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

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.

Related Posts:

• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #15: Melissa Febos
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #13: Cheryl Strayed
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #9: Elisa Albert
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #6: Jillian Lauren
• Get Out of My Crotch!

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.

Related Posts:

• Give the Gift of Sugar!
• Ethos of the Era
• The Rumpus Release Party for Dear Sugar’s Tiny Beautiful Things
• The Rumpus Release Party for Dear Sugar’s Tiny Beautiful Things
• The Rumpus Release Party for Dear Sugar’s Tiny Beautiful Things

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.

Related Posts:

• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #15: Melissa Febos
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #13: Cheryl Strayed
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #9: Elisa Albert
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #8: Heather Havrilesky

While I realize this is not quite the simple solution to the problem that some people think it is, the thought has certainly occurred to me.  In fact, whether to write fiction or memoir is a debate I have been having with myself for a good twenty years, since the early 90s, when I dabbled in graduate school, first at Sarah Lawrence, and later at City College. I’ve done some of each, and while I enjoyed certain aspects of working on fiction, I’ve come back again and again to first-person non-fiction. It’s just always seemed more natural for me.

For reasons I can’t seem to name, after a period of feeling more emboldened, I’m now back to feeling fearful about writing memoir again, and am seriously considering shelving a lot of material until my parents pass on. There’s plenty of other stuff I want to write that has nothing to do with them, so I could still write memoir. But somehow, thinking about all that brings me back to my old debate.

I thought it would be helpful – and interesting – to take the conversation outside my head and have it with Elisa Albert, a friend whose writing I admire tremendously. Albert is the author of the darkly funny, irreverent novel, The Book of Dahlia – in which inoperable brain tumor patient Dahlia Finger essentially gives an annoying self-help author and the rest of the world the finger – and the hilarious, often politically incorrect short story collection, How This Night Is Different, which skewers an assortment of Jewish stereotypes while also shedding sympathetic light on a variety of human frailties and dynamics.

Albert, who is at work on her second novel, describes both books as “personal” as opposed to autobiographical, although they are rooted in her own experiences. I met with her to talk about this at her home in Albany, New York.

***

The Rumpus: Part of me has come to feel as if there’s some stuff I just can’t write until my parents are gone. After all this back and forth with different authors, and different conversations that you and I have had, I don’t know if I can write about them until they’re gone. Although, don’t hold me to this – I’ll probably go back and forth a few more times.

Elisa Albert: So you’re assuming they’re going to die before you?

Rumpus: Hmm. Well, you have a good point. Yeah, if it’s the other way, it’s not going to work out so well.

Albert: You’re deciding you’re not going to write it at all, or you’re going to wait a long time?

Rumpus: I think I’m going to wait a long time for the stuff that’s about them. I’m thinking that I can write some of the other stuff first – the stuff that’s not about them. I’ve got so much that I’ve meant to write for so long, and haven’t, that there’s a very deep well. I think I’m making peace with writing things about myself that might upset my parents. But that’s just stuff about me. Who knows? Maybe, after I’ve gotten over that hump, then I’ll be able to write the things about them while they’re still alive. But maybe not.

Albert: Why can’t you write it and not publish it? Why can’t you write it all, and then afterward decide what you want out in the world, and what you don’t?

Rumpus: I don’t trust myself. As soon as I’ve written something, if I’m pleased with it, I get really itchy about getting it out there. That’s already happened a few times. I get it out of me and I start to like it and start obsessively tweaking it, and then I just want everybody to see it. I also feel guilty just writing some of it. I’m still very conflicted about writing about parents, family members and other people close to me. One of the suggestions people always have for me, is “Why don’t you just make it fiction?”

For various reasons, whether to write fiction or memoir is a conversation I’ve been having with myself for literally twenty years. I thought I’d have it with you, now. You and I have discussed this before – you describe your fiction very specifically as “personal.”

Albert: Yeah. Not autobiographical, but personal.

Rumpus: But in talking, you’ve said that a lot is drawn from your own life. You’ve talked about some of the characters in The Book of Dahlia being really close to people in your family. And so in a way, you’re taking almost the same risk as someone who’s writing a memoir.

Albert: Well, not really. That’s a misunderstanding of what fiction is. Fiction is not reality with the names changed. It’s a completely bizarre, singular stew in which things that are real get mixed up with things that are invented. It’s a weird hybrid – a donkey head on a zebra body in a fourth dimension kind of thing, even when it’s realistic and even when it’s pseudo-recognizable, or people assume that it’s about you, or ‘I recognize your father’, or ‘I recognize your brother’. It’s just this new beast that emerges when you put everything in the hopper. It’s not a solution to writer’s block, I don’t think. A lot of it feels involuntary. I don’t sit and make conscious decisions about what I’m going to “use” and what I’m not. Stuff that needs to be used is there and there’s no way around it. And the craft part comes in trying to appropriate it and use it well, use it in a way that’s interesting and opens new questions and pathways and can lead to bigger issues. It’s not as simple as plucking things that really happened from your life or your experience and just changing names or making it set on Mars. It’s a weird thing.

Rumpus: It’s not a conscious decision you make?

Albert: I can’t really articulate to you where it all comes from or how it happens. The Lorrie Moore story, “How To Become A Writer,” is the be-all and end-all, as far as I’m concerned. Everyone could dispense with a lot of talk about fiction and craft, and a lot of what goes on in MFA programs, if they just read that story, like, 15 times. Because it says everything. She has a teacher of writing describe it as recombinant DNA. You start it in a realistic context, and then you alter it, and then you alter it again, so those imaginings ripple out and it can no longer be traced back to reality, really.

Rumpus: And yet there is some connection to reality that you acknowledge.

Albert: A friend whose novel is about to come out – she’s freaked out about ‘what are people going to say?’, what projections are going to be put on her, what people are going to assume about her life – and she said, “Maybe one day we can go through The Book of Dahlia and you can tell me what’s real and what’s not? Did this happen? Did that happen? Like, line-by-line, let’s go through it.” And I’m like, “No!” And this is someone who’s a friend, who knows me.

Rumpus: I guess that’s a burden whether you write fiction or nonfiction. People are going to read it and think, “Oh, is this you? Is this what you think about things?”

Albert: And that’s okay. That’s fine. It was harder at the very beginning. It hasn’t taken that many years for it to just become something funny and odd that happens and I don’t care. It’s not me, it’s not my problem. It has nothing to do with me. It doesn’t affect me. I mean, people who know me, know me. People who don’t know me are going to think or project whatever they want. And it’s not my problem.

Rumpus: My friend Emily Mandel just sort of scoffs at the notion of “write what you know.” She just essentially makes everything up. There’s no clear Emily character in her writing. While I admire that ability and her talent, it doesn’t feel like something I particularly want to do. By the way I have notions that for me the simple solution is to just fictionalize what happened in my life – change names and circumstances. I mean, sometimes I imagine these stories – and I’ve written a few short ones – where there’s a character who is similar to me, but she is better and worse than me, more exaggerated, and she does the things I only think of doing. Sometimes I just think that would be fun. But, doing that, I still run into the same problem of, well, it is rooted in me, and so I am still revealing myself if I write it, and revealing the people around me whose actions made me think and feel things I wanted to write about in the first place.

Albert: Yeah, I think that’s unavoidable. Even if you’re a crime novelist or a science fiction writer or whatever. By definition anything that you can make up is confined by the limits of your perspective. Unless you drop acid before you write, you’re going to have a really hard time having a perspective that’s not yours. You can only imagine as much as you can imagine. You can only empathize as much as you can empathize. That’s the limit of who you are and who you’ve been and where you come from and what you know. That’s not to say that fiction is all autobiographical, because it’s not. I have to be able to relate to the people I’m inventing or writing about – even the ones who don’t get along. It’s what I imagine acting to be. When you see an actor do her thing, you don’t get to know her any better by watching her on stage or watching her in a movie. But you think you do because you’re seeing her interpretation of a hopefully very specific human being. And that does come from somewhere inside her. It’s based on something she knows or feels, and some empathy she’s able to have for the character. So everything comes from the self that way. I don’t really think about it so much when I’m writing, though. I get into a groove and the self dissolves. There is no more me. I am left behind, and I’m in the world of what I’m working on. Ideally, on a good day, I lose myself. That’s what’s fun about it. That’s where the joy and the fun of it is.

Rumpus: It seems like fun. I mean – I’ve sort of gone there at times. I’m tempted to go there again. But I am pretty sure that for me, it would involve mostly material that is really close to my life. I’ve toyed with making things up completely now and then, but it just never had the same appeal resonance for me as working with what really happened, because I think about that so much. But I suppose there are outcomes and attitudes that could be different.

Albert: If we sat down and went line-by-line through Dahlia, I could say, Oh, that did happen to me, oh that happened to a friend of mine, that’s something I heard about, or I always imagined this. I could trace out where it comes from, draw you a convoluted diagram or something. My dad is this really this incredibly nice, tall, Jewish lawyer, like Bruce Finger. But he’s not Bruce Finger. Their biographies are different, the way their roles are played out is different. It’s not the story of my family.

Rumpus: And you are not Dahlia Finger, seeing as you don’t have brain cancer, and you haven’t died.

Albert: But my brother did. He had a brain tumor and died at 29. And that’s totally where this book comes from. But, as I’ve said over and over again, my brother was Dahlia’s opposite. He was a proactive, positive, wonderful guy. He didn’t complain for a minute. He didn’t say fuck life and fuck this and fuck all y’all for a minute. But something sparked in my head when I was a teenager, watching him die. I imagined this alternate universe person in the same situation who was going to handle things really differently. So is it autobiographical? No. But it comes from this completely intense experience. And clearly I thought it was worth telling, because I told it. But the goal was never to illuminate my experience. The goal was not to make myself understood. The goal was to explore what all this shit means, and how people deal, and how they don’t, and what happens in families. My family has something in common with that family.

Rumpus: Did you ever worry as you were going through later drafts, oh, shit, my mother or father are going to see this and not be flattered – or, my brother. I mean, your living brother, you’ve told me that he’s really close to the brother character in the book. So were there any anxieties about that, the same way that someone writing a memoir might…

Albert: There honestly were none. I somehow escaped that particular thing. I think it has something to do with the fact that my parents, being the unique people they are, both feel incredibly guilty for a lot of the things that happened and the way our family played out. They are incredibly loving and supportive. And so the combination of that loving, supportive, “You want to be a writer? God speed,” and the, “Oh my god we fucked up so badly and we know it and we’re so sorry” – combination works out sort of perfectly in that I can say whatever I want. Nobody is going to try to silence me, even passively.

Rumpus: Really? No digs, even?

Albert: My mother will sometimes make a joke. A friend of hers said, after Dahlia came out, “I’m glad she’s not my daughter.”  And I think it hurt her. I think it made her realize other people were reading it with a perspective other than “Isn’t it great that my daughter is doing what she wants to be doing and is having some success at it?” She didn’t speak to that friend for a while, she told me. And I think it’s taken her a while to feel secure and okay. But she doesn’t put that shit on me. She just doesn’t. I’m really blessed that way – both of them are supportive. They’re like, “Congratulations on getting your books published, and how amazing that you’ve emerged as a writer, and way to go, and say whatever you want, however you want to.”

Rumpus: What about your brother?

Albert: Well, my brother is a different story. For a long time, I wasn’t concerned with what he would think or feel because I felt like that relationship had reached its end, and I had sort of given up on him.

Rumpus: Yeah, I noticed in Freud’s Blind Spot, the anthology of essays about siblings you edited, in the intro, you talk about how disappointed you have been with him, and how he’s not been the brother you wanted, and I thought, my sister would kick my ass if I wrote anything even approaching that.

Albert: The blessing and curse with my brother, though, is that it’s so far gone – our estrangement and the travesty of our relationship – that it doesn’t really matter anymore what I say or don’t say. Actually, when I was working on Freud’s Blind Spot, I was in a really different place than when I was writing Dahlia. When I was writing Dahlia, I was like, I don’t fucking care, I will portray this character as extremely as I want. I had reached a point where I was like, I give up, there is no relationship here, I can’t make it different, I have no responsibility to this person. It’s been pretty powerful and upsetting over the years. And I will be loyal to myself. I’m not going to protect someone who’s really hurt me. And now some years have gone by, and I’ve come to an understanding that as much as I still want to be on my own side and validate the little girl I was growing up in a really bad situation, I don’t need to be carrying around a lot of enmity toward him. I have increased empathy toward him as I get older, and I see how he suffers, and how his life has been hard for him. I don’t feel as strongly about him as I used to.

Rumpus: You’re able to have a relationship with him now?

Albert: I’m at the point where I hope I can some day soon be in a room with him and not take a Xanax.

Rumpus: Did your brother read Dahlia?

Albert: I have no idea.

Rumpus: What about your parents – did they see what you wrote about the brother character and feel protective of your brother?

Albert: Not that I know of.

Rumpus: Do you think your parents would consider adopting me? I run such a high risk with my parents. Not just of losing them, but of hurting them. I so envy that support you have.

Albert: You know, I don’t think it’s your job. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a sociopath, but if you’re not doing what you want to be doing, not saying what you want to be saying, at some point you’re harming yourself to avoid harming them. That looming threat of what they would do or how they would react is not right.

And in some alternate parallel universe where you write whatever the fuck you want to write and publish it and fulfill whatever goals for whatever it is you want to say, I bet they’d initially be upset, but then they’d get over it.

Rumpus: Well, I often think about creating this character who writes whatever the fuck she wants to write – an alternate parallel universe me. You know, I wrote and have been be performing this monologue about how I used to cut class in high school to go home and sing by myself, and then I got caught by my annoying step brother when I was belting at the top of my lungs. Some of the people who have seen it, have said, “I love the way you go and become your teenage self again in the piece,” and I’ve since realized that I’m actually not being my teenage self – I’m being who I wished I’d had the guts to be then. The me in the monologue is sassy and outspoken. The me in real life was so timid, I was whispering my feelings into a tape recorder hidden in my closet. I whispered my upset and angry feelings over the bat mitzvah tape my dad made for me to study with, and I had the humiliating experience of having to ask him to do it again for me. But anyway, this brings me back to the acting analogy you made. As a kid, I was really shy, but if I was acting on stage, in a role, I could not be shy, because I was expressing emotions I was familiar with, but through somebody else.

Albert: Right. It gives you a veil. You don’t have to stand naked in front of an audience. You can inhabit somebody else and channel yourself through that.

Rumpus: I’m sort of doing that in the monologue. Even though the events in the monologue are real, it’s a fictional version of me. It’s been a fun departure for me. I think that’s part of why I wanted to switch gears and interview someone who writes fiction that is personal, who has at the root a character based on who you are, but goes a million other places with it.

Albert: Well, that’s exactly it. I don’t think I ever write about who I am. I don’t think I’m capable of that. I think I write about someone I wish I was, or someone I fear being, or some other tweak. Somebody who can actually see who they are and communicate that in a clear-eyed way? That’s a very rare and special skill, and I don’t have it. When I try to write personal essays, they usually are, I think, total failures. And even if I don’t think they’re failures immediately, six months or a year later I look back and think, “That’s a total load of shit.”  That’s why I’m a fiction writer. I can’t write unless I’m inhabiting a role, and I am bringing myself to bear in how I interpret that role. I mean, if you have a magnifying glass, you can suss out things about me. If you’re a Jungian psychologist, you can probably make statements about who I might be, if you read everything I’ve ever written, tease me out. But that’s not my goal. I’m not trying to write about myself or illuminate myself. I’m trying to understand things that confuse me, I’m trying to answer questions for myself. A book is like a conversation I’m having with myself. And when that conversation is over, the book is done. The assumption is that if these are big questions for me, if they’re things that I’m trying to work out, then they are important because my perspective matters, and my humanity matters. I don’t, for some reason, often fall prey to the idea of “Oh, what I have to say doesn’t really matter. What do I know? Who cares about what I think?”

Rumpus: Well, yeah. The personal is universal. Like, if it matters to you, somebody else is going to relate to it.

Albert: People misunderstand that sometimes. They think it means that your experience is going to be meaningful to everybody, but that’s not what it means. It means that the things that vex you and challenge you and disappoint you about life itself are probably meaningful to others.

Rumpus: You know, I hate to say this, but I haven’t read a memoir I’ve loved in a little while. I’m feeling a little burnt on the genre. Maybe it’s because that’s what I mostly read. I want to be mistaken for getting on the anti-memoir bandwagon. I still generally love them. And maybe that is what I’m writing. Again, don’t hold me to any of this. I will continue to dither – trust me. I mean, I’m writing. I just am not sure what it is.

Albert: Well, that actually has its place. It’s part of the work.

Rumpus: Switching gears, does anybody ever come to you and say, “I see myself in your book, and I don’t like the way you’ve portrayed me”?

Albert: No, never. People assume they know me, though. That happens all the time.

Rumpus: That has to be very annoying.

Albert: It used to be scary and kind of sinister and threatening and creepy. It used to really creep me out, and confuse me. Because then I felt like, “Am I that person?” I’m 32 and I can’t tell you exactly who I am. I hope I’m still evolving and changing, and I don’t have very set ideas about who I am. As I get older they feel less set.

But when people assume I’m one of my characters, and react strongly against my fiction, it feels like they’re reacting against me.  People have really strong feelings about Dahlia, like, “I don’t want to read about some horrible, lazy, no-good, complainer who doesn’t deserve to live.” It’s like, whoa, who are you talking about? I’ve definitely had my moments of confronting that stuff and being like, maybe I am a lazy, no-good, fucked up complainer. It’s a weird mind fuck. And I’ve had it happen many times that someone comes up to me and says, “You’re much nicer than I thought you would be.” It’s interesting. At this point, I just say,  “Oh, cool, I’m glad.” I think I’m somewhat okay.

But, you know, I’m really not interested in reading or writing about noble people. I think that’s such a load of bullshit.

Rumpus: Yeah, me either. When I did some graduate school, I was in this short story workshop with Deborah Eisenberg, and there was this stupid guy in the class who responded to one of my stories by saying something like, “I don’t like these characters; I’d never be friends with people like this,” and I thought, how sad for you! That is so not the point of writing fiction or anything. I’m not at all interested in reading about noble characters. I want to read about people with flaws.

Albert: The things that are good in life, the things that work as they should, and the relationships that fulfill what they’re meant to, hallelujah. Thank god for that in life. That’s precious. But now let’s talk about the shit that needs talking about! I don’t see the point of looking at things that are great and noble and perfect and as they should be. Maybe in the acknowledgments. But I’m not going to spending three years of my life sort of masturbating to everything that’s as it should be.

Rumpus: I think that’s one of the things that’s so risky for me, whether I write fiction or non-fiction. It’s revealing my fascination with those sorts of flaws, which might indicate that I have some of those flaws.

Albert: No! Really?

Rumpus: I really do. Yes, I do in fact have flaws. But in my family, I’m the good daughter. I’m also a clergyman’s daughter, so people often assume impose upon me this beatific aura, and assume that I LOVE synagogue, too.

Albert: Because clergy are such exemplary people.

Rumpus: So it’s a coming out for me, no matter what I write. I’m admitting I cast a jaundiced eye on a thing or two. I need to find my balls about that, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction.

Albert: I don’t think it really matters. Right now I’m writing a first-person novel that I hope will read like a memoir. I want it to feel like you are inside this person’s head, and in this person’s life, experiencing everything that she is experiencing. I think a really high-quality first-person novel can read like an incredible memoir. Not because it’s autobiographical, or because anything in it really happened, but because of a completely un-self-conscious, raw disclosure.

But in any genre, if you’re true to your own vision there are going to be people you alienate. You can’t please everybody. Pleasing somebody can’t be the goal, either. The only person you can guarantee satisfying is yourself, in creating whatever it is you want to create. That’s why I really do see it as a conversation with myself – not in a navel gazing kind of way, I hope. If I’m entertaining myself, if I’m having fun, if I’m in it, I’ve lost myself in it, then I can feel good about that day’s work. If I’m trying to please god knows who, then I’m wasting my time and there’s no point to any of it. If I’m writing to please an editor or my mother, or some woman I met at a reading, it’s a waste.

Rumpus: So you divorce yourself from all commercial concerns?

Albert: I do. That was how I was educated. That’s how I came up through this stuff and started as a reader. My coming of age as a writer has nothing to do with, like, bestseller-dom. It’s about fidelity to some truth or vision that I want to give voice to. It all sounds very idealistic, but that’s it. I’d rather not write anymore than have to write something so that somebody can like it. There are so many things I want to do with my life before I turn writing into that kind of thing. It’s a freedom. It’s the fulfillment of a kind of personal freedom. It’s why I’m a happier person when I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m not as happy, and I’m not as pleasant to be around.

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

In his essay, Genzlinger reviewed four memoirs, and only one of them – An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan – favorably. He was brutal in his criticism of the others, making arguments against them that frankly made no sense to me. They were too much about the authors and not enough about the others in their stories; they were too painful and sad; the authors hadn’t earned “the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience.”

He started off by asserting that former Salon television critic Heather Havrilesky’s memoir in essays, Disaster Preparedness, treaded on subjects too mundane: “cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity.”

But his description of Havrilesky’s book – in addition to my familiarity with her clever, witty writing – actually piqued my interest in it. Not only do I sit squarely in Havrilesky’s demographic, I also happen to enjoy collections of essays with an arc, the kind where the author hasn’t necessarily survived some remarkably terrible or even wonderful experience, but is instead just really adept at interpreting common experiences in a way that gives you new perspective on your own.

I wasn’t surprised to find that I enjoyed Havrilesky’s book and really related to it. There is so much overlap in our stories, I should probably hate her for beating me to the finish line by miles – thousands of them. But instead, I’ve decided to believe that, contrary to Genzlinger’s argument, there’s room for yet another perspective on your parents’ clumsy divorce in the 70s, your consuming control drama with a boyfriend in your twenties, and other fairly common misadventures. Besides, Havrilesky was super cool – funny, genuine, encouraging – when I reached her at home in LA by phone, so hating was out of the question.

***

The Rumpus: I’ve read other interviews in which you’ve sort of said that karmically speaking, you had Genzlinger’s take-down coming, because you are “an asshole by profession.” Meaning, you work as a critic. I know you focus mostly on television and film, but do you also review books?

Heather Havrilesky: I have, for Book Forum, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and I just recently reviewed Freedom for Salon.  I love to review books, although it’s hard to weave that in when you have to watch forty hours of television a week and see movies and all that stuff.

Rumpus: I have been wondering whether Neil Genzlinger’s review has had any impact on how you feel about criticism, or if it might change the way you review books?

Havrilesky: The piece that he wrote is a very recognizable piece to me because I’ve written a lot of stuff like it for different places. Salon was always interested strong statements, finding some way to weave together this and that, or asking “Is this a new trend? And if so, does it deserve to be blown out of the water?” Memoirs certainly aren’t a new trend, but if you read a few bad ones, the category becomes a pretty easy sitting duck, easy to blow out of the water.

Rumpus: I think memoirs – and the typically sensitive memoirists who write them – are easy targets, especially for people who are uncomfortable with the kind of raw emotional material and personal revelations they often contain.

Havrilesky: Yeah, maybe. I read people’s comments about that piece, and I’m reminded of the comments about a lot of pieces that I’ve written. People tend to think that you’re crossing a line if you seem like you’re not being fair. The thing you always want to avoid is giving the impression that you went into an experience of some genre, whether it’s movies, television, books or anything, with a preconceived notion of what you were going to find there.  But it’s really hard to avoid, too. I have a lot of sympathy for that. When you’re reading something through the lens of “most memoirs are worthless,” it’s pretty hard to enjoy a memoir. There are memoirs that he could have read that may have overcome that for him. But mostly I’m sympathetic to that assignment. I mean, I’ve written it a million times, so I don’t really have a big beef with him or the style he used to trash the stuff he trashed. It would totally be hypocritical of me to criticize that, because I absolutely write the same kind of thing, and people have often called me harsh on a lot of different fronts. I’m the last person in the world to call someone harsh, because that’s a reviewer.

That said, I really try hard to challenge myself to keep an open mind to the things that I’m reviewing and appreciate them for what they are. I just reviewed “Just Go With It.”  It’s a Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler vehicle and it wasn’t the greatest movie in the world, but it wasn’t a huge disappointment either. Jennifer Aniston plays Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler plays Adam Sandler ­– there are no surprises as far as that goes. But if I didn’t mention that someone gives a sheep the Heimlich maneuver and it’s kind of funny, I would feel a little guilty. If you appreciate something, you have to find a way to weave that in. And if you’re writing a piece that doesn’t have any room for that, but still calls itself a review, then that’s really messed up.  But I don’t think that that piece was necessarily a review of those books. It was sort of packaged like that, but I think it was more of an essay.

Rumpus: One of my problems with it is a fear that it will fuel an anti-memoir backlash, and at a time when I just might be ready to finally write my own. Actually, a couple of weeks ago, I met with an agent about a potential ghostwriting project, and she said something to the effect of, “Well, you can’t make it too memoir-y. You did see that piece in the New York Times Book Review, didn’t you?” And I wanted to pull all of my hair out, right there in front of her. Although, at least one person has told me that agents and editors aren’t taking the piece too seriously.

Havrilesky: I don’t know. I would be surprised if people are really taking that essay incredibly seriously and they’re going to guide their ships by it. That would seem a little ludicrous to me. But I think it’s a perfectly good piece of criticism, or not a piece of criticism, but a perfectly good essay.

Rumpus: Really?? I mean, I saw you put this really gracious comment on the piece online, but…really?

Havrilesky: Yes. And the thing is, if I’m telling you it’s not that big of a deal to me – and he was like fucking cutting my throat out on the page – then that should be really encouraging, right?

Rumpus: Well, I want it to be… By the way, it occurred to me that Genzlinger was not the audience for your book, or that type of book, whereas I am. I feel like he would have given a similar review to Traveling Mercies, or The Boys of My Youth, or My Misspent Youth, or Beg, Borrow, Steal, which are all books of essays that I’ve loved.

Havrilesky: I feel like The Boys of My Youth is such a gender-neutral book. It’s strange because you sort of aspire to achieve that. Like, I’m gonna write the most literary gender-neutral thing in the universe and it’s gonna be really respected. But then you read things that are really feminine. Like Anne Lamott is such a feminine writer. She has almost a liberated Adrienne Rich view of what she’s creating.  She’s creating in her most authentic voice exactly what she would enjoy reading.  I’ve thought a lot about that and decided that just because cheerleading is a gendered subject doesn’t mean that it’s not the most hilarious fucking topic in the universe.  I read a lot of Anne Lamott while I was writing my book and it really inspired me to just find my very specific voice and just fuck the critics, fuck the anticipated scoffing that would come from that, because if you can’t get into your connection to your story, you’re gonna tell a shitty story. You have to connect to it.  The way that she connects the reader to her experience is just fantastic.

Rumpus: You know, I really wrestle with that. First of all, I’ll say that any time I write an essay about something I deeply connect to, I have no problem selling it, and once I do, I hear from lots of people about it, mostly women. If I try to write an essay based on what I think is a relevant topic, it’s almost always a fail. But I’ve gotten some really nice, encouraging responses over the years, and they make me feel like, Yeah, I can and should do this. But I alternately chide myself, in a very Genzlinger-esque voice, saying, Really, don’t trouble yourself to do this, because no one is dying to know what it’s like to be a perpetually ambivalent, spiritually confused, childless, 45-year-old daughter of a clergyman who left New York City for the boondocks. The world will go on just fine without your perspective.

Havrilesky: But you know that’s bullshit. Because, yeah, sure it’ll go on. But it sounds like, based on your past experience, you will find a way to write your thing in a unique way that people can connect to you, and that makes it worth doing.

Rumpus: Well, first I have to get over the fear of upsetting other people, like my parents, my father in particular.

Havrilesky: Can you kill him?

Rumpus: Believe me, you are not the first person to ask that. I recently heard Terry Gross interview singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell on Fresh Air, and he said part of what made writing his memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks, easy, was that his parents are dead. Your father is deceased, but your mother – how has she handled the book?

Havrilesky: I had my mom read the book over and over again because a lot of the stuff is about her and her crappy marriage. I have obviously had some complaints about her – the mistakes that she made.  I realize this is every mother’s worst nightmare, so I totally have compassion for her.  I have said to her, “You know people are going to come out and say to you, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you moved out on your kids when you got divorced.’” She’s gotten these random phone calls about it, and she’s now got to answer to this kind of thing. She’s been really kind to me about it even though it’s not the easiest thing for her.  It’s not that she’s so private or that she doesn’t tell people all kinds of stories openly. She’s a very good storyteller and has been completely open about the things that she’s been through. But there are times when I felt really guilty for having put her through that.

Rumpus: Did you give her the opportunity to nix it?

Havrilesky: Not to nix the whole thing. I mean I don’t think that she ever even would have dreamt of nixing the whole thing.  She really liked it. I sent her the first chapter about her and my dad fighting, and she was comfortable with it. And then I sent her the next chapter and the next. I asked her – especially in writing the chapter about her and her friends – a lot of questions about, “Can I say this? Can I say that?”  And the lawyer has you change details about people so that no one can trace who they are.

Rumpus: So, she’s largely on board with how it came out?

Havrilesky: Oh, yeah. But you know, in hindsight, if I wrote the whole book again, I think I just would have written about some of that stuff a little differently.  Like when I was writing about her moving out of the house when my parents got divorced – although that chapter actually is from the perspective of me then mostly, so that really wouldn’t change. I mean the thing is I was crawling into how I felt about it then, and how I felt about it was the world was ending. So I didn’t want to back away from that.  It’s not an exercise of self-pity. The point of that chapter is to explore what that felt like to a kid. The lesson of that chapter is not that my mom did the wrong thing, or that parents should never get divorced. My parents needed to get divorced. And she really did a smart and courageous thing in divorcing him. She didn’t have any kind of career. It was hard for everyone and it was really fucking hard for her, too. She got some advice from a priest who told her she should move out for the summer. She thought that that would be the best transition, even though for me it was terrible.  But it was the 70s and she was young and confused and dealing. She was staring down the barrel of having a minimum wage job and supporting three kids on minimal child support. She was under severe fucking duress!

Rumpus: I related to so much of what you wrote about your parents. Your portrayal of them as they were divorcing brought me right back to my dorky parents suddenly morphing into these disco ducks with permed hair in Sassoons and satin jackets.

Havrilesky: My dad did that.

Rumpus: Speaking of your dad, how do you think he’d feel about the way you portrayed him – this sort of irresponsible, womanizing charmer?

Havrilesky: You know, I left out details about my dad. There were details that if I put them in, they would have been too prejudicial, and people couldn’t experience him as a rational human being. I mean, he doesn’t seem that rational anyway.

Rumpus: I had compassion for him. I saw him as just this flawed human being. Do you think you’d write about him the same way if he were alive?

Havrilesky: That would have been challenging. I’m not sure how I would write about my dad if he were alive. It would be interesting to know how he’d handle it. I kind of think he’d sort of enjoy it.  He would probably make corrections to certain things or say, “You can’t say this or that.” But he never really shied away from the spotlight, so I don’t think he would find that much he didn’t like. With my mom, for sure it was a struggle. You just have to be really up front about the fact that you’re not trying to write to hurt someone. I was writing about them from a child’s perspective. I think the more you access that, the more you realize how unrealistic we are about parents. My father was a fucking human being in my life.  He did a lot of great things for me as a parent, but he also did a lot of disappointing things because he was a fucking human being, and that’s what human beings do. In hindsight, I was really fortunate to have the dad I did, because he made such a great character. He was such a rich source of material. I am very thankful to him for that.

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But I couldn’t do it. No, not me, Nice Jewish Girl From the Suburbs. What would my parents think – my clergyman father, especially – if they found out? (Besides, could there be a more tired clergyman’s daughter cliché?)

So, how does a Nice Jewish Girl From the Suburbs go from belting show tunes in the living room while her father accompanies her on piano, to becoming first a stripper, then a call girl, and finally one of many kept women in Prince Jefri of Brunei’s harem? This is certainly something I wanted to know. Jillian Lauren writes about it in her fascinating memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem.

For me, as interesting as how she made those transitions was how she had the courage to write about it all – her challenging relationships with her adoptive parents, some abuse she suffered at her father’s hands, her complicated sexual and emotional entanglement with Prince Jefri. She spoke with me about this by phone from her home in L.A., where she was putting the final touches on her first novel, due out next fall.

***

The Rumpus: I’ve never stripped, been a prostitute, or been anywhere near Brunei, but I still related so much to your book – especially your disillusionment with Judaism while still missing some of the aspects of it, and your challenging relationship with your father. You reveal a lot about your difficulties with him and your mother, and I just found myself wondering how you did it: How did you get over your fears of hurting them, or losing their love because of things you reveal about them and/or yourself?

Jillian Lauren: I wrote the book with a tremendous suspension of disbelief; I wrote it as if no one was ever going to read it. I know that sounds like a cliché. They always tell writers, “Write as if no one is ever going to see it,” but that wasn’t hard for me, because no one had ever read anything I’d written before. I had been writing for a long time and had been unsuccessful at getting things published. I mean, I’d had small things published, but had written books before that no one had read. So it was very easy for me to believe no one would ever read this book.

Rumpus: That would be hard for me, because I’ve already had some essays and articles published that have upset people in my family. So I have this heightened awareness of what that’s like, and that it could happen again.

Lauren: Well, what I’m talking about is easier to do with a book than with an essay or article that’s going to be coming out in a week or a month. When you’re writing a book, the process is so long that it’s easy to kind of trick yourself that way. The time between the moment you sit down at the keyboard and write the first word to the point where somebody’s reading it – I mean, it’s going to be the end of the Mayan calendar before my next book, or, you know, the apocalypse. That helps!

Rumpus: I can see that. Although, I feel guilty as I’m writing this stuff. In the moment, in the act, I’m really conflicted.

Lauren: For me, it got really hard in the final passes, where I still wasn’t sure whether I was going to put in certain things about my family. The stuff about being a sex worker, well, whatever. I didn’t think that would embarrass my family. It was what I did, not what I do. I don’t think I lost anyone over that.

Rumpus: Did you lose people otherwise?

Lauren: I lost people over publishing the material about my father and my family. I caused a lot of pain. The stuff about my being a prostitute didn’t cause anyone a lot of pain, other than maybe me. I think my parents could have lived with that embarrassment or found a way to frame it that would have been acceptable to them. It’s very much about what their neighbors think. I think they could find a way to frame their daughter acting in a way that was unacceptable, but not a way to frame themselves behaving in a way that was unacceptable.

Rumpus: So you lost your parents over this?

Lauren: Yeah, my parents have stopped talking to me. And my brother, sort of. I mean, if I want to reach him I can. He’s very religious and living in Israel now, so he doesn’t approve of me anyway.

Rumpus: After you finished writing – and stopped telling yourself no one would ever read your memoir – did it occur to you that your family would turn their backs on you because of it?

Lauren: What I’d hoped would happen was they’d be able to say: look how much we’ve learned, look how much we’ve changed, all of us. Let us be an example, maybe for other families who are going through the same thing, or parents who have behaved in ways toward their children that they’re not proud of. I mean, I’m a parent now, and it’s only Monday, and already I can list twenty things I’ve done this week that I’m ashamed of.

Rumpus: Yeah, I have that same fantasy. I remember telling Shalom Auslander something like that and he just laughed at me and said, “Yeah, that’s never going to happen.”

Lauren: But I think it’s important that we talk about that stuff, particularly in like, upper middle class Jewish communities where there’s this pretense that things like physical abuse don’t happen in our world.

Rumpus: I’m with you there. I keep hearing stories about physical abuse in Jewish families, and it’s always so surprising, even though I dealt with some of that in my own family. My mother’s second husband would sometimes become violent, and at one point we had a social worker from the county coming to our house because a neighbor or somebody had called. But we had to be very hush-hush about it because, like, that doesn’t happen in Jewish families. I’ve rarely told people.

Lauren: When you come from any minority community there’s that concern, like, should I cast doubt or blame, or tell some unflattering story about my parents?  There’s this feeling that I’m betraying the whole community. We keep our secrets, take care of our own. There is this insular feeling about it.

Rumpus: So how is it not having your parents in your life now?

Lauren: It’s very hard. As complicated as my relationship with them was, they were a good part of my son’s life, and my husband’s life. And now they’re not there. My husband said something recently, like, “Oh, wow, I can’t believe we’re not going to hear from your parents at all this holiday,” and I was like, “Nope.” And it is weird. But I made the decision to publish the book with the willingness to let that happen if it had to. I had dinner with my friend Rachel Resnick, who wrote Love Junkie. She lost her relationship with her father over publishing that memoir. She said to me, “If you’re not going to run the manuscript by people, expect to lose them.” But I was unwilling to run the manuscript by people. I felt it was important enough for me to publish this. I stood behind it and I still stand behind it. I don’t regret it.

Rumpus: That is so brave. I have so much respect for you for choosing that.

Lauren: I think there’s only one way to write memoir like this, and that is full out. If you’re going to start manipulating what you are and aren’t going to tell, what you are and aren’t going to reveal, and who you are and aren’t going to hurt, I think the result of that is a coy book. I’ve read them before, and to me it’s the cardinal sin. I think that as artists, we can’t worry about writing work that is going to be acceptable to our children or our parents. Or we’re going to write some bullshit, or like, Harry Potter. Great! I hope to some day write a children’s book. But right now that’s not what I write. I write intensely personal material, often with some sexual content. I don’t want my dad reading that, and I don’t want my son reading that, but it’s not going to stop me from writing it.

Rumpus: I keep wrestling with all of that.

Lauren: Listen, there’s no law saying you have to write a book like this! You can write something else.

Rumpus: I keep wishing I could. But I’m fixated. I have these stories to tell about how I got to be how I am, and there’s no way to do that without having some stuff about my parents and other people in there. I don’t feel like I can write anything else until I write this. And yet I can’t write this! I’m stuck. I am so afraid of my parents’ reactions, so afraid of hurting them.

Lauren: Well, I can tell you something that I have distilled from conversations with other memoirists, which is: Your parents’ reaction to your memoir isn’t going to be any different from your parents’ reaction to anything else you’ve done in your life. Their world perspective is how they are going to react to your book, no matter what is in it. If your parents are the kind of narcissistic parents who expect you to be this perfect representation of them in the world, then they are going to be disappointed. Those things you’ve published in the past, I believe that you couldn’t have written them so that your parents would have liked them, or not have been hurt or offended by them.

Rumpus: That makes so much sense. It sounds like something my former therapist would say. Yet it’s still so hard to accept.

Lauren: You want them to say, “You have your own path. I don’t own you. You are a really awesome loan to me from God. I took care of that loan as best I could, and now, I leave you to your path. And I just think you’re super. And congratulations on your memoir.”

Rumpus: Oh, that sounds awesome. But, yeah, not gonna happen.

Lauren: Yeah, definitely not. Yet, still, that’s the parent that I strive to be. Actually, my mother said to me, “What are you going to do in thirty years when your son writes his memoir?!” My mother, who forever ruined for me the under-water room of the Museum of Natural History the last time I talked to her. As my kid’s running back and forth. And the guards are like, “No running!”

Rumpus: You told your mother about the book at the Museum of Natural History?

Lauren: No, no. We were visiting my parents in New Jersey when I told them what was in the book.

Rumpus: How did you tell them?

Lauren: Well, they knew I was writing a book. Before it was done, I wouldn’t talk to them about it further than that. I said, “I’m not talking to anyone about it while I’m writing it,” because nothing will kill that kind of a project like talking about it, although I did tell them it had some adoption-related themes. Perhaps I could have been a little more forthcoming.

When I was ready to tell them, I hired a therapist to act as a mediator. I sat down with my parents six months before book came out, but after it was totally done and in and no changes could be made. I said, this is when the book is coming out, and these are all the things that are in it. I had a list and I went through it one by one. And I said, “I hope this is enough for you and you won’t feel the need to read it. I’d like for you not to read it.” I’ve had friends whose parents agreed not to read their memoir. And I thought, what awesome boundaries on their part! Maybe I’ll at least ask for it.

Rumpus: Oh, that is ideal! I remember reading in the acknowledgements to Julie Klausner’s memoir, like, a promise to her parents that some day she’ll write a book they can actually read, and I thought: Wow. Imagine if you could persuade your parents not to read what you write!

Lauren: Well, sure enough, my mother looks me right in the eye and says, “I am going to read the memoir. Everyone I know is going to be reading your memoir. You can’t tell me not to read your book.” So, so much for that fantasy. It was a very difficult conversation. At the end of it, they insisted that they were okay with the book coming out. But in the wake of that conversation, we were having a very difficult time with our relationship. And then a few months later the first press started. There was an article in the New York Post, and my mother came home from being away for New Year’s to fifteen messages on her answering machine from friends who’d seen the article. She told me she just couldn’t handle it, and so she couldn’t have any more contact with me. And that’s the last I’ve heard from them.

Rumpus: What did you say when your mother told you that?

Lauren: I told her I was really sorry I had hurt her, and I told her that she should brace herself, because I knew that the Post article wouldn’t be the last of it, or the worst of it. I have sort of an unusual situation in that my story involved newsworthy people, such as foreign royalty. Because of that I got an unusual amount of national media attention for my memoir.

Rumpus: It sounds like you were being very practical, and also talking to her in a very compassionate way.

Lauren: Well, I realized the book must have been a really tough pill for my parents to swallow. I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for their position. But I also think that when you are going to be an artist who works with this sort of material, you have to just hand it over to the world. I trust that it’s bigger than me or my relationship with my parents. They have their right to have their reaction to it, but I’m still going to publish it. This has been incredibly hard for a lot of reasons. But I’m going to keep doing it.

Rumpus: How does your husband feel about it? You said that he seemed sad that your parents weren’t going to be in your life these holidays.

Lauren: My husband is incredibly supportive. He has been the whole time. There are certain relationships that I’m unwilling to lose in the world, that would trump me publishing something, and have. I have written a few things that he’s been very uncomfortable with, and so they haven’t made it out of the house. But generally, he is very comfortable being written about. He knows that aspects of our life are going to be all over things I release, and he’s perfectly fine with that. He’s believes in me, and he accepts it. He knew this about me when he married me. I didn’t marry somebody who wasn’t okay with it. So yeah, there are a couple of relationships I’m not willing to lose. And one is my husband, and the other is my son. He’s only two-and-a-half now, so it’s not an issue, but when he gets older, if he’s uncomfortable with something I write, I’ll respect his wishes.

Rumpus: I imagine it would kill your parents to know that you’d make those choices for other people, but not for them.

Lauren: Well, I think it’s sort of the normal order of things. This is my immediate family, this is the world I worked so hard for. I think the ethics around writing about children versus writing about grownups are different. You know, we’re all grownups, we’ve all made choices. I do make concessions for my husband. But that’s because he asks for them so rarely, and because he believes in my work and is so respectful of it. He is really the one who made it possible for me to follow through with writing this book because it was so hard. It did shake me to my core. I really was sitting there the day before the last day that I was allowed to make changes to the manuscript and I was debating, do I leave these paragraphs about my family in or take them out? Back and forth. And he said, “You are protecting a person who did these things. It’s the truth. Your father wasn’t an evil monster, but he was abusive to you and your brother, and it’s an important part of the story. You can spend your life protecting him. But the other option is you can write about it, tell the truth, let it be in the world, and see who it speaks to – who it helps.” You know, abused children protect their abusers. We get enmeshed in these contracts that are unwritten and unspoken, that we will protect our parents. It’s like the opposite of how things should go. As a writer your job is to pull the covers back on the stuff that we are inclined to keep quiet, to present the truth without shame.

Rumpus: You know, I hear you talking about this, and I’ve had a bunch of these conversations, and yet I keep coming back to this strong desire to get my parents’ permission and approval.

Lauren: You’re not going to get their permission and you’re not going to get their approval. It sucks. I’ve finally done something that I know that I would like to my parents to be proud of me for. And they would like to be proud of me, but they can’t. It’s a tragedy.

But I think there has to be a part of you that is capable of a lack of sentimentality. There has to be a part of you that’s willing to just be kind of brutal. This needs to be said, it’s an itch I’ve got to scratch. And it’s going to hurt some people. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m dealing with it in the most compassionate way, in order to tell the most authentic story and make the best book. I sort of think that mindset is required for this type of work.

Rumpus: That’s hard.

Lauren: But it’s what you have to do. It’s what I’ve had to do. I also have these cuckoo bananas stories. I tried to only write fiction for a long time to avoid revealing this stuff. But it wasn’t until I started writing non-fiction that the door in my mind opened for me. It said to me, “You are on the right track.”

Rumpus: You write in the book that Lauren is actually your middle name. So I am assuming your parents have a different last name than you. Did you do that as a way to protect them?

Lauren: I did it deliberately a long time ago. I did it so that nothing I did professionally would be associated with my parents. But then once you’re on “Good Morning America,” and people who know your family recognize you, that doesn’t work any more.

Rumpus: Yeah, your cover is blown. I’ve thought about using a pseudonym, but I think that would be strange and unsatisfying for me. Do you think your parents will ever come around?

Lauren: I don’t know. The wounds are fairly fresh. But I have bait – their grandson. My friend Shawna Kenney, who wrote I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, was initially shunned by her parents. They didn’t talk to her for two years. But now they’re talking again. So you never know.

Rumpus: It’s not just your parents that you reveal in your book, but also Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, whose harem you were in for 18 months. Did you have any qualms about shining that kind of a light on him – or any fear of reprisals, legal or otherwise?

Lauren: From a legal standpoint, I figured I was pretty okay. I never signed a confidentiality agreement. The legal department at the publishing house took the vetting of this manuscript very seriously, so I felt well taken care of in that regard.

I didn’t write this with the intention of hurting Jefri at all. I have compassion for him. I don’t hate him; I never hated him. I have a sort of fondness toward him that you get for people who have turned into characters, whether in your book or your life. He doesn’t have any power over me anymore. I feel kind of sorry for him. He just can’t seem to keep himself out of trouble lately. And he cracks me up with those sex statues.

Rumpus: You weren’t concerned he might lash out at you in some way?

Lauren: I’ve been asked before whether retribution was in the realm of possibility. I mean, portraying a Muslim political figure in unflattering ways – I suppose any number of things could happen. But I’m not going to shut my mouth because I’m afraid of a host of possibilities, and I have no idea what they could be. And I’ve found that people have been incredibly supportive – Muslim women in Brunei, for example. I get emails from women in different countries. They write and tell me how much they liked the book.

You know, I felt strongly enough that my story was as important as Prince Jefri’s story. Just because he is wealthy and part of foreign government doesn’t mean he’s more important. I was able to get behind that from a feminist perspective, and that helped to embolden me to not be afraid.

Rumpus: I’m guessing you haven’t heard from him since the book came out?

Lauren: No. I haven’t spoken to him since I left Brunei, years and years ago. But I did hear from one of his wives. She wrote me and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

**

Check out the Rumpus Radio interview with Jillian Lauren.

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• Get Out of My Crotch!

I found myself admiring so many aspects of Elliott’s writing. But what touched me most as a nervous wreck struggling with my own memoir was the simultaneously bold and compassionate way he handled writing about his father – kind of a brute, in both physical and emotional terms, who may or may not have once murdered a man.

There’s a scene toward the end of the book in which Elliott attempts to make peace with his father. Despite negligence and violence at his father’s hands during his teen years; despite his father letting him languish in group homes; despite decades of harsh verbal sparring between them; despite his father’s leaving negative reviews of his son’s books on Amazon and elsewhere, Elliott writes, “I realize that I love him and that my relationship with him is the most important one in my life.” Elliott meets with his father in Chicago and offers an olive branch, or more specifically, “a way for us to see that our memories are equally valid.”

“We all think we’re retaliating,” Elliott writes. “We all think our actions are justified by someone else’s actions. But actually we’re responsible for what we do.” While the conversation is less charged than many of their previous ones, his father is mostly unreceptive. “I’m always going to retaliate,” he promises his son before they part.

As a writer, I can only aspire to achieve, in equal measure, the kind of bravery with which Elliott writes about such painful relationships, and the even-handedness with which he treats the folks who get revealed in the process.

Elliott and I talked about all this one September day when he visited Albany, NY, where he was guest lecturing and giving a reading. As we sat down over coffee he said, “I guess I should talk at some point about how weird it is for me to be interviewed on the Rumpus.” But we never got to that.

***

The Rumpus: I want to start off talking about that passage in your book toward the end, where you go and you meet your father and you tell him that you realized that your relationship with him is the most important one in your life and that you love him. That scene makes me cry because I identify so much with it.

Stephen Elliott: In the process of writing my book I realized that I cared about my father, and I had to just take a stab at the happy ending. I just wanted to see him, and I was like, I am going to take some poison out of this relationship.

Rumpus: Unlike you, I am on regular speaking terms with my father, but it’s a difficult and kind of artificial relationship, and it keeps me from writing because if I write the truth – even if I’m not writing about him and it’s just about me – then I am revealing myself to not being who he thinks I am. I am realizing how much impact this relationship has on me. So I wanted to talk to you about how you realized that even though your relationship with your father is so difficult, you actually love him and that this is the most important relationship in your life.

Elliott: When I started writing the book, I did not feel that way. At that point, my father and I were not on speaking terms. We had not spoken in years and I was very angry at him and I was very upset with the things that he kept doing, like leaving bad reviews for my books on Amazon, and I just felt so constrained by this conflict that we had.  So it’s not like I started the book forgiving my father. It was probably through writing all those things and exploring them over that time period that I came to a better understanding of my relationship with him. And so to say it is the most important relationship of my life, well, it is fairly obvious, when you add it all up, what person have I spent the most time thinking about in my life? My father. What person in my life as impacted my decisions the most? Often not for the best, but the most, nonetheless.  My mother got sick when I was like eight years old and died when I was thirteen and she was so sick, she wasn’t really as impactful as she might have been. And my father is this abusive lover who gives and takes away affection and is completely unpredictable. So yes, of course, it is the most important relationship in my life. But also, how could I not love him? How could I not love someone who has been such a huge part of my life and had so much to do with who I am? And so I was engaged in twenty-five years of arguing with my father. Who else would I engage in twenty-five years of arguing with? And why would I engage with him, and respond, and listen – why would it matter…

Rumpus: If he didn’t matter to you?

Elliott: Right. I did not know when I started writing The Adderall Diaries that so much of it would be about my father and our intense dynamic, and I did not know the things I was going to find out and come to understand about our relationship. And that is a lot of what gives a narrative tension to the book – that I am exploring.  I am trying to figure things out, you know, so that is one of the things I figured out.  I did not start off knowing that, and so when you talk about writing about your father it’s like, you don’t know where you’re going. I talk about this all the time: you are not supposed to know where you are going when you start writing.

Rumpus: I totally don’t, because some of the better essays that I have published have wound up touching on him, but when I sat down to write them I didn’t think that he had anything to do with him.  Like this one where I thought I was just writing a story just about the book, The Rules, and how that way of treating people just doesn’t work. I had no idea when I sat down to write that at the heart of my feelings about that book was something about my relationship with my dad. Although, he gave me that book, so…

Elliott: You are so deeply conflicted over your relationship with your father. And I wonder sometimes, why is she so concerned about what her father thinks? You write and you try to be a good person and you make the effort, but there are still people who will not ever be pleased.  It is not like you can satisfy everybody, I mean if your father is a person who will not be happy no matter what you write. You just have to accept that at some point, you know?

Rumpus: On some level I think I do. It’s my intention to write about him compassionately. I feel like I have, but he’s been upset by things I’ve written about him, and so I feel like I owe it to him to be more careful. But I still do not think he will be flattered by anything I write about him.

Elliott: I think what you’re talking about is something really false, though.  Like there is a difference between trying to be compassionate to someone and actually feeling compassion for them.  Like you have to reconcile your feelings, you have get at a truth. If you are being artificially nice when you have conflict with your father, then you are not fully exploring it.  So if you go into that, if you really head into that storm, then you might figure out how you really feel, and then you might find real compassion in there – the kind of compassion that does not depend on approval.

Rumpus: Wow. That makes so much sense.

Elliott: You know, what you are looking for now is approval. You are like, “I’m going to write something that my father will not disapprove of,” but that does not have anything to do with how you feel. If you really explore how you feel, you might find real compassion, and it will not matter what he thinks of your writing.

Rumpus: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I have had an inkling of that in the back of my mind. It’s this sense that if I were write more honestly and maybe risk disapproval – disownership, even – then I might come to a realer place with him. Maybe I would feel more like I had an honest relationship with him. And also, if I took those risks, it would make the writing more accessible and relatable.

Elliott: More vivid, more powerful. The reader can feel when you are lying, even if they are not really sure of what the lie is.  You might think you are telling the truth, but if you are being dishonest with yourself, you will pass on that dishonesty to the reader, and the reader will feel it. You know, you talk about owing your father compassion, but you do not believe that and neither do I.  It is not a ledger book with a balance.

Rumpus: I feel like there is some natural compassion for him.  I feel sorry for him. But also I think that there are things he does that I want to write about that come from a place of good intention but are just terribly misguided. There is something about the good intention that I want to come through. For example, my father handing me a copy of The Rules when I am thirty-five – this totally fucked up book about getting guys to like you by treating them like shit. But the intention was good. It was him saying, “I want you stop going out with fucked up guys; I want you to, be happy.” But as sweet as that intention seems to me as a writer, he is not going to be flattered by my portrayal of him as a sweet, misguided guy.

Elliott: There is no version of this that will make him happy. I think you just have to do the work of figuring out your own feelings. Right now it’s like you’re writing with one hand tied behind your back. And that’s the hand you write with.

Rumpus: You are so right. That’s a great analogy.

Elliott: Because you are writing and you are concerned with what your father is going to think about your writing, while you are writing it, and so you can’t.  You have got to go into the storm. The writing won’t get good unless it leads to, like, serious realizations about who you are and how you guys feels and about what the real genesis of your conflict is.

Rumpus: I probably can’t get there unless I –

Elliott: You have got to go toward it, but you cannot go toward it because you are writing and you are worried about what your father is going to think while you are writing it so you cannot make any progress and you can’t make those realizations that you need to make.

Rumpus: So many times I have thought, why can’t I just write something else? Like why can’t I just make some shit up?  I mean, there is other stuff in the word that interests me. I have observed relationships and I think that is interesting and I can make up a story about people who did this or that. But I feel as if I cannot change the channel. In The Adderall Diaries you write about feeling as if your sorrows and your experiences are just sitting there like a can of red paint and that you just have to use it. Do you still feel that way?

Elliott: I think there is like an urgency you are talking about. But what I am saying in The Adderall Diaries is like, you know, this is what I do. I write and I create art from my life.  It is not about right or wrong, it is just what I do. I think that is different from saying I have to do this. It’s almost like you are already making excuses – you’re saying, “You don’t understand. I have to do this.” Where with me, it’s more like, this is just what I do. If somebody gets hurt, it’s not like I want to hurt anybody, but this what I do, and if you are in my life, I will probably end up writing about you in some way. And you have every right to be offended by that, and I could apologize, later, but I know I am going to write about it. Why bother lying about that?

This is a little dangerous, but here goes. I had a relationship with someone that wasn’t moral. It was wrong. It involved a lot of lying and the first couple of times I felt guilty and then after a while I thought, If I really felt guilty, I would not be doing this. So it’s like, I was feeling bad about it to give myself the excuse I needed to do what I wanted.

Rumpus: So if you felt bad about it, that made it okay. Like, if you were suffering in some way, it justified doing it.

Elliott: Yeah, exactly. It’s okay because I feel bad about it. But I keep doing it. So it’s not like, “Okay I have to write it.” It’s, “This is what I do, and I have made peace with that.”  It’s morally ambiguous as far as I am concerned. There’s nothing noble about being a writer.  This is just what I do.  This how I have learned to get by in the world.  This is how I cope. This is how I process. This is how I understand things. This is how my memory functions. I do not know any other way, and it is too late now, and I do not really want to change it.

Rumpus: Yeah, one of the things I’ve heard you say a few times is that you acknowledge that you are in some ways betraying whomever you’re writing about. But you don’t not do it. I have been fascinated by that – that, on the one hand, you say, “I am going to do this,” and on the other, you say, “but I am going to acknowledge that what I am doing is kind of shitty.”

Elliott: Yeah. I try not to be shitty, though, you know? I mean, I try. I always hide identities unless I can’t.

Rumpus: Yeah, but sometimes you can’t hide people. Like you couldn’t hide who you dad was.

Elliott: Right. Those are the situations where you make the difficult decisions.  But either way, if I am going to write about someone, I try to write about them with kindness, and by that I mean I try to make very serious effort to understand their point of view.  To understand that if we are in a conflict, and I feel wronged by them, they probably feel wrong by me. You know, that you are not the victim. Realizing that nobody ever feels like they started it. Everybody thinks that they are reacting to something. I feel like I am reacting something, my father feels like he is reacting to something.  We all feel that way, and so try to understand those things and just get into the writing, where you just can’t fake it. Sometimes you just have to really go into it.  Here is this burning heat.  Here is this place where I just really dislike this person to the point where I can’t even write about them because the hatred is so strong, and just go into that.  Like, what is that about? And you have to be very skeptical of yourself.  You have to understand that the other person doesn’t think of himself as the monster. Nobody thinks of themselves as the monster.  So you try not think of them as monsters either. We are complicated. So you try and understand why another person might feel justified in what they are doing.

Also, understand that the quickest way to be wrong about somebody is to think you know their motives. If you think, “My dad did this for this reason or for that reason,” you are almost certainly wrong.  We don’t even know why we do things. Motives are impossible to really know.

Rumpus: Yeah, I get that, especially the idea that no one thinks they started it. I keep coming to that stalemate. My dad and I also come to the stalemate about whether it’s the past or the present we’re talking about. I remember you reading something about how your dad thinks that you are angry with him about the past, but you are really angry at him for –

Elliott: The present.

Rumpus: Yeah, the present. And I keep going around that one a million times with my father.  He’ll say, “You’re still not forgiving me for the divorce in 1976,” and I’ll say, “No, it’s about what you did last week, which happens to be same thing you did back then.” He doesn’t ever get it, and he thinks I do not understand him at all, either.

Elliott: But your problem is not him assigning motive to you – it’s you assigning motive to him.  It’s not him not understanding why you did something – it’s you not understand why he did something.  If you want to have a better grasp on the situation and write about this complicated thing, then like you have to put your effort toward understanding where where he is coming from.  Understanding that his truth is true to him. Like, he is not lying when he accuses you of being unforgiving.  Like that is how he feels, you know.  He is not making that up. So if you want to understand things, then it is not important that he understands why you are upset. It is actually much more important that you understand why he is upset, because that is where the information lies.  That is the information you do not currently have.  You’ve got the other information. The information you do not have – which is very hard to obtain in full – is: where is he coming from?  How could what he is saying be true and what I am saying also be true, and of course it is, because “true” is such a liquid thing.

Rumpus: There is a central story that I want to explore in my memoir.  My father and his sister do not speak. He disowned her in 1976, and my whole life, there have been two looming threats. One was that I was going to be disowned like his sister, and the other was that I would turn out like his sister, who is like 69 years old and impoverished and ill. She lives in alone a room in someone’s decrepit house.

Elliott: This is his sister?

Rumpus: Yeah.  She has been on and off welfare for many years. She was married once to an alcoholic who took all her money. She had a daughter with him who is a year younger than me – she’s 44 – and who ran away from home when she was fourteen to Alabama. From what I understand, she became a stripper and a sex worker, and had three kids with three different dads. And now she’s a grandmother. I’m pretty sure my aunt hasn’t met any of her grandkids because neither she nor her daughter can afford to travel. So, I have this idea that I want to go and bring my aunt to Alabama, reconnect with her and my cousin, find out what happened, why she’s always been sort of a mess – and if she even sees herself that way.

Elliott: So do that.

Rumpus: But I have always felt as if I am not allowed.  Because he disowned her, and disapproves of everything about her, I feel I am not allowed to know her.  And I am dying to go and spend time with her. I feel for her. It’s so sad to me – and scary – that she was cut off like that. And I want to see my cousin, who I haven’t seen since I was ten. And I want to help bring them together. And I know I will want to write about it. Ideally I would also love to talk to my father about it. But I know he will not want to, and I know that I run the risk in doing this of getting cut off and upsetting him. So I am terrified.

Elliott: I mean, why? It is like all of this is so obvious, you know what I mean? Like you have incredible fear of your father disowning you.  He is like forbidding you all this information. He wants to keep you in the dark and not let you find out some other truths, and you feel you are being kept from finding out who these people are, for fear of being cutoff and you do not even have any idea what you are going to find there.  You are forty-five years old and, like, you don’t get to talk to these people and find out about them? There’s like a movie here. Obviously you are going to find out everything from these people, but you are so terrified of your father. You just have to find out why you are so deeply terrified of your father disowning you. Because nothing of what you are saying makes that add up.  Nothing you have said explains the fear of him disowning you.  What happens when he disowns you? Does the earth come off its axis? If a person cannot have a relationship with you because of who you are, then you have to accept that.

Rumpus: Yeah, that’s my whole problem.

Elliott: Just like you cannot write a book that everybody likes, you cannot be a person that everybody likes. You cannot be an interesting person if you try to please everybody all the time.  This is something that Margaret Cho told me once, and she is all famous and it’s crass – it’s a crass way of thinking about life. She said, “If nobody is saying anything bad about you, you are not doing anything.”  And I know what she meant. You are forty-five and you are just this sweet person who does not want to make any waves, you know, and it is getting late. You do not get to go half-way.  No reader is interested in a book where the writer is trying to spare somebody’s feelings.

Rumpus: Right. Ouch.

Elliott: I mean, all those relationships you will be having with your aunt and your cousin and everybody else, you know, and things you could explore by yourself, you are too afraid to explore because you don’t want to make your father angry. Look at all these things that you are giving up. Even though you so clearly love him, you have to let go of trying to keep him from being angry. You have to do those things. And you have to let your father just be your father, and if he cannot deal, do not be the person making excuses. You do not have to respond to anything. You do not have to respond to everything, do not have to try talking your way out of it.  Just allow the person to be upset.

Rumpus: Let him have his feelings.

Elliott: Let them have their feelings, and go their own way, and let them come back around, or not. It’s like you’re being kept in this weird cage.  It’s just bizarre.

Rumpus: I feel like so much of my energy in life from childhood has been, you know, do I not embarrass my father.  Do not disgrace my father. For much of my life it kept me from being who I am.

Elliott: You have to find a way onto the high road.  Like, let him feel how he feels and live with it. You know, my father leaves bad reviews of my books on Amazon and I say, okay.  If that makes him happy, then that is fine.

Rumpus: But it doesn’t cripple you? It doesn’t give you writer’s block?  It doesn’t make you feel like –

Elliott: Not anymore.

Rumpus: But it did?

Elliott: It did.

Rumpus: What was it like before you got past it?

Elliott: When I was like twenty seven maybe, twenty eight, I just felt my father owed me a lot, you know.  He was a long way away from having paid his debt for the things he had done. I was actually wrong about that. I mean, how do you collect that debt? What does a son owe a father? What does a father owe a son? But I had all this resentment toward him. I remember one time he said to me, “You know a relationship can survive anything except contempt,” and I knew he was right, but I had a lot of contempt.

Rumpus: And did it come out in the writing?

Elliott: Yeah, I think you can see it in the writing, in this book I wrote about life in the group homes, A Life Without Consequences. The father always dies in my novels. And nobody shows up at the funeral. But I don’t actually think that was a problem.  I think what he really took offense to were the things I would say in interviews.  I would talk about group homes I grew up in, saying these are hard places and there is a lot of violence. I remember one time he said, “My neighbors think I am an abusive father because of the things they read about you,” and I thought, “Well, you were an abusive father.”  Like, the neighbors are right. So what do you want me to do about that?  But now I can see it from his side.

Rumpus: How did you get over that hump?

Elliott: Well, I went into the storm.  I wrote about it directly. What I had to write about was this crippling relationship, and this battle for my identity.  I had to really address what was happening. I had to write about that conflict specifically, write my way through it, try to understand it, and finally come to terms with the idea that my father and I can have different truths. It’s fine. I do not need his approval. I love him and I want him to be happy. But that does not mean I have to talk to him or respond to his messages.  It does not mean that I cannot write something that I want to write. He is seventy-three or seventy-four, seventy-five years old now. He is not going to change.  I do not need to change him, don’t need to convince him of anything. I just have to love him.  I just have to accept him and let him have his truth. And what you are focusing on– it sounds like you want to change your father. He is not going to change. And you have to love him and allow him to have his truth.

Rumpus: There is part of me that is also trying to get through to him and say, this is not so bad, what I am writing. I am not so bad.

Elliott: No. No. You have to stop. There is no getting through to him. The point of writing this is not getting through to your father. Your book is not a letter to him.  You cannot argue your side of the story, to me or to anybody else.  It is like you have to accept that there are multiple versions of reality and that people have different views on what happened. You have to let these contradictory truths exist and just love your father and live your life and let him do whatever he is going to do.  But do not let him impact your actions, or your image or your identity.

Rumpus: I feel like the book is going to be kind of meta – a lot about my finally giving myself permission to write the book.

Elliott: You know, you might have to write in circles. You might not be able to do it in a linear way because the glare might be too bright to go straight forward.

Rumpus: So, what is your relationship with your dad like now?

Elliott: I see my father when I am in Chicago.  He sends me emails from time to time. Occasionally we talk on the phone. If I am in Chicago I certainly stop by to say hello.

There was a moment, which I think happened because of the writing of The Adderall Diaries, where I just felt all that resentment toward him leave me. That was a moment where I realized that I do not want him to be unhappy. I want him to be happy. I hope for him to be happy. I do the things I do because they are what I do, but I do not do anything to actively make him unhappy. I do not get any pleasure from that, and yeah, you know, like, I love him.  I am not under any kind of like illusion that he was a good father, but really, who am I to judge?  It doesn’t matter. I feel like I am more concerned with, am I good a person.  Am I satisfied with the way I am living my life? This is more important to me than whether my father a good person.  That is not really relevant.  He’s just my father.  He is just who he is.  He is a difficult person and he is capable of giving what he is capable of giving and he is not capable of giving what he is not capable of giving.  We are never going to be that close. I will never have grown up with him, and not left home. There was so much distance between us for so long and at one point I did not speak to him for five years. You cannot undo that. You know this idea that it’s never too late? That’s bullshit. It’s always too late.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Order The Adderall Diaries from The Rumpus.

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In an effort to embolden myself to move past this crippling fear and go on writing – or give up altogether – I’ve begun interviewing memoirists I admire. I ask them their philosophy about writing about others; how they have handled writing about their parents, siblings, husbands, wives, partners, exes, and everyone in between; and what kind of consequences they’ve suffered as a result.

First up was Vivian Gornick, veteran journalist, feminist, critic, teacher, and author of many books, including The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, essentially a bible for writers of memoir and essays.

In Fierce Attachments, her classic 1987 memoir, she tells the story of her difficult, symbiotic relationship with her widowed mother – how it both defined and confined her. The narrative weaves back and forth between evocative vignettes from Gornick’s painful childhood in the Bronx, and scenes from her adult life, many of them centered around conversations she has with her mother as they walk together through Manhattan.

Gornick holds nothing back in portraying her mother – feisty until the day she died at 94 – as cloying, manipulative, and vindictive. But she does so lovingly, alternately offering compassionate glimpses of her mother’s vulnerability and deep attachment to her daughter. Any reader who has had a complicated relationship with a parent – and who hasn’t? – both perfectly understands and marvels at how an educated, “liberated” intellectual feminist thinker and Village Voice reporter like Gornick can be instantly undone by one phone call from the woman who gave her life.

I met with Gornick, who is at work on her second memoir, at her apartment in Greenwich Village.

The Rumpus: I first read Fierce Attachments when I was thirty-five and I just read it again, at forty-four. It really knocked me out this time, maybe because I see my parents getting older. How old were you when you wrote it?

Vivian Gornick: In my late forties. I was about forty-six or forty-seven, something like that.

Rumpus: It really resonated. I am especially in awe of the way you handled writing about your mother and also your husband and your lover. I found that although you didn’t pull any punches, you treated them very tenderly.

Gornick: That is good. My mother did not quite see it that way. But, I mean — well, she did, periodically and ultimately. Lots of people – old, Jewish people who have no literary sense whatever – would often say, “How can you write such things about your mother?!” And my mother herself would say that on occasion. But, yeah I am glad to hear it feels now that I was writing tenderly.

Rumpus: Did you plan Fierce Attachments as a memoir?

Gornick: I was definitely very conscious about writing a memoir. The stories of my mother and Nettie and myself, those were vivid stories I told since I was a kid. And people were always saying, “Oh write a novel, write a novel.” It took me many years to realize that I wasn’t a fiction writer, and that came about through my work at the Village Voice. See, I never thought of myself as writing about myself, but I was of that generation that was very influenced by the New Journalism, and I knew early that – and this dovetailed with feminism, with my becoming a radical feminist — to insert myself, to use myself to tell a story that was actually cultural and political and intense, was my style. I learned the importance of using myself — not writing about myself — in those years. People who knew what they were doing would use themselves to illuminate a subject beyond themselves. The bad ones were falling into it and ending up writing about themselves and they were the worst writers of personal journalism. I never lost sight of the story that was outside myself.

Then years passed and I got tired of that work and I wanted to write from the inside, out of my own experience. I wanted to make literature, and not any longer be a stranger in other peoples lives, but become intimate with my own. So, one day, I was walking in the street with an old friend, and somehow or other we started talking about our childhood, and I came up again with Nettie and momma and me. She suddenly said to me, “That is a memoir.” And you know, the word, it never came into my head. But this was the seventies, before this craze began. And a light bulb went on in my head and I realized that that is what I had to do.

Rumpus: Did you plan it as the memoir that it turned out to be? Or did you just write and see where it went?

Gornick: What happened was, all my life, I thought Nettie and momma made me a woman. Between the two of them, my mother lost her husband and became Anna Karenina – she went down on the sofa and suffered – and the other one, Nettie, became the whore of Babylon. From them I learned that a man was the most important thing in life and if you lost one you were a moron. If you did not get one, you were stupid and lost and you were inept. I came of course to resent that as I got older and I was an incipient feminist. I had ambitions for myself and I came to hate them both for this. And this was the story I thought I wanted to write.

So I wrote about forty pages and I suddenly got horribly stuck and I knew I did not have a structure that would help me tell the story that I wanted to tell, and I did not even really know what the story was at this point. But I knew I had unfinished business with my mother and that telling this all in the past, as if I was telling a straight narrative since I was eight years old, would not work. For six months, I sat at my desk in misery, and then one day my mother called and told me one of these walking stories that I later repeated in the book. This girl and she were at the stop light and the little girl started to cross the street on the red. My mother pulled her back and said, “Darling, you only cross on the green,” and kid said, “Lady, you got the whole thing upside-down.” And I said to my mother, “That kid is not going to last until eight.” And then, for fun, just to relieve myself of the writing block, I sat down and wrote this vignette out. And suddenly I realized that I had gold, that I could put my mother and myself in the present, walking the streets of New York, and alternate with the past, and that would help me create two sets of women who were slowly going to account for themselves, to each other. And in the walks, I was going to give my mother everything. In the walks, she’d be smart, funny, wise, warm, tart, all the things that she could be, and in the past, she would be neurotic and self-pitying.

Rumpus: So she had an arc.

Gornick: She had an arc and that helped me make an arc. When I went back and re-wrote everything this way, slowly I began to see the story was not in how momma and Nettie made me a woman, but the story was that I had become my mother and therefore I could not leave my mother. That was the thing I really came to understand – what we all come to understand ultimately. It is all based on fear and misery and the inability to separate. And that I had mimicked so much of her. So much of her was inside me that I could not leave. Once I understood that, I knew that I was writing to dramatize that insight. After that it didn’t matter what the hell I wrote. There was nothing I was afraid of, because I knew I was not writing to trash her. I was not writing to aggrandize myself. I was writing to serve that insight.

Rumpus: Did your mother know you were writing this memoir? How did she feel about it?

Vivian Gornick

Gornick: She knew what I was doing, and sometimes she would rage at me, “Why are you writing this?! So the whole world will know you hate me?” And I would go home and quail, and I would not be able to write for three days. And then I would forget about her, and trusted that she would have the wit ultimately to see that these were hard truths I was speaking, and that I was not setting out to savage her. And in her way, she did. I mean, my mother was like a child. She was volatile until the day she died, so I never showed her a word of this to her until it was printed. Then she gets it. She reads thirty pages and she calls me up and she says, “Already I see you said something not true.” So I said, “What?” And it was something ridiculous. Then another thirty pages and another and I said, “Ma, what is it?” And she says, “It hurts.” And I said, “Mom, it is a great for you that you can say that.” Anyway, she finished it and she came here and she sat down in this chair and she said, “Well, you had a lot of courage and some nerve to write this book. You told the truth. I see how much I have affected your life.” But then two weeks later she called me in a rage, saying, “You have held me up to ridicule! Now the whole world knows I was no good.” On and on we went like that. At the end, after a year, she got into the celebrity of the book, and she was walking around New York signing it.

Rumpus: That’s awesome. That’s an outcome to wish for.

Gornick: I know a novelist whose work is very autobiographical. She said once, “I write as though everyone is dead,” and essentially, if you are going to do this work, that is what you have to do. You have to believe in the story that you are telling more than anything else.

Rumpus: I aspire to what you are saying – I do not feel like my stories are just about me. I feel like they are larger stories about what is happening culturally, and also just about being a human being. Like, “This is what it is to be a human being in this world at this time.” I do feel that there is a greater good that will ultimately be served by what I have to say.

Gornick: That should liberate you.

Rumpus: It does until, you know, like, my stepmother calls and tells me that if my father has a heart attack, it’s going to be my fault because of what I wrote – in the same way that you would get the phone call and would not be able to write for three days. Not all of my stories are about my parents, but many at least refer to them. There is just no way to cleanly tell a story of anything that happened in my life without the context of other people.

Gornick: From the minute I realized I was a writer, I realized they just had less reality than my story. There’s no other way to put it. You either do it or you do not do it. If you are traumatized by the family, the parents, all of this, then you do not write.

Rumpus: Right.

Gornick: There is no prescription. There is no magic potion for it. There is only the greater need. Nobody can put that into you. That is the transforming moment, the need to tell your the story.

Rumpus: I have that need. Actually, I do not feel like it is a choice. I feel like I cannot help but write – except when I’m so scared that I can’t. There is this compulsion to get it all down.

You never let the feelings of others influence your writing?

Gornick: I subjected myself to one restriction in Fierce Attachments, and I regretted it. My brother – I cannot even remember how or why I showed him any of this. I guess it was my niece who said he was in a dither and he was agitated. He is six-and-a-half years older than me. We have a bad relationship, but we are a pair who keep on trying. So, I always felt somewhat constrained by him. My brother said to me, “No matter what, I do not want you ever to write a word about me,” and that scared me. So, I make him very shadowy. After that though, I never ever showed anybody anything, none of them, ever. I do not show anybody anything. My ex-husbands I have written about, and I do not give a shit –

Rumpus: Did you change names?

Gornick: Yes, completely. I never can write with their real names. It just constrains me terribly.

Rumpus: Did you ever hear from either of the husbands?

Gornick: Yeah, the second one. He was like, “What? When did I do that?” I said well, you did not exactly do that.

Rumpus: What about — what about Joe Durbin, the married man with whom you had an affair? How did he handle it?

Gornick: Oh, Joe Durbin. Well, the one thing that I was afraid of was that his wife would recognize him.

Rumpus: That was my question after this one.

Gornick: Yeah, she did not. It was a complicated affair. He certainly didn’t give a damn. Even though I had some hard things about him too in it, you know, what a bully he was. Oh, but he did not care.

Rumpus: You revealed he was an adulterer.

Gornick: Yeah, and that he was unfaithful to me. But, I mean, he knew himself. He did not care. He was delighted by the book. He thought it was a great book. The wife, though.

Rumpus: You worried about her?

Gornick: I worried, but not enough not to write. I showed it to him before it was published out of this worry, and he was a little bit worried, but not enough to censor me.

I had some trouble with other people, though. My mother tells a story early on about Mrs. Kornfeld, I think that was her name, and she is the woman who lies down in the road, who is crazy with sexual jealousy because all these women are able to sleep with their husbands and she cannot because her kids are in the room, and she goes to really a malicious extent to scare the women in the country. I do not know why I used her real name. I figured they are all dead. A year later, I get a call and a man says, “Are you Vivian Gornick?” I said, “Yes,” and he says “I believe that you wrote about my mother.” My heart is pounding, and he says “I am Mrs. Kornfeld’s son.” I nearly dropped the down the telephone.

Rumpus: Was he angry?

Gornick: He was not angry. Worse, he was sort of hurt. And then I realized I had been reckless.

Worse, many years ago the first book I wrote was a book about Egypt. [ed: In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt, Dutton, 1973]. I had an Egyptian lover and I went to Egypt on the strength of that affair and I met all these people and I came home and I wrote this book on Egypt with all these people in it and that had terrible consequences. I just did not disguise them enough, and one of the uncles called this Egyptian man who was still in America and said, “You have sent a Jewish fox to eat of our vitals.” It was really scary. I got calls from the Nazi party in America that said, “We see you are one of us.” I got calls at midnight from people who said, “You belong in Auschwitz.” The Jews especially were in a fucking rage. And I was frightened. It was really frightening. That was like being one of these reporters who was gonna be offed.

Rumpus: As you were writing, there was never a sense that you were betraying anybody in writing about them?

Gornick: As a writer you are always making use of the people you have experienced. I mean what else have you got? Joan Didion once said a writer sells everybody out, which is true. The best thing though that you can say for yourself is that you have got your eye on a larger story. You are not writing in order either to even scores or write some nasty piece of delicious sensation or whatever.

Rumpus: It’s little consolation for them. “Congratulations. You are part of a grander truth.”

Gornick: It is a big consolation for them yeah, right. No one ever sees themselves the way the writer sees them. A friend of mine wrote a memoir about her mother where she said many, many painful things and her mother called her up in a rage and she said, “Ma, it is not about us, it is art.” And her mother said, “What kind of dummy do you think you’re talking to?”

Rumpus: The book ends with a discussion where you mother says, “Why don’t you go already? Why don’t you walk away from my life? I’m not stopping you.” And you say, “I know you’re not, ma.” It was such a difficult relationship. Did you ever think about cutting her out?

Gornick: Of my life?

Rumpus: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a complicated love between a child and a parent. You want to protect them, but at the same time, you want to be free of them.

Gornick: Oh no. I could not do that. Are you kidding? It is not even that I am such Jewish daughter. As you get older, you know that this is a zero-sum game. You lose fifty different ways. You are harnessed with this thing. The only way to live with yourself is just to be as decent as you can be within it. But I was a dutiful daughter. I could not live with myself if I cut her out. She dragged at my heart too. There was no way out of it. But writing the book did not – when I wrote that book I had achieved as much distance as I needed to write the book, but I had certainly not achieved enough distance to not still go on being lacerated by my mother.

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