghost not only for that book, but for a second forthcoming title that will bear only Paltrow’s name on the cover, and she quotes Turshen in the article about her work on the actress’s books.

A week later, Paltrow appeared on the Rachael Ray show via Skype, still insisting she had no help. Ray has similarly refuted Moskin’s Times article. She told Eater.com: “In well over a decade of writing recipes for many cookbooks, television shows, and magazines, I have not now nor have I ever employed a ghostwriter. I simply don’t use them.”

I wasn’t there when Paltrow and Ray did or didn’t write their cookbooks, but as a ghostwriter myself, who has dealt with a client denial, I have a hunch about what happened at least in the case of Paltrow, for which there is more information to sift through.

The way Turshen is quoted in the article, the detail with which she is introduced, the fact that on her website Turshen lists the book as something she’s worked on, and that she wrote an essay about working with Paltrow on her cookbook for Food & Wine magazine all give me the impression that Julia Moskin got it right, or pretty close to right, and that  Paltrow’s denial is rooted in problems of semantics and misundersanding. I sense  Paltrow believes that because the stories and recipes in the book were hers, even if  Turshen did the editorial heavy lifting, she didn’t serve exactly as a ghost, and therefore Paltrow should be credited alone.

“Ghostwriter” is a problematic word. It gives people the idea that we have some kind of other worldly power; that we’re able to hover over clients somewhere in the ether and read their minds, then write their books using only our own words. But it’s nothing like that, at least not for me. That’s where misunderstandings arise.

In her denial, Paltrow tweeted, “I wrote every word myself.” The thing is, even if she did write every single word that made it into the book, it doesn’t mean she didn’t have the help of a ghostwriter or co-author whatever you want to call us.

In my work I never simply interview a person and then write their book using a whole different collection of words than they did. Typically, I use many of the same words that came out of their mouths, although likely in a different order, and surrounded by other words. I also move whole pieces of their narratives around for purposes of better storytelling. I remove boring expository chunks, and try to draw more interesting anecdotes from my clients to replace those – anecdotes they wouldn’t have thought to include until I prompted them; anecdotes I still have to seriously rework and bring to life.

Another way I work is to get clients to “free-write” bits for me, without concerning themselves with spelling, grammar, sentence structure, or “sounding good.” I have them do this because sometimes people are inclined to reveal more when they are in a room by themselves, writing privately, than when they are sitting and talking with some ghostwriter their agent or editor hired, whom they’ve just met. I find some clients also tend to remember and capture more details when they write things down and email them to me.

After I receive and rework the pieces they’ve written for me, I incorporate them with what came out of the transcriptions of our interviews. That synthesis is really hard work. Even if I were to use only words clients spoke and emailed to me, which is never the case, it would still take a lot of work to put those together in a way that yielded a book that’s readable and interesting. It’s a skill most ghostwriting clients – even the ones who can write beautiful letters and witty blog posts – don’t have and rely on us for. Maybe don’t realize falls under the heading of “ghostwriting.” Which is to say, even though the stories are not our own, and many of the words come from our clients, we still do a great deal of work transforming those stories and words into books.

This is where a client might get confused. In her mind, if she’s providing the stories, and I’m asking her to write, I’m somehow cheating or shirking my responsibilities, and she is no longer officially using me as a ghostwriter. Never mind that I’m neck deep in her manuscript, and I will be the one to piece it together, rearranging everything many times, creating transitions, finessing the order and wording again and again before turning it in. Even with chunks penned by the client, it’s still the same job for me. Actually, it can be an even harder job, especially when the client gets attached to problematic sentences she’s crafted and resists having them reworked, or insists on retaining sections that don’t move the story along.

So maybe Paltrow uttered or typed every one of the words in her cookbook. But I strongly doubt she strung them all together as they stand in the book without a great deal of Turshen’s hard work. Maybe “ghostwriting” is the wrong name for Turshen’s role. Maybe it’s the wrong label for this work, altogether, although I’m at a loss for a replacement that accurately describes taking raw verbal matter and transforming it first into rough jigsaw pieces, then smoothing and arranging those into a patchwork, and finally weaving it all into a seamless tapestry.

At the very least, it seems to me the book was a collaboration between Turshen and Paltrow. But it’s probably stipulated in Turshen’s contract that she can’t claim to have worked on it. That’s pretty standard – what ghostwriting is about – even though many people know that most celebrity books are not written by the celebrities themselves. That’s probably what Turshen assumed when she agreed to give Moskin an interview.

I hope Turshen is not penalized financially or otherwise for this potential breech of contract. It’s lousy enough having Gwyneth publicly deny her work on the book. I know that feeling. It’s happened to me.

No one goes into ghostwriting for the acclaim. You do it because it’s a flexible job, it pays at least decently (sometimes well), and because it can actually be gratifying to help someone who’s not really a writer tell his moving story. For the most part, I am happy to stay behind the scenes. While some writers accept a “with” credit on the cover, I never put my name on anyone else’s book.

I tend to think of myself more as a “memoir midwife,” as one client called me. Sometimes it feels akin to what I imagine being a surrogate mother is like.

The point is, in the end, I am ultimately delivering someone else’s story, not my own creation. And so I don’t think it makes sense to put my name on it.

Instead, it’s often written in my contract that I must receive the first acknowledgement, and that it must be worded in such a way that people in publishing will easily decipher what my role was. The acknowledgement usually reads something like, “I’d like to thank Sari Botton for helping me find the words.”

(Turshen’s acknowledgement in Paltrow’s book is more oblique about her editorial contributions: “I literally could not have written this book without the tireless, artful assistance of Julia Turshen. She quantified, tested, and retested every recipe, oversaw the production of the photos, helped brainstorm in a crisis, and, above all, was my intellectual and emotional support through the whole process.”)

Going otherwise unnamed is fine with me. It’s inherently not my ghostwriting clients’ job to publicize the work I did for them. By the same token, it’s not okay for an author to go to such lengths to vehemently deny having had help that she disparages her ghostwriter in the process.

One client of mine falsely insisted in interviews that she’d fired her ghostwriter after she’d found the first chapter to be unsatisfactory. She claimed she then wrote the book all by herself in five weeks.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I labored hard on that one, especially since we were “crashing it out” in just ten weeks, including the interviewing time.

I was advised to send that author a legal cease-and-desist letter to get her to stop “publicly retracting the acknowledgement stipulated in my contract.” Later, when I got some distance from the incident, I realized her denial was consistent with others she’d made about having help in her life, from the first time I interviewed her.

We talked in her living room that day about, among other things, why she couldn’t imagine putting her son on a special diet. “Tonight, I’m making spaghetti for the whole family,” she said. “I can’t imagine what he’d do if he couldn’t have any of it.”

When we wrapped up interviewing at about 6 pm, we walked into her kitchen. There, in front of the stove, was a woman in an apron, already making spaghetti. “Oh my god,” I thought, “my client thinks she’s making spaghetti even though her hired help is clearly doing it.”

I get it now. She doesn’t like to admit to accepting help with things. No one does. Celebrities – especially those who went to fancy prep schools in Manhattan, as Paltrow did – perceive a stigma associated with needing a ghostwriter, even though they might not have experience writing books. Besides, what’s the point of having a secret ghostwriter if you have to talk about it publicly?

When I read my client’s false claim that I’d been fired, I cried. And then I thought about all the babysitters and nannies that in the book she denied having, as well. I figured they were all having a good cry, too.

***

Photos by Brian Macaluso

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Note to self: Duh. Those are probably the biggest things I wrestle with. Plus I worry I’ll make things worse by writing about it all, whether as memoir or autobiographical fiction.

But I’m a mere featherweight in this category when compared with Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Gets Some, an incisive collection of autobiographical fiction originally published in 2000, which manages to be simultaneously bleak and sardonically funny. Carter ­– the HIV-positive, recovering-heroin-addict daughter of feminist author Anne Roiphe, and sister of often contrarian cultural critic and author Katie Roiphe – earned her black sheep bona fides going where few Jewish girls, let alone Jewish girls from Park Avenue, dare to go.

The collection features Gloria Bronsky, Carter’s alter ego, from her desperate days of using, and sometimes trading sex for drug money, on the Lower East Side, to her years struggling to stay clean one soul-suckingly mundane day at a time in Minnesota, land of the Twelve Step rehab facilities and half-way houses ad nauseam. Stops along the way, on Park Avenue and at a fancy prep school, provide stark perspective; this is not your run of the mill junkie with HIV. This is “a rather charming statistical anomaly,” as Glory says in one of the book’s earlier stories, a daughter of the moneyed New York Jewish intellectual elite, who derailed.

While Carter acknowledges that Glory is very much based on her, it’s an amped-up depiction, “a shocking and almost grotesque version of myself,” she told me when we met at a diner on the Upper West Side. There we talked about many things, including the perils of writing about your parents – even when your mother herself was disowned by the wealthy side of her family for writing about them, in fiction and memoir. “It gets very meta, very quickly,” Carter said.

By the way, I first learned about Glory Goes and Gets Some from a post on Emily Gould’s blog. It’s the December selection for the awesome indie e-book store/club, Emily Books, which Gould launched a few months ago with her friend and business partner, Ruth Curry. Carter will have a discussion with her cousin, n+1 editor Marco Roth, at the January 10^th Emily Books event at Word, Brooklyn.

***

The Rumpus: You dedicate your book to your mother and your step-father. There are some stories in there that seem very autobiographical and I wonder whether they hit a nerve with them. Like “Train Line.”

Emily Carter: Well, this part here, (pointing to a page in the story describing Glory’s mother sizing up Glory’s new boyfriend) that could describe a lot of parents – “Status: Judeo-negative… Do NOT interact.” That’s not entirely untypical in a certain segment of society. That was not the one that upset.

Rumpus: There was one that did?

Carter: Yes!

Rumpus: Tell me about that.

Carter: Well, it blew over.

Rumpus: How?

Carter: Well, first of all, my mother made her living writing memoirs and extremely autobiographical novels about her family, and there were major ramifications from that. But she always told me to write whatever I had to, and not to worry. Now, when she saw the piece that hurt and offended her, she was very hurt and offended. I didn’t write it to do that. My love for them and my gratitude, I felt, showed through in my work. I felt that I never attacked them in my work that way. I had to write about growing up with the family I grew up with or I would have been somehow dishonest. But it was not my agenda to expose and destroy, or to hurt or offend. But there was some hurt and some offense taken.

Rumpus: Which story was it?

Carter: “The Bride.” It was supposed to be published as fiction. But it was rejected as fiction and sold as memoir. At the time I was really, really, really strapped for money, and I had to say, I don’t care what you call it, just publish it and pay me for my piece so I can pay my rent. I really was in no position to argue about the niceties of autobiographical fiction at that point in my life.

Rumpus: Did that one run in the New Yorker?

Carter: No, it ran in a magazine online called Word Magazine. But somehow somebody at the New York Times dug it up and said this piece was originally written as memoir when they reviewed the book. They mentioned my relationship with my mother and my family and said it wasn’t “cozy” because I’d done some gimlet-eyed descriptions of her here and there. I wrote them a letter in response saying basically, thank you for the review, but I love my mother. And she was upset. Especially because it was the New York Times, which for her and my family is the big book or the bible or the Higher Power. And it wasn’t to me, so I was a little bit shocked by the depth of her hurt. But it blew over. It was a number of weeks, and then she was over it. I mean, believe me, I’ve done worse things, and it wasn’t meant to hurt her. And it blew over because she knows that I’m a writer, she’s a writer, and we have to write what we see. And she also knew I didn’t do it to attack her. My agenda wasn’t to hurt.

Rumpus: My biggest dilemma is that in writing about my life, I’ve hurt people in my family, most notably my father.

Carter: I read one piece you wrote. It didn’t seem terribly hurtful to me. I mean, it described an unpleasant situation, but he didn’t come off as a monster by any stretch of the imagination.

Rumpus: I can’t write a memoir or a book of stories that are autobiographical without that piece of who I am. And so I just wrestle with this.

Carter: I guess you’re in a sticky wicket. I don’t know what to say except that it’s been my experience that no matter what you say, or how you couch it, the truth from your perspective may be painful to someone else. At the same time, I’ve found that people who are writing about flawed but loved people in their lives, if they’re not writing to expose those people, or to alienate them, as long as that’s not their agenda, that’s not mixed into the story, those things blow over. It depends on why you’ve written it. Now, Augusten Burroughs wanted to destroy his mother, maybe for good reason. It was also such an important story, it couldn’t not be told. But he wanted to destroy her, and they will never talk again. That was part of his agenda. He also wanted to expose this man who had drawn so many people into his orbit and hurt them, and he wanted to strike a blow against charismatic, damaging people. He wanted to hurt them the way he felt he’d been hurt. It was a brilliant book and it was wonderful, and it was his agenda.

If your agenda is to tell a good story, and you think someone’s flaws would make a good dramatic twist, it is a forgivable sin, and I think you’ll be forgiven. That’s truly what I believe. You can’t expect not to hurt. It will hurt. However, if your agenda is not just to hurt, I do think those things blow themselves over. If you’re deliberately trying to hurt a relative and destroy them, well, then yes.

Rumpus: That’s not at all my agenda. It’s just that a lot of my observations and a lot of my stories come from being this daughter.

Carter: And you love him. That came through in the piece I read, anyway.

Rumpus: Did you let your mother read the book before it went to press?

Carter: Much adored, my mother is often my first reader. I lay my work at her feet like a cat would a bird. Also, I value her feedback. I do try to keep from her things that might upset her, but I’m afraid I’ve made her judge aesthetically content that might have affected her emotionally.

Rumpus: Did you leave your last name, Roiphe, off the book to protect her?

Carter: I used Carter to avoid any taint of nepotism should I get published, which I didn’t for years, and was silly anyway since the underground ‘zine type mags I was writing for had never heard of anything as mainstream as my Upper West Side, Times Book Review-reading mother. The first thing I was published in was a cute little pamphlet calling itself “Dumb Fucker Review.” It paid in copies.

Rumpus: It was so interesting reading one of your mom’s memoirs, 1185 Park Avenue, after you and I talked on the phone. Here she’s writing this memoir about some intense family stuff, and in it she talks about writing autobiographical fiction years before that made her father distance himself from her. And then here you are writing this, and it’s very meta.

Carter: Yes, it gets very meta very quickly – a big meta mess! What my mother did was she got us disowned from the wealthy side of the family, which she could have thought of when she was 27, writing her books! But she had to tell the truth.

Rumpus: Was the choice to write autobiographical fiction instead of memoir a creative impulse? Or was it an attempt to protect people?

Carter: It was a creative impulse. It was also easier for me. Instead of writing five stories about five different people, I could composite them and make a person up that I believed exemplified this, that or the other point that I was trying to get across. Did I steal from life? Like a ruthless little gonif I stole from life. But I put it together in my own way.

Rumpus: When we spoke on the phone, you said that the book is only partly autobiographical. Is it that there are some stories that are, and some that aren’t, or that each is a mix?

Carter: There are stories there that are about other people besides the main character, and they are 100 percent fictional. But the stories that are autobiographical, the character is a shocking and almost grotesque version of myself. It’s not really me. It certainly deals with feelings I’ve had myself, but ratcheted up to ten. If you could create a character made of all your worst insecurities and worst feelings and have someone say them out loud for you through a megaphone, that’s what Glory is. It’s not an accurate reflection of my character or how you’d find me in a conversation. And certainly, I always kept in mind that if something made me uncomfortable in myself or in a situation, that’s where I would go. I would make that more of my focus; I would make it bigger.

Rumpus: I’ve thought a lot about doing that kind of thing. Years ago, I did some MFA work, and my natural inclination then was to fictionalize real situations. And then somewhere along the line, I switched gears to nonfiction. I still consider writing fiction. I think it would be kind of fun to have a character who does all the shit I’m afraid to do. But I also have this feeling like I can’t get there until I get the true stuff out first.

Carter: I understand that feeling. The only thing I can say is, it’s a ruthless business. And there isn’t much you can do to make that easier for people, especially if it’s somebody who really has a resistance against it. But I’d say you can stick to your guns about your intention, and say it’s not to expose or hurt or offend, but to tell and to explain. Because, if you believe your story will connect with other people, that it’s a story worth telling, you have to tell it.

Rumpus: I’ve got all these stories I’m so afraid to tell. Like about how I grew up adjacent to affluence, but not from an affluent family myself. I had these step-sisters who had trust funds, and they had this grandmother who would give them thousands of dollars every year, and then she’d give me and my sister each a card at Chanukah with one crisp dollar bill in it.

Carter: That’s a great story. How can you not write that story? With the card and the crisp dollar bill. It’s a story that needs telling, not to attack, but because it’s the story of a young person having that kind of experience. There’s always that story in families of someone getting the short end of the stick, and what is that like?

Rumpus: If I ever get my shit together and complete my book, maybe I’ll open it with an explanation of where I’m coming from, and hope it will help people be less upset.

Of all the composite characters in your book, did any of the people they were based on ever come to you and say, “I can tell that’s me, and I’m pissed.”

Carter: No, and it’s a good thing, too. But one of the people I based one very small part of a character on, to our great sorrow, wound up shooting his girlfriend in the head – not killing her – and is in jail for the rest of his life. A very sweet person when sober. A very different person. He did this heinous thing. That’s someone I’d like to not have mad at me. But I had to steal his story. It was too good. I suppose if he confronted me I’d admit it and say, it was that particular thing, it was a good story, give him some money if he asked for it. You know, I didn’t make a lot of money from this book. But I don’t feel bad about what I did. I certainly don’t. I used more bits and pieces of incidents than whole stories. And I only did that with people I cared about. Because, you know, we only kill the ones we love.

Rumpus: Did you sit down and write most of this at once?

Carter: No. It was like five years until I had enough to have a collection. And then I had to add parts to make it more read-through, more cohesive. I was hearing that short stories didn’t sell, short stories didn’t sell, short stories didn’t sell. So I wrote some interstices and some pieces that would make it seem more novelistic, more like a book about a certain place and time. I wrote some more interstices and more characters to make it more overarching and give it a narrative.

Rumpus: Did you sell it when it was complete?

Carter: No, it was rejected by everybody – everyone my agent sent it to. And I sent it myself to a small local press and they accepted it.

Rumpus: How long did it take you to sell it?

Carter: About two years.

Rumpus: And then it got resold?

Carter: It got resold for paperback.

Rumpus: Have you considered doing another book?

Carter: You know, for the past 10 years, I’ve been really involved in other things. I am starting to come back to it, and we’ll see what happens. After you’ve not been writing for a while, you’re very rusty. My gears are grinding back up. The machine is coming back to creaky life.

Rumpus: What have you been doing?

Carter: I’ve been studying ethology. Which is animal cognition. And taking some dog training courses. And I was taking care of a lot of animals. And I was helping my husband study for nursing school. He went back at 45 to get his RN. So now I have a private nurse. And I’ve been basically following my bliss. I’ve been making money here and there doing book reviews. I still do book reviews for the Star Tribune, to try and make some money. Doing a long piece again is very scary. I can actually hear these rusty gears turning and creaking, clicking into place and screaming out for WD 40.

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“I bet it’s because of what happened with me,” suggested former Times Critical Shopper columnist Mike Albo, who very publicly lost that plum gig in the fall of 2009 after word that he’d taken a free trip to Jamaica as part of a press junket made its way around the snarkosphere.

He’s probably right. There is language in that Times email that just had to have arisen from the paper’s clumsy 2009 firing of Albo (who is probably best known as the co-author of the brilliant satirical novel The Underminer: Or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life, and as a performance artist who stars in Underminer-themed videos, among other things).

It didn’t matter that Albo was a starving freelancer and not on the New York Times staff. It didn’t matter that the trip was completely unrelated to his column – for which he received a measly $900 every other week. The incident raised thorny questions about the relationships between journalists and the people they write about – particularly in the more merch-y arenas, like fashion. And it raised other questions about the kinds of restrictions a publication can place on writers to whom it doesn’t offer a salary and benefits.

Albo addresses those questions and chronicles the whole ordeal in The Junket, a bitingly funny, thinly-veiled “novella-festo” he’s just released as a Kindle Single for $1.99.

In it, he achieves the perfect balance between veracity and satire, twisting certain details in the most deliciously wicked ways, but never making you doubt for a second that the story is so real it still haunts Albo at night. The fictional “Mike Albo” in The Junket explains it this way:

“This story needs to be told without much fictionalization or allegory, from my point of view. It’s not like I want to do it this way. I wish I could transmute my middle-aged gay pain into some teen vampire drama. But I do need to bend the truth a bit or I will get into even more trouble. Think of this as a memoir with a fictional $3,000 sheer Thai silk veil lightly draped over it.”

Albo chatted with me by phone about how he became “the Silkwood of swag,” the reasons he chose to fictionalize, and the virtues of publishing an e-book (ironically partially about the death of print) through Kindle Singles.

The Rumpus: I know you’re calling The Junket fiction, but I have to tell you that it is very real to me. I lived in that world, when I worked for women’s magazines. It’s unbelievable how much stuff gets sent to you. At a certain point you don’t even realize you’re accepting gifts. It’s just stuff on your desk that would take too much effort to mail back. You’ve got this little passage that really says it all: “I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion – gift bags and plus ones and banquets and galas – that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work. Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag.”

Mike Albo: Yeah, I’m not saying that what I did was right – I’m just saying everyone does it. It’s part of the interesting wheel that no one is admitting. Our consumerism involves a lot of hype. I just think we’re all part of it. The line is more blurry than people admit.

And the only people who can afford to abide by the publications’ policies against accepting freebies are people with a lot of money or rich parents – people who are like, “The $150 I’m going to get for this article will pay for fresh cut flowers for my Tribeca loft!”

Rumpus: It’s crazy, what is happening with rates for freelance articles. Just about every day, I get a “job alert” from MediaBistro offering me an opportunity to write for content farms like Suite 101 and Demand Studios, for like $35 an article, and I want to shoot myself. This used to be a way to make a living. I don’t know how anyone does it now, especially living in the city.

Albo: It’s the same story about New York. I try not to be curmudgeonly about it, but it’s so hard to scrape by in these creative professions.

Rumpus: I really can’t see how going on that trip to Jamaica would compromise your reporting for the Times, for the Critical Shopper column. I mean, if anything, I could see you writing about what went on there, sort of sending it up.

Albo: The reason I wanted to go was it was such a bizarre trip. The people who were going were really interesting. And Thrillist – the hosts of the trip I went on, not the trip “Mike Albo” in the story went on – was pretty interesting. I was really interested in how all these brands were circling around this trip. I’m so obsessed with how consumerism consumes us. This was like a wet dream/nightmare come true. The whole experience was so bizarre by so clarifying. It really sharpened my eyes and my head.

Rumpus: You were basically doing research about what it’s like to be conflicted about swag.

Albo: And also about relationships with people you write about. When I was writing for the Times, there were plenty of times when they asked me to write about someone I knew and I said, “You know, I’m kind of friends with them,” and I didn’t write it.

But at the same time, some of the people I wrote about became my friends. There are some designers who are just lovely people, and sometimes just by going to the stores to meet with them, I became friends with them, and just love them.

We’re pushing product. We’re all always pushing product. It’s our whole culture. Everyone is doing it all the time. I’m starting to feel like I want to go to law school or something. The whole journalism ethics thing is such a blurry world, and I can’t see out of it. I wish I were all Arianna Huffington-ish about it and could argue my point, but I don’t have much of a point besides, this happened to me, and it was hard.

Rumpus: Part of what keeps me from writing is that I’m afraid to burn bridges and upset people. You’ve fictionalized, but it’s still pretty clear who’s who. Are you concerned or worried about burning bridges?

Albo: Funny, I said to a friend today, “I hope my bridge-burning novella-festo does well because I’ve completely destroyed all my professional contacts, yay!” There are a few reasons why I wanted to fictionalize. The first is that I thought that if I did it as a memoir, it would be polemical and dry. And I’d have to be more argumentative. Also, I wouldn’t be able to make up fake newspaper headlines, which was the most fun to do! Secondly, I feel that when you write a memoir, unless you’ve had an incredibly interesting life like Jon-Jon Goulian or Ingrid Betancourt, it would be really boring. Like, if I were going to write this as a memoir, I’d have to explain to readers, “Now this Paul is a different Paul than the other Paul that I know…”

Rumpus: So you feel as if it would require too much boring exposition?

Albo: Clearly. And to tell the story well as a memoir, you have to streamline it, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it fiction. I did the same thing – my first book, Hornito: My Lie Life, is also a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel and I used my real name. Some of the stories in it aren’t true, but mostly it’s true. But I had to streamline. I almost feel like it’s reality-show literature.

Rumpus: Oh, wow – you’ve just invented a whole new category.

Albo: Thirdly, the little people, I really didn’t want to go after them. Including my ex-boyfriend, who is different than in the story. The woman who is Laynee, in the book, there’s some talk on the internet about who she is. But the truth is, I sat next to a guy on the plane, and there was a woman on the trip I fell in love with, who was just as funny as that character, but it was not her.

Rumpus: So that was a composite character.

Albo: Yes. Totally. It would be a bummer if I hurt anyone’s feelings.

Rumpus: And the boyfriend, too, was highly fictionalized?

Albo: He did not look that way. He was different. But I don’t even know if that kind of fictionalizing works that way. Call me in four months and I’ll tell you if anyone called me and said their feelings were hurt. I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. This was a watershed realization for me: One of the first things I got published was back in the 90s – the golden age of the 90s – and it was for this website being put together by Prodigy. Some of my friends, who I still love, were editors there and they would ask me to write funny essays. One thing I wrote was a piece about all the people who died in my high school. My high school was like the movie “Final Destination.” There were all these weird accidents and stories. So I did a version with people’s real names. This was back when you thought the internet was like paper – I didn’t think it would be in there in perpetuity. Years later I went to my high school reunion, and this guy there was like, “You know, you wrote this thing…” And I felt so terrible. I begged my friend to take it off the site. That to me was a moment when I realized I had to step on the other side of the line, of satire. You can do it, and it’s a very thin veil. Keep it real, but keep it satirical, and heighten things.

Rumpus: You’re saying you can fictionalize as a way to not hurt people?

Albo: Oh–“hurt” – that’s such a harsh word. What I’m saying is that you can avoid revealing people.

Rumpus: One of the things that has stymied me is that I am afraid of hurting people in my life. I have all this rich material, but I’m afraid to use it. I could fictionalize, and that could be good for many reasons, but I don’t know that people wouldn’t see themselves in my extrapolated versions of them and still be hurt.

Albo: Let’s just pretend we have no souls for a second and not address the hurting people issue. I’ll tell you that when I started writing this piece, I thought about making it really absurd. Like all these people go to this island, and half of them die, and the rest have to swim back. Like I was going to totally go over the top. And I had a bunch of scenes – like one in SoHo House, making fun of it, and it just seemed a little too farcical. There are some memoirists who are so lying. I just want to look around and ask, “Does anyone believe this shit?” And then there are these novels that are total reality-show literature, where I’m like, “Oh my god, I can feel their pain in these pages.” I feel like Hemmingway is like that in a way. There’s this book I’m reading now called I Love Dick.

Rumpus: I’ve read it.

Albo: That’s total reality-show literature.

Rumpus: She refers to it as fiction, but apparently it almost perfectly mirrors her life.

Albo: It might be fiction. Maybe she embellished the letters. It’s totally reality-show literature.

Rumpus: I feel like it would be fun to write fiction about a character like me, who does all the shit I’m afraid to do – including writing a memoir. Anyway, I loved the way you used fiction to heighten things. Having lived in that world, I feel like I knew which parts were real, and which you made bigger.

Albo: The magazines I worked for, they’re pretty fictionalized.

Rumpus: I’m really glad you wrote this as fiction. It gave you a lot of latitude. And it allowed you to be really funny. It is so funny! How many words is it?

Albo: I want to say it’s about 16,000 words – like 41 pages. The Kindle Single program editor said, “We’re finding these work when they’re between 8,000 and 30,000 words.” People feel like they’ve learned something or taken something away with those lengths. When I was trying to bloat this out into a book form, I had all these chapters that were more memoir-y than fiction, and who knows, one slight dream is that someone at some stodgy publishing house will ask for a full-length book version. But I was really getting bogged down with telling the story, and then Virginia Heffernan, who is like this weird angel in my life who just comes along and gives me an idea and saves my ass, was like, “You should get in touch with this guy at Kindle Singles.” So I called the guy and we talked. I was really tentative at first. But he was like, “I really think it will be great for this.”

Rumpus: So, is publishing a Kindle Single a good thing? Is it a viable way for a writer to publish?

Albo: It’s too early to say, and maybe in October I’ll say, oh, I should have done it another way. But right now, I like it. Part of the relief of this is the format. It’s sort of this slightly independent way of publishing your work, and also I’m not embarrassed asking my friends to spend two bucks. I feel bad making friends spend twelve bucks, but not two bucks.

Rumpus: And you don’t have to ask them to go to your Kickstarter and give you ten or fifteen or twenty-five bucks, and offer them a present in return, and not get the money if you don’t make your goal.

Albo: My book kind of feels like the right length for it, too. Once again, who knows? We’ve been in this sort of bi-polar time in publishing where something has had to be either a magazine article or a book, with nothing in between, unlike the old days when there were pamphlets and little weird books all the time. Like, Blake was doing his stuff like that. A friend actually said to me the other day, “I’m so glad you did a short version, because I feel like there are so many things out there trying to be books that aren’t.”

Rumpus: Do you also realize the irony that you’ve written a piece partly about the death of print as a Kindle-only piece. Did that occur to you?

Albo: It did, yes. But right now I am feeling more optimistic about the continuation of print than I ever have. Even just from people asking me this week, “Can I get The Junket in print?” What I’m hoping is that there can be print-on-demand on it. I don’t think print is going away. McNally Jackson book store has a this Fotomat-type print-on-demand booth.

Rumpus: How does it work? Do you get an advance like you would from a book publisher?

Albo: No, there’s no advance. The cut is 70/30 – 70 for me, 30 for Amazon. Which is pretty good. So I make about $1.40 per book. It’s pure sales. I could end up getting the amount of an advance anyway, without having to pay it back. Who knows? This is the splashiest, gossipiest piece I’ll write for a while. It seems right for this.

Rumpus: Does your agent get a cut?

Albo: Yes, my agent is taking a cut. I did broker the deal, but being a new form of content, there are all sorts of weird little details and twists to the content and distribution and I am grateful to have her working with me on it. To me this is an interesting time for both this new form and for the relationship of an agent and writer. For instance, I am hoping this to evolves into an actual solid book in the near future, and I still don’t know if that would happen through Amazon, or with a publisher, or, maybe, I will do it on my own and put it in bookstores myself – and I sort of still see the value in having an agent help you figure these things out. So far this has been a positive experience. But hey, I’ve been living in NYC for years so I am cautiously optimistic about everything. Catch me in a month or so and I will let you know how it all panned out. I will either be totally psyched or totally bitter and living in a shed with the phrase “fuck the world” tattooed to my forehead.

Rumpus: How have you been surviving, financially, since you got fired from your column?

Albo: Well, The Underminer was optioned for a film in I think 2007. And I got a chunk of money for that. I have been trickling off of that for years. There are some months when I can’t pay the rent and I’ve been really broke. I’ve been writing for GQ and W, and thank god for those assignments. I just wrote something for Men’s Journal. Then there are those places that forget to pay me, and I have to waste all this time following and tracking people down. My self-esteem has been run over by a tank several times, but think I still have a good gauge of when it’s just too humiliating.

Rumpus: This is a really hard time to be a freelancer. It’s amazing that you’re still doing it, especially after what happened to you at the Times.

Albo: Of course it had to happen to me when I was turning 40. I mean, could this have been any more of a Jennifer Aniston movie for a gay guy? The fact that it coincides with a mid-life crisis I didn’t even know I was having. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Am I supposed to completely change careers? Or what?

Rumpus: I think you should get money for just having coined the term “underminer.” Like the world at large should give you an ongoing, tax-free stipend for that. You hit on something so accurate – I make references to that all the time. Just the other day I tweeted, “First, we kill all the Underminers,” after someone said something allegedly supportive to me that was actually completely unsupportive and back-handedly hurtful.

Albo: Thank you. I like that–when the riots hit New York, we have to kill all the Underminers first.

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Honestly, I didn’t even want to read it.  There was just so much of the kind of pre-publication hype that I find off-putting: a highly publicized, literary-A-list-studded galley-release party three months before the book even came out; numerous articles about what a social butterfly and literary it-boy Goulian was, and how he was famous, essentially, for being about-to-be-famous.

And then there was the whole matter of the reported $750,000 advance Random House paid him. When I hear about books earning crazy sums like that, I get a horrible stomachache, and not for the reasons you might think, such as jealousy. No. Having been party once (as a ghostwriter) to a million-dollar deal that placed unprecedented, mind-fucking pressure on me and everyone else involved, and then went wrong in every possible way a project can go wrong, I find myself anxiously worrying for writers who land those kinds of contracts. I’m afraid to go anywhere near their books; I want to avert my eyes from what seem to me train wrecks waiting to happen. What is the chance of one of those books living up to its pre-release hype? Of earning back its advance? How soon before an accounting is taken, and the author starts getting shit from snotty gossip columns for not moving books?

I’m not sure what persuaded me to give the book a chance. (My curiosity may have been piqued by something as trivial as a tweet comparing Goulian to Stephen Elliott – both are self-proclaimed submissives who tend to eschew long-term relationships, real jobs and standard adult living arrangements, and who generally prefer cuddling over sex.) But somehow or other, I eventually opened it, and that was it. I fell in love with the book, with Jon-Jon as a writer, and then with Jon-Jon the living, breathing, warm-hearted human being when I interviewed him.

Goulian is so eloquently, hilariously candid about everything – his insecurities, his vanity (he is currently between nose jobs number two and three), his wide-ranging ambivalence, his entrenched aversion to conventional notions of “growing up” – that it’s hard not to be engaged, and to empathize, especially if you’ve ever felt out-of-step with societal norms or your age group, or if you’ve ever let your parents down. You can’t help but feel for him as he tries again and again to do what he, the brother of two high-achieving scholar-athletes, thinks he’s supposed to do. He goes to law school. He clerks for a prominent judge – although he can’t bring himself to take the bar exam. He moves on to a job as a revered assistant to New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, but he can stick with it only so long before he’s on to other less demanding commitments, such as babysitting.

I especially admired the great humor and sensitivity with which Goulian writes about his parents and his grandparents. They all labor – clumsily, hurtfully – to understand and guide their peculiar progeny, a bright kid who in his teens takes a sharp turn from his passions for soccer and academics, and dons a skirt and eyeliner. I was so moved by this remarkable balance between hard truth-telling and compassion right from the introduction. There, he tells the story of his famous political philosopher grandfather, Sidney Hook, referring to Goulian – his body-image-obsessed, effeminate college-age grandson – as a faygeleh (Yiddish for homosexual), and a few pages later apologizing for that in a sweet, incredibly humble letter. (For the record, Goulian is straight.)

Goulian brilliantly frames the book as a response to a postcard he received when he was 36 from his six-year-old self, thanks to an arrangement he’d made thirty years before with a small-town postal carrier. Six-year-old, soccer-playing, ocean-surfing Jon-Jon wants to know what thirty-six-year-old Jon-Jon is up to. Forty-two-year-old, skirt-wearing, couch-surfing Jon-Jon has a lot to fill him in on.

Goulian and I talked–and talked, and talked–at the Upper West Side apartment of a family friend, who lets him stay in the tiny former maid’s quarters off the kitchen.

***

The Rumpus: So, you’d never written anything before. After all the various things you’ve done in your life, and years of indecision, how did you decide to write a book–and this particular book?

Jon-Jon Goulian: It came out of nowhere for me. I’d never published a single article or anything in my life. Well, there was an essay I published when I was 17 in the San Diego Reader, which is like the Village Voice of San Diego. I won third place in a contest. I think the question was, “What’s the worst job you’ve ever had.” Between then and now, this was it. And it was torturous. I don’t sit still easily. So I actually stood when I wrote the proposal, with my laptop on this bureau back there [points in direction of maid’s quarters], in four weeks. And then in Vermont [at his late grandfather’s house] I found this other bureau and did the same thing. Because when you’re standing, you can bounce around on the tips of your toes a little. It keeps you moving, and it’s better for your posture. It’s more exercise.

Rumpus: But how did you know this was the particular book you wanted to write? I ask because I’m 45 years old, I’ve been sitting on writing a book of my own for years out of fear, but also out of indecision, because I can’t settle on which story, which angle, is it fiction or memoir, what’s the voice. I cannot zero in on which thing I want to say first. So, after all the things you’ve tried in your life, how do you come to, okay, I’m going to write a book and it’s going to be this exact book, and I’m going to write the proposal in four weeks?

Goulian: The beginning of this book was this: In January 2007, I am living in this maid’s room, doing odd jobs, freelance editing, babysitting for $12 an hour. I’m having lunch with a friend, Kate Taylor, who is now a culture reporter for the New York Times. At the Time she was writing for the New York Sun, but on the side, she was editing an anthology of essays about Anorexia called “Going Hungry,” for Vintage. She had a lot of writers – Jennifer Egan, Joyce Maynard, herself – and she had one guy maybe? She wanted to diversify the voices. So at lunch, she sees me playing with my food, and ordering in the most high-maintenance way possible, and I looked really skinny. She said, “Do you maybe have an eating disorder?” And I said, “Maybe by the loosest definition.” I definitely sometimes starve myself to be deliberately skinny and bony. But hardly is it cause for intervention or hospitalization, or even worry. She said, “Would you write an essay for my book?” So I went home, and standing at the bureau, I whipped out an 8,000-word essay in three days. Then she started to edit it and wanted to put it in her book, but then I thought, The theme of anorexia has over-determined the focus of this essay. I told her, “I don’t feel comfortable being in your book, because all these other stories are about people who were seriously anorexic,” and it felt like my approach was even a little frivolous. So I pulled the essay.

In the mean time, I had sent it to all my friends. And most of my friends happen to be writers. I fell in with this group of writers after I graduated college. I’d had no literary aspirations really then, or even now. Law was going to be my thing. I thought I had to grow up, so I gave all my skirts away and started working as a paralegal. But I fell in with this crew, and I’ve never been able to shake them.  And I showed them the essay, and they were like, “You know, there could be a book here.” These people were very encouraging along the way. Because even though I didn’t have any literary aspirations, I used to write these very long emails and tell fun stories. They always said, “You should write something, share these stories with a bigger audience. We get a real kick out of you; other people should enjoy you, too. “ So I sent that essay to Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie agency, and she said, “Yes, you might have a book proposal somewhere in here.” So she took me on as a client in May, 2007, and then I spent the next nine or 10 months just really thinking about my life and taking notes.

At that time, the memoir was going to be more about my eating, and my relationship to food was going to be more of the organizing theme of the book. But then I didn’t have that much to say about it, other than what I have to say about it now, which is that my father raised me on such a rigid diet that I became so self-conscious about what I put in my mouth that consumption in every respect became fraught for me – even sexual consumption. So I spent 10 months, but really just thinking and taking notes.

Rumpus: That sounds like a great exercise–but also like the kind of thing I’d just keep doing and doing without ever completing the thing.

Goulian: Well, it came to a point where I really didn’t know if I was going to do it. I didn’t know if I had enough to say. Then March, 2008 has rolled around and I haven’t really done anything on this proposal. I meet people all the time who say they just can’t sit down and do the writing they want to do. I was talking to this woman the other day, and she has a full-time job, and she’s married, and she has kids, so she’s lucky if she can find a three-hour chunk of time to write each day. And here I was with at least three of those chunks every day! I’d sit down in the morning, and I’d get nothing done, and then I’d get up and run around for a while, and then sit down and try again. And if I didn’t get anything done in the second chunk of time that day, I’d have to start over again later. Sometimes it would be 9 o’clock at night before I had anything on the page. Sometimes you need to have some serious external prod to force you to write something. I remember Mary McCarthy said that when she started going out with Edmund Wilson, he would lock her in a room and say, literally, “You’re literally not coming out until you’ve written a short story.” So, for me, I sent a note to my agent saying, “If I haven’t given you a proposal in three or four weeks, drop me.” My friends knew I had this agent, and they were really supportive of me and the shame of potentially being dropped–for me, that was the external prod. Then I just stood at the bureau, and what came to me was, Hey, instead of food, how about androgyny as the organizing theme? So, I whipped that proposal out.

Rumpus: A full-on proposal with sample chapters and everything?

Goulian: Initially the proposal was about 20,000 words–an introduction, two sample chapters, an outline of the three remaining chapters, then a prologue, which was about the postcard. Which was a great springboard. It organically gave rise to the story, because it’s my younger self writing to me and asking, “Hey, what’s up with you, man?”

Rumpus: That is so perfect.

Goulian: That’s something every memoirist has to answer: Why are you telling this story? And everyone calls you self-indulgent, and narcissistic, and asks, “Why do we care.” And the conceit here is that I had to answer my younger self. He’s reaching out to me and asking me what I’m doing with my life, and I’m saying mom and dad still give me a hard time. So it was just perfect. So, I sold the book, in April, 2008. When I finally woke up from that, it’s around June 1, and I have a book to write.

Rumpus: What kind of a deadline did you have?

Goulian: A very short one.

Rumpus: Like, how short? I’ll tell you that as I ghostwriter, on occasion, I’ve been given, like, seven weeks to write a book – including interviewing time.

Goulian: I had a September 1 deadline. From June. So I went off to the woods, and started going at it. Remember, besides the proposal itself, this is the first thing I’ve ever written.

Rumpus: And you’ve got this huge advance.

Goulian: Which I don’t want to say much about–actually, which I don’t want to say anything about!

Rumpus: But, that’s some pressure! So, did you write it in the ten weeks?

Goulian: Yes, I wrote it in the ten weeks, and it was chronological as I’d proposed. And then I sat down with my editors at Random House, and we all agreed that the chronological approach wasn’t really working, primarily because my life, chronologically, doesn’t lead up to any crisis of action or revelation. I’ve hung out here, I’ve hung out there, I’ve stared at the ceiling here, I’ve started at the ceiling there. The book was losing momentum. So they suggested and I agreed that I structure the book more thematically. They said, “Maybe if you gathered the material on various themes and you put them in baskets.  Put the bits about your adorable Granny Shammy here, and the bits about your grandfather Sidney here, and the bits about food here.” And then I went off for six months just thinking about structure, and trying to come up with an outline for the book that would work for me. I sat in that maid’s room back there, and I had every scene of the book on a sticky note.

Rumpus: So you were storyboarding.

Goulian: Yes, like people who write screenplays. And I would start with a number of baskets, and then I started wondering which basket should go first, and it drove me a little batty. The word that finally made everything gel for me was–and I don’t know where I even heard it–“imbricated.” It refers to the overlapping of tiles on a roof–the way they overlap like that, that’s called imbricated. For some reason that word meant a lot to me. I thought, why don’t you think of these chapters as “imbricated”? So that each chapter will overlap both over the one preceding it and over the one that’s yet to come.

Rumpus: I’m really fascinated with this “imbricated” concept, and the storyboarding idea. I’ve thought about doing that. What I do to myself is, I get an idea about what I think my book should be, but then I start obsessing, thinking, Okay, which details belong in here at all, and which ones should go first, and which part should I write first? And what if I outline? But what if I outline wrong? And then I just can’t do anything. I’ve got lists and lists and lists all over the place, on paper, in my computer, of stories and ideas. They’re just all over the place. Maybe I need to sit down and storyboard them, and give myself time to just outline. Was that really helpful to you?

Goulian: Yes, but remember, I had that gun to my head. I had people expecting to see things, and I had these tight deadlines. Without those, I’d probably still be outlining in that back room. I finally came up with an outline for the second draft that I was happy with. Each chapter starts a little later in time than the one preceding it, but also roams around. Because when you think of your life, you don’t think about it in strictly chronological terms. You’re swimming in it, and I was trying to bring to life that aspect of life – that one swims constantly. And you’re hanging out in the mind of a neurotic, someone seriously neurotic. And that’s where the narrative takes place. A lot doesn’t happen, in the conventional story sense, in this book.

Rumpus: It’s all character-driven–all emotional.

Goulian: And perception-driven. It’s about self-perception. Then Random House said, great, let’s move ahead with it. So then I went back to Vermont, and stood at the bureau writing. And in two months, executed it, with this outline reigning me in. And the second draft was also about 120,000 words. Including stuff that didn’t make it into either draft, it would have been about 400,000 words.

Rumpus: That’s like four-and-a-half books.

Goulian: I have enough outtakes for a few more books.

Rumpus: Do you think you’ll do that?

Goulian: No. Actually, a lot of the outtakes and a lot of the stuff from the first draft that didn’t make it was about my sex life from my 20s and early 30s. In the book now, the chapter on sex and food, called “the Vegetable Monster,” that’s a joint chapter because my anxieties about food, from the rigid diet I was raised on, tainted my relationship to sex.

Rumpus: I can see that. I mean, I was raised with a weird relationship to food, and one parent who was a compulsive over-eater, who was always alternating between that and crazy diets and health food. It made me very self-conscious about weight and my body and body fat, and uncomfortable about showing my body to people.

Goulian: Well, that, too. But also, sex literally involves consumption of fluids – kissing and whatev. It made me think of the health implications. This was also the age of AIDS. And my dad’s a hematologist, and he was seeing the earliest cases of AIDS. So sex in this chapter ends when I’m 21 and I’ve been broken in by “Stevie,” who, by the way, came to my reading in the Castro, and who agreed to that name.

Rumpus: So you changed people’s names?

Goulian: Yes and I say as much in the author’s note. If someone was involved in sex stuff, and if I thought there was a risk of embarrassing them.

Rumpus: But then there are people who are obviously your family. Did they know you were writing this book, and how did they feel about it?

Goulian: I didn’t tell my parents until I sold the book. I didn’t even tell them I had an agent before then because of the classic Jewish mother thing. When you’re working on something and you’re a kid who’s been floating as long as I had, to even talk about having an agent would have made my parents say, “Yeah, we’ve heard about these things you work on…” And in the past I’d worked on screenplays and other things. The day I sold the memoir, the first call I made was to them. They were obviously very excited that I’d finally done something. Also, they were a little wary of what this kid’s gonna say. I remember saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fair.” I was incredibly anxious about how deeply I could go into my family’s characters and their lives, because I kept asking myself, Why do I have the right to violate their privacy? And I don’t. So my response to that was largely to stay away from them in this book. I mean, what I say about them is accurate. But if my family were dead, this would be a very different book.

Rumpus: I feel you treat them much more kindly and sensitively than they treated you when you were growing up. I feel like you were very fair. But fair or not, you’re still revealing things about people. That’s a huge risk.

Goulian: Although, not that much. In fact, in the review in the New York Observer, he gently criticized me for turning them into superheroes, and he referred to the book as a love letter to the folks. Again, if they were dead, I would have psychoanalyzed them maybe more. I might have gone into factors in their lives that might have affected the way they brought me up. My mother’s relationship to food as a girl, for instance, was fraught, as was her mother’s. I stayed away from that because I didn’t think it was my business. The richer characters in the book are the ones who are dead. My grandfather, my granny Shammy, my high school teacher Mr. Carey, sort of a mentor to me in high school, those are the ones that are richer. A fair criticism of the book is that the parents and the brothers are stock characters. In fact, my brothers are referred to simply as the oldest and the middle brothers, so all you take from that is that they’re archetypes, and I’m the youngest in the birth order and how that might have affected me. Even though they are thinly drawn, arguably, I don’t really know them that well. Boys – we are not emotive with our folks.  You come home from school, and you’re like, “Hey, what’s up? School’s fine…” It’s largely small talk, the substance of conversations. I don’t go deeply into my feelings, they don’t go into their feelings.

Rumpus: Although, your father tries to engage you with this question of what’s going on with you, and what are you doing with your life.

Goulian: Yes, he does, and I don’t really engage with him on it.

Rumpus: And you’re not even revealing anything shocking about that by telling about it. That’s his role. That’s what a father will do. I mean, I get the call all the time – “What are you doing? Are you writing something finally?” In my case, there’s a subtext there of, “Are you writing about me?” So did you give them a chance to read it first before it was published, and to make changes?

Goulian: I waited until the last possible second to show them the book. It was last December, two weeks before it was going into galley. One approach was just never show it to them and wait until it came out in stores. But I showed it to them, for two reasons. First of all, I needed my dad’s legal permission to publish those letters he sent me. And, two, so they could correct biographical details about their lives, because this is now going to be published, and in a bookstore. So if I say my dad got his tonsils out when he was six, but he got them out when he was four, he could correct that. I was terrified. It was still a manuscript. I doled out each chapter, first to my mom. I did not show them the sex chapter, though – the one on sex and food.

Rumpus: Yeah, you sort of apologize to them for that chapter in the opening of the book.

Goulian: It’s more about my body than they need to know. Although, when I think about it, there’s a lot about my dad in there – about the diet he raised us on – but I didn’t show it to him. And my mom read it really quickly. And this was true of both my parents: they were too busy preparing themselves for the next awful revelation that never came to really enjoy the book. It had been two-and-a-half years since I’d sold the proposal, and they just had no idea what to expect. Does he turn us into monsters? Does he blame us for things? There are so many memoirs out there turning parents into monsters.

Rumpus: I know – my mom asks me all the time, “Are you writing a book about a bad mother?”

Goulian: My mother told me something about Erica Jong’s parents, as a way of reassuring me. Basically, they were so happy that their daughter published a book, that they didn’t care what was in it.

Rumpus: I wish that were the case with mine. I published a Modern Love essay a few years ago in which I revealed things about my parents’ relationship and their divorce, and the editor made me tell my parents what it was about, and get their permission to go ahead with it. I didn’t have to show it to them, just tell them about it. And so I tell my father, “I got a Modern Love accepted, and I have to tell you that in it, I have you sitting at the piano, singing ‘Let Me Try Again,’ with tears streaming down your cheeks as mommy is making dinner and ignoring you and we’re playing in the living room…” and the only thing he heard was that I’d had a Modern Love accepted. He was so excited. And then it came out, and he was really upset and hurt, and it still bothers him. And I’m completely traumatized by having upset him in that way. So were your parents okay with what you wrote?

Goulian: They were relieved. Not only wasn’t it as bad as they imagined, they come off really well.

Rumpus: It comes across that you have a really good relationship with them.

Goulian: They’re just really gentle, relaxed people. Part of that is also that they were workaholics, wrapped up in their own working lives.

Rumpus: You reveal your dad to be an orthorexic – someone who is hyper concerned about healthy diet.

Goulian: Yes, but remember that I didn’t show him that chapter. He did say to me, “Why don’t you show me the other chapter?” And I said, “No, not doing it.” And he said, “Well come on, I’m going to read it when it comes out. This is your hang-up, not mine.” And I said, “Fair enough. You can read it when it comes out. But I’m not showing it to you.”

Rumpus: Has he read it?

Goulian: I don’t know. I just saw my mom, and she said she has not read that chapter. My book was there, and she said, “Oh, by the way, I haven’t read that chapter.” In the New York Times Styles profile of me, they mention boy-on-boy experimentation, and it referred to me taking ecstasy to explore my sexuality. They read that piece, and they’ve never said anything to me about it. I mean, my parents are very fair-minded, accepting people.

Rumpus: I wish I could just ask my parents not to read certain things. I published an essay once that was partially a funny look at my sex life, and I asked my father not to read it. He later totally lied and told me he didn’t read it, but said he’d heard about it, and he told me he wrote me this ten-page letter about what a disappointment I am, but his therapist wouldn’t let him send it to me, because his therapist knows how defensive I am.

Goulian: Oh, my god.

Rumpus: All this to say, I understand your fear of your parents reading about your experiences with sex!

Goulian: You need to see that letter!

Rumpus: Some day. I don’t think I could handle it right now. So, your parents didn’t give you any kind of a hard time after they read the book?

Goulian: Oh, no. Not at all!

Rumpus: And, your fears and anxieties that you had about what your parents were going to think – are they now gone?

Goulian: One-hundred percent. The other fear was about my Uncle Ben’s reaction. He’s my grandfather’s son, and the literary executor of his estate. I had to get his permission, legally, for the letters from my grandfather to me. I was a little worried, even though he has a very laissez-faire approach toward giving rights. He’ll give rights to people he knows are writing very negative books about my grandfather. My grandfather was a controversial figure. I was worried that Uncle Ben was going to demand to see the book first before giving permission to use the letters, which was not going to happen. But, boom, he signed off immediately. I actually would like to see his reaction to that chapter, because my grandfather comes off as a little rough.

Rumpus: The chapter where he flat-out asks you, “Are you gay?”

Goulian: Yes. He apologizes in there, too.

Rumpus: I thought that was a beautiful, very self-aware apology. I was touched by that.

Goulian: Me not responding–you can understand that. You’re embarrassed by it. You just want it to go away. So when my uncle signed off about the letters, I was relieved. And also my dad – he could have said, “Those were very personal private letters I sent you, and I don’t want them out there,” and they are so crucial to the book, and here I am two weeks before the book goes to galley.

Rumpus: That was so supportive of him to let you use those. It seems like you are really close with him, and the rest of your family.

Goulian: We’re very close. My refusal to grow up in a sense and do all the conventional things that people expect of me causes such concern and worry and anxiety in the people in my family, that it really brings us together in a sense. I love them, and they give me a reason to love them, so I don’t bolt from them. We’re in constant contact because of it – them worrying, me trying to deal with their worrying. It had the opposite effect from what you might expect.

Rumpus: I so relate to that part of your story about people wondering when you were going to “grow up,” and pick a lane and stick in it. In many ways, I feel like I’ve never launched. I don’t know – haven’t written a book of my own, I’ve only written other people’s books. I’m so afraid to commit to one idea. I also live a fairly unconventional life. I mean, I’m married, and somehow I am a homeowner, but I don’t have kids, mostly by choice. I live in this bohemian little town where there are a lot people sort of floating too, and where I’m friends with people who are in their twenties, and people who are in their sixties. I’ve just always had to do things my own weird way – maybe I was fucked up by Free To Be You And Me – and so I found it kind of comforting to read about you. Even though it seems you are still struggling, emotionally, with your lack of direction.

Goulian: Well, that’s part of the tension of the book. It’s not that I’m this rebel saying, “Fuck you” to his community. This is someone who clearly is tortured by it. It’s not a book about a rebel. A rebel as I define it is someone who asserts his individuality when faced with the pressure to conform. This is a book about someone who wants his family and friends to love and accept him, and wants to fit in, but can’t do it because he just doesn’t really want to. There’s nothing he wants to do, work is problematic for all the reasons I mention in the book, everything is fraught, he never seems to be able to stick with anything, his grandfather is giving him a hard time for not sticking with anything, law is problematic for him. So I can’t seem to “get my act together” in that conventional sense.

The underlying irony of the book is that through writing this book about how I can’t get legitimized, I get legitimized. Although you do get a sense that outside of that, nothing changes. Notwithstanding the book deal, I’m still here, and living out of bags. I’m still going to be eating my nuts and berries, still worrying when I go to restaurants what they’re doing to my food, still crashing here and there. My mother often asks me, “Have you thought of getting your own apartment, and a lease, and putting something on a wall…” I mean, I’ve never bought a piece of furniture in my life, and I’m 42. But the book changed my life in the sense that in the eyes of my parents and most of my friends – and I hang out in a pretty bourgeois crowd – although they were tolerant and accepting, I have been legitimized in their eyes. And I have to admit, it feels good.

Rumpus: Do you feel like, with this book, you’ve explained yourself to your parents? And do you feel like that’s your job?

Goulian: I don’t think we’re supposed to explain ourselves to anyone. That’s where my memoir is a little different. There isn’t this definitive self-appraisal. I mean, I explain why I did a few things along the way, but it doesn’t end with, “Now I know who I am and why I do what I do.” I’m still and oddball to me, and to most people around me, I’m still confused. There’s no dramatic breakthrough at the end where I’m a new person who understands these things.

Rumpus: I’m really glad about that. So…what’s next?

Goulian: My dad finally asked me that a few months ago. I got a three-year reprieve from the folks. I sold the proposal for the book in April, 2008, and from then until a few weeks ago, it was all good. Like, Yes, he finally did something. We don’t have to worry.

Rumpus: And now?

Goulian: I don’t consider myself a spiritual person or a new agey person, but I put on this new agey vibe and I said, “Dad, it’s not about what’s next, it’s about what’s now. What’s now is wrapping up this.” September it’s a fair question, I suppose.

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