Apparently I was not alone. The essay struck a nerve with readers, and for a few days in early September, it seemed to go viral, taking over my friends’ Facebook feeds and eventually winding up on MetaFilter. I was stunned, and overwhelmed by the feedback I received. Women (and some excellent men) wrote to me publicly and privately to say thank you, and to share their own hard experiences with reproductive choice. I got lovely notes from writers I admired. I was asked to contribute the piece to an anthology of writing on women’s rights. And I was invited to be a guest on Fresh Air.

Now, when you’re a writer—or any sort of creative artist—and you are struggling to find your audience, to be seen and heard through the static, to make even some bitty mark on the world, you do not say no when Terry Gross comes calling. Fresh Air, with a daily audience of 4.5 million public radio listeners, is the platinum ring of publicity—the platform to end all platforms, at least in the NPR-friendly corner of the culture.

So, despite some reservations, I said yes. I went down to WBEZ (Chicago’s public radio station) and sat in a studio with a local producer and a set of headphones and talked for just under an hour with Terry Gross, in her studio in Philadelphia, about what it was like to accidentally get pregnant, to freak out, to try and figure out what to do, and then to have a miscarriage.

It was a disaster. I was nervous, inarticulate, and defensive. I realized, around minute five, that there was a vast chasm between writing about something so very personal and talking about it with someone who I did not know and was, no matter how gentle, totally intimidating. After the fact I likened it to a really awkward, inappropriately intimate job interview. I did not sleep all night and when, the next day, the producer e-mailed to say that, yeah, that didn’t go so well and we’re not going to be able to use it, I felt nothing but a pure wash of relief.

That was months ago, but it got me thinking about the challenges of personal writing, something I’ve, for the most part, shied away from as a writer but that I’m lately finding resonant as a reader. Why can personal writing be so gratifying, and yet also so terribly scary—or destructive? What’s the peculiar challenge for women in writing about painful/shameful subjects such as sex and power? How does the expectation that a writer should be brand-building, across platforms, 24/7, affect the separation of a work of art from its marketing? How much information is too much information? Can it ever be more powerful—or at least self-protective—to hold something back?

When I was writing “Knocked Over,” I turned for advice to my good friend Zoe Zolbrod. (I turned to her for advice when I was pregnant, too.) Author of the great novel Currency, Zoe is now working on a memoir about childhood sexual abuse and has a lot more experience than me at turning complicated personal experience into something fit for public consumption. I realized, after the Fresh Air fail, that I was far more articulate when sorting through all this stuff with Zoe than on my own—or with Terry Gross. So I asked her to join me here.

***

Martha Bayne: Hey, Zoe! I guess I should start by saying thank you, for your help getting “Knocked Over” published, and for all your editorial suggestions along the way. I remember in August, when I was writing the piece, you kept pushing me to go deeper, to reveal more about my “emotional journey.” And I didn’t want to, for a variety of reasons. I’m okay with what I held back from the essay, but clearly this initial resistance returned, with a vengeance, during the interview, as Terry Gross seemed far more interested in discussing my emotional journey than, say, Todd Akin, or the disastrous state of maternity coverage for individual health insurance holders, and I was not prepared. In retrospect I wonder if I was doing myself a disservice by not going farther down that road in the first place. Thoughts?

Zoe Zolbrod: I remember before the interview, to the extent that you were prepping, you were prepping statistics on reproductive health, not prepping how to turn your emotional journey into nuggets of radio-friendly story. I guess in part that was your journalist self kicking into gear, but it also seemed a way to make the story not about you anymore. Before the interview, you also mentioned worries about becoming a spokesperson for casual sex—you were concerned that a platform as large as Fresh Air might bring you to the attention of Fox News or other right-wing pundits who would shame you and hold you up as a symbol, à la Sandra Fluke. So to some extent, you were taking a defensive posture even before you sat down at the mic to be asked about how it felt to get pregnant when you were single and forty-four—you were anticipating the ways you could be viewed for talking frankly about sex.

We’ve talked some about the line between being brave—or taking action in the face of risk, which so many of the essay’s readers complimented you for—and being fearless, conducting yourself as if there were no consequences, which was the adjective you felt was more apt. Would you say that you were no longer feeling fearless when you talked to Terry Gross? And if so, what prompted the change?

Bayne: That’s probably true. I don’t think fearlessness means acting without regard to consequences, but more just forging ahead in the face of unknown consequences. (Whereas bravery is like running into a burning building. You know what you’re getting into.) I did not feel fearless sitting in that studio; I felt strangled by every word coming out of my mouth, wondering how each one would be judged.

This may have been because I was worried (however improbably) about somehow landing on Rush Limbaugh’s radar, but also at that point I was already revising my own inner monologue. The interview happened a month after the essay was posted, which was itself only six weeks or so after the events that prompted it. One of the things that people responded to so strongly about the essay was its emotional immediacy. But I wasn’t there anymore; my “emotional journey” had continued to carry me on down the road, to a place where I was still trying to get the lay of the land. I was feeling a different kind of sadness, and tasting a whole new flavor of anger.

Zolbrod: Once you put a story in writing, especially when it’s actually read as widely as your essay was, it fixes something that is still unfolding. You end up having to impersonate yourself.

Bayne: Right. So here I am, trying to channel the voice of this person from late August, in October, and feeling like a fraud. Of course, that trapped-in-amber quality is true of any piece of writing—it exists out of time, but is at the same time a product of a particular moment, and authors have to figure out how to live with the disconnect. Just ask anyone (like you!) who’s gone out to promote a book written years ago. But it’s really jarring when the subject matter is all this very intimate, mucky, still-evolving stuff. I’m interested in how you’ve dealt with this, in that unlike me, your memoir is about—in large part—events that happened a long time ago, not last month. Do you think having the benefit of time makes the story you’re telling more fixed?

Zolbrod: Not really, because that’s not how I’m approaching the material. I’m definitely not looking back in tranquility at traumas of my childhood. My book, as it exists right now, consists of roughly three through lines. One from my early childhood, which included sexual abuse; one from my adolescence onward, as I cast the story of what happened to me in different ways as I figure out my identity; and one that’s very current, where I’m writing, often from the point of view of a parent, about things that happened last month as well as how the past appears now, when more recent events have me interrogating my interpretations. In a way, I’m dealing on the page with what you dealt with in Terry Gross’s hot seat—including facing feelings of anger and of being a fraud. But of course, the big difference is that as a writer rather than an interviewee, I’m more in control of this process, however raw the subject matter.

You’ve mentioned that there’s a Journalism 101 trope that says something like “no good story ever started with the word ‘I.’” The analogous idea when it comes to memoir seems to be that you shouldn’t publish writing done as therapy or you shouldn’t be writing about events you’ve not completely processed. When it comes to my own project, I seem to be rejecting those ideas to some degree. Still, they get at the tension that can exist between what’s good for the work and what’s good for the author.

Bayne: That’s a good point. I have a knee-jerk aversion to calling “Knocked Over” therapy, but as everything was happening I was definitely taking notes as a way of both documenting this confusing experience—both the external events and my own emotional response—and of trying to make sense of it. So, perhaps the process may have been therapeutic? But I’d hope the form and context that this raw material eventually took on lifted it into a more universal place. I mean, I did not publish my journal, god forbid. I do wonder, though, what would have happened if I’d waited a bit longer to turn those journal entries into an essay. Even a month later it might have been a very different piece. Whether it would have been better or worse, we’ll never know.

Zolbrod: That sort of gets back to your question about whether you did yourself a disservice in terms of what you held back in “Knocked Over.” I think insofar as we’re talking about the work, the answer is clear. “Knocked Over” turned out beautifully, and it had enormous resonance for people—I mean, I had multiple people who had read your essay coming up to me because of my association with you, telling me their stories of reproductive messiness that they were now inspired, and perhaps for a long time had been desperate, to tell.  The balance in what you pulled off in the end seems just right.

But perhaps your question about whether you did yourself a disservice has more to do with you personally, as you continue to work through the effects of that watershed couple months. It’s interesting that after the awkward interview with Terry Gross, when you felt like, to some extent, your privacy was being invaded, your question is whether you should have held less back originally. I would think your experience might have led you to wonder why you had put so much out there in the first place—although in all our conversations, I’ve never heard you second-guess your decision to publish the essay. So when you ask if you were doing yourself a disservice in not going deeper into your own psychology or into the full complexity of the situation, are you really asking more generally about personal writing in general? What would have a satisfying conversation with Terry Gross looked like to you—what would it have covered?

Bayne: Well, one key thing that I forgot is that to a large degree, these interviews function as a stand-in for the story itself. So you’re being asked to re-tell the story you already told on paper, for those who don’t know it, rather than have a conversation that builds on the existing information. I remember subconsciously chafing against this at the time, thinking, Why is she asking me these dumb questions? But I blame myself completely for that part.

I also think, at that moment, I was more interested in the response to the essay and what it said about the cultural/political moment we were in, which was just wound up to this crazy-making point in terms of reproductive rights and women’s sexuality as the election season got more and more heated. The piece was very personal, but at the conclusion it jumps from the personal to the public sphere and that’s what I was more interested in, at least in terms of a topic for public discussion.

It’s funny—I went back and asked my old editor about that trope about not starting with “I,” and she interprets it more as just a push to get writers to try harder to find a good lede. I just thoroughly internalized it as a proscription against personal writing during the years I was working at a newspaper. But even before that, thinking back to Maxine [the zine Zolbrod and Bayne co-published in the late '90s], you were the one mining personal experience and relationships; I was writing book reviews or, like, pseudointellectual think pieces. I don’t know if I’m repressed or just an unusually private person, but I’ve just never been super comfortable talking about sex or other culturally taboo subjects in a public forum. So “Knocked Over” is an outlier.

But nowadays, when writers are supposed to be putting it all out there, building a platform and owning their own “brand,” blah blah blah, I guess I’ve had to reassess my boundaries. We’re all, to some degree, crafting these public personas, through blogs and social media. As writers we’re told we need to be selling ourselves constantly—but how to do that without compromising your privacy or making yourself unpleasantly vulnerable is a challenge.

This is maybe a generational thing? I look at younger writers raised on the Internet and I’m sometimes left speechless by their oversharing. In principle I really, really want to support their right to own their own experiences, in all their often-messy, evolving, incompletely processed glory. I do believe that can be empowering, and I do believe that the collective power of shared individual stories is both personally liberating and a really amazing tool for social change. But I fear for them! I think that there can also be great power in holding information close, especially for women, because intimate writing can expose them to all sorts of personal and professional dangers.

Zolbrod: It’s hard for me to hear you (or anyone; it’s a concern often voiced) say you fear for women writing freely and not get my hackles up, not react as if girls are being told to stay home rather than go out alone because there might be somebody waiting to rape them, especially if they’re wearing that sexy outfit. I mean, if there’s an editor out there encouraging a female writer to pen something about her boobs or her three-way, and ignoring her queries about community banking initiatives, the empowering choice is probably to refuse to go down that road. If one is not compelled to write personal narratives, one shouldn’t feel forced to by the trends of the day or by expectations of gender. But in my world—admittedly one far away from editors at moneymaking trade houses or click-hungry web sites—those situations are pretty hypothetical. I’ve never gotten the impression that the first-person nonfiction writers that I’m interested in—Lidia Yuknavitch, Cheryl Strayed, Kate Zambreno, and Stephen Elliot come to mind immediately— are writing because of feeling external pressure to do so. I’ve got to believe that the best writing in any genre results from the writer’s deep relationship to the material, not from a market pressure.

But I do agree that there are professional dangers in self-exposure. Look at Melissa Petro, who lost her job as a teacher after her writing exposed her as a former sex worker. And on Kate Zambreno’s brilliant blog, she’s mentioned worries that her online presence might be making her less hirable. So few of us make any kind of living off creative writing—even writing that can be labeled “salacious”; I have a hunch that that’s a myth—we have to be conscious about the ways in which what we publish can jeopardize our ability to earn money elsewhere. That’s a real consideration.

And then there’s the lack of respect for writing deemed confessional. For a while, when people asked me what I was working on, it was difficult for me to say, “A memoir about the times I told about my childhood sexual assault.” There were various reasons for this, but one of them was that I could imagine the eye rolls, the of-course-you-are’s. My own commitment to what I was doing had to become bigger than my internalized fears of what others would think. That’s feeling empowering to me right now, but again, I’m sitting at the control panel. I don’t know how it might feel to have the book actually published and out in the world. Can you talk more about the power there could be for you in holding personal information close, in not letting it go?

Bayne: I think on the mundane-but-critical level of actually making a living, if your professional identity is not built on revelatory personal writing it is entirely possible that personal information can, if not damage your career, run it a bit off-track. I mean, my situation is pretty low stakes, but, as you know, I’ve spent a lot of the last five years on a project that sits far outside the indie lit world of The Rumpus. But it’s something I’ve worked very hard on, and I’ve got this whole sideline now as an authority on soup and food and community building. I joked on Twitter last fall that I didn’t want to become the expert on soup and miscarriages, that it was going to confuse my brand. But I was sort of serious. And, more recently, an acquaintance and writer who I respect a lot advised me not to write about how I fucked up my probably one chance ever to get on Fresh Air. That holding one’s own failure up to the light is a bad idea, because for women it’s so easy for some acknowledged weakness to be turned against us professionally. She did not think this would help me down the road.

So that’s the practical concern. But, also, in the essay I talked a bit about unreliable narrators and unresolved conflict, and in that vein I have this weird, intellectual interest in the idea of the untold story. If it’s untold, is it still a story? I don’t really have the theoretical framework to talk well about this, but I find myself having this urge to defend not-telling.

Maybe I’m just contrary, because of course a story not told doesn’t get to live in the world as a story, but maybe, in the world of nonfiction at least, there are other factors that trump the demands of narrative, or of empowerment. I was at an AWP panel on women and the literary marketplace, and one of the panelists—the cofounder of VIDA—referenced this Audre Lorde quote: “Your silence will not protect you.” And everyone nodded and clapped and I did, too, but I also thought, But, wait, sometimes it does—whether it protects you from judgment or from something more heinous. We’re so quick to hail writers who dig into complicated, intimate material as “brave” or “fearless,” but that doesn’t mean those who choose not to go there, for whatever reason, are cowardly, or fearful.

Zolbrod: Well, I agree, but I don’t think that’s a danger. As a culture we don’t punish or chastise the person who didn’t rush into the burning building because she realized she might die if she did. When we call one writer brave, we’re not calling another writer fearful. There are many other accolades that can be bestowed upon writing—brilliant, imaginative, authoritative. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Amazon reviews aren’t filled with proclamations of her cowardice.

But there are a unique set of risks that come along with personal writing, as we’ve both acknowledged here. When I say I feel a pressure not to write about sexual material, I’m talking about my desire to avoid the harsh personal judgments that so often accompany such disclosures and my worry that I’ll make myself unacceptable to the mainstream, most importantly to the corporate educational publishers that I earn a living from. I’m also worried about lawsuits and about hurting people and damaging my relationships, and in particular the effect a book like this could have on my kids, how they’ll feel about it. But I feel an internal pressure to be the author of my own experience, to frame it. I feel a pressure or a compulsion to write what I’m writing. And I guess that pressure is what gives me the hubris to think the book might be good, or that it’s important that I do this work. It’s that pressure that makes me write despite my fear of the consequences.

But perhaps the fight not to submit to my inner pressure would be the more noble one—which might be what you’re saying. If not the word “brave,” certainly the word “stoic” or ”kind” could be applied to the decision to stay quiet to protect one’s family. I think it gets back to taking the measure of our own selves. The reckoning has to happen within us. We have to know why we’re writing what we are, why we’re including certain material and leaving some out.

And even before that, it just comes down to impulse. You’re right that you and I have leaned towards different writing genres since forever. The way I make sense of things is through narrative that’s often personal, and the way you make sense of things is through research and exposition. Neither is objectively better or worse, right? We’re both trying to get at meaning, or knowledge, or some kind of truth.

Bayne: To pull up something from the memory-hole, I remember when I first started working at an alt weekly, I was very green and badly wanted to prove myself, and there was a story about crazy local politics that I wanted to write. And I researched and I interviewed people and I wrote and rewrote this ten thousand-word feature and, looking back on it now, it was just a godawful mess. I had no idea what I was doing, and no idea how to make it better and, for reasons that I now know had very little to do with me, I couldn’t get any help from the editor assigned to it. He just wrote me off. And I never tried to do anything like that again. I went off into arts and culture coverage, and food, and essays, and all that, and that all worked out okay in the end but…I may I still have a little chip on my shoulder, a feeling that writing about politics or “issues” is more legitimate, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Also, outside the thoughtful, well-curated world of The Rumpus and other outlets like this, there’s so much bad personal writing out there! I’m thinking of that Elizabeth Wurtzel piece in New York Magazine in January. It was such a case study in how not to write an essay—rambling, alternately self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. But here it is in this major NYC weekly; that’s what defines personal writing for the mainstream. Poor Elizabeth Gilbert—I found myself doing this the other day: someone was knocking Eat, Pray, Love, and I was all, “But she was a real journalist before she did that!” And then I hated myself for making the distinction. She’s just a writer—and a very good one, actually. So I am part of the problem.

I feel like I’ve gotten very far afield—and that, like during the Fresh Air interview, I’ve wandered onto some muddy ground and I’ve found myself trying to defend a position I’m not one hundred percent committed to, and revealing some uncomfortable things about myself in the process. Hmm.

Zolbrod: Well, we’re ending up talking about genre, but I think the impetus for this conversation was at least as much about where publicity and the writing itself falls on the fuzzy Venn diagram. I mean, whatever your general disinclination towards memoir, you did write this particular personal essay and you had no regrets about it, and you felt like you couldn’t say no when Terry Gross called, but in the end you didn’t want to answer questions about the emotions and events surrounding your unplanned pregnancy when asked in front of millions of people at the moment you were scheduled to do so. There’s a big difference between those two things, as you noted.

You have a friend who does media training who told you—too late!—that you should have called her for some tips before you had your interview. Perhaps the crux of this conversation is just that media training is a thing to be availed of. Honesty and urgency might be hallmarks of powerful writing, but when dealing with the media, when you’re not the one in charge of the presentation, polished and predicable might go much farther, a hot versus cool thing.

If Terry Gross called you again, what would you say? What would you do differently? Do you listen to the conversations she has with other guests—especially authors—with a different ear now?

Bayne: Definitely. I think that media coaching, or at least some better effort to structure and polish my own responses, would have been a great help. I mean, powerfully honest and urgent writing is rarely a first draft; it is revised and edited and honed and thus made paradoxically more raw and honest. The idea that a conversation audible to 4.5 million listeners is somehow off-the-cuff is a fiction; it’s a performance, and I should have treated it as such. (In my defense, I was perhaps overconfident, as I was used to being interviewed at that point. But only on the subject of soup, not my sex life.)

To pull up another AWP anecdote, a woman at a different panel, on memoir that engages with political issues, mentioned her discomfort with being urged by her publisher to become more of an activist/spokesperson on the issues that informed her book, which was about her son’s suicide after coming home from Iraq. And my heart sort of broke for her. Because, here you are and you’ve created this work of very personal art that (hopefully) speaks eloquently to the topic at hand—in her case, gun control and the lack of mental health care for Iraq War contractors. But these days you can’t leave it at that. You have to go out and do interviews and publicity. So the trick, which I assume media coaching could help with, is to learn how to say, “I think the work speaks for itself,” in a way that’s not defensive or rude or shuts down the conversation.  There’s no shame in that, and in that sense I think holding back can be more powerful than going out and inarticulately defending it in the public sphere.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
• Notes For a Twenty-Something’s Memoir
• Sounds of Leigh Newman’s “Still Points North”
• The Ghost of Mary MacLane
• The Debate on Confessional Writing

My Foreign Cities (Liveright Publishing), out this month, is Elizabeth Scarboro’s memoir of her first marriage to a young man, Stephen, with cystic fibrosis, while she was also growing into herself as a person, as a woman. My Foreign Cities is the story of a young woman making the choice to love a man with not enough life to live, even if she was unable to realize the whole of what she was choosing. The memoir is deeply moving, particularly because the writing, the story being told, is not overly sentimental in the way it might have been in the hands of a lesser writer. My Foreign Cities is, in its way, and much like The Chronology of Water, a book about the body, the impossible frailty of it, how love enables us to do the seemingly impossible, and also, about finding joy in the face of overwhelming grief.

My Foreign Cities has been selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the Top Ten Memoirs of Spring. Scarboro is also the author of two novels for children, and her work has appeared most recently in the Bellevue Literary Review. She lives with her family in Berkeley, California.

Yuknavitch is the author of the novel Dora: A Headcase, a modern farce, and The Chronology of Water. She writes and teaches and loves and mothers in Portland, Oregon, and her essay “Explicit Violence” appears in the anthology, Get Out of My Crotch, from Cherry Bomb Books, co-edited by Kim Wyatt and Rumpus columnist Sari Botton.

In recent years, as I’ve read more memoirs, I have struggled with how to talk about memoir critically, how to separate form from content. Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.

 ***

The Rumpus: Is memoir a genre we can consider critically? How do we begin to approach such a thing given that memoirs so often expose such intimate things from a person’s life?

Lidia Yuknavitch: The question you ask is puzzling. Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to “critique” as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

Your question is itching at the skin of CONTENT. Memoirs have at their heart a content that “happened” to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone’s actual face?

Rumpus: Yes, that’s definitely where I am struggling. Oftentimes when I am reading a memoir that feels intimate, that shares someone’s difficult personal history, I don’t know how to separate content from how the content is communicated.

Yuknavitch: In both Liz’s excellent book My Foreign Cities and in my anti-memoir The Chronology of Water, we are troping life and experience. We are bringing literary practices to memory and experience, and giving literary shape to them (or anti-shape, as is the case with COW—shapes against the grain of the inherited conventions). On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I’ve seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature—why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person’s life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don’t quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms. Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as “abstract” when in reality, it’s precise—precisely the language of emotions and the body. Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone’s actual life experience.

When I was reading My Foreign Cities I felt a lifestory, yes, but I also felt story. The practice of storytelling. The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content. One thing about humans is that we all have them—lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are). The thing that turned me inside out in My Foreign Cities is that the ”plot” and the “telos” of the story exploded ordinary expectations. The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned—because they had to be—and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.

Elizabeth Scarboro: I never read memoirs until I decided to try to write one. After reading at least fifty, my first response is that they can and need to be critiqued. That’s easy for me to say in the privacy of my own home, where the writers of the memoirs I’ve read will never hear or read my reactions to their work. But I do feel memoirs should be held to high standards (and their authors would want that), even if they are different standards – even if what we want from a memoir is different than what we want from a novel, in the same way that what we want from a documentary film might be different than what we want from another kind of movie.

Maybe one way is to think about how the writer has crafted the story, rather than the life out of which the story has been carved. I’m always interested in structure, because it’s hard to move a story forward and deepen it at the same time, and both are required in memoir. The balance between momentum and reflection seems key. And also the writer’s relationship with his/her narrated self. I loved This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff because I felt like he got that right—he was affectionate but critical, clear-eyed about who he’d been as a boy, and it made me love his character and get bound up in what might happen to him.

It might be more relaxing to critique memoir when you think about everything the writer has left out of the book. It’s the writer’s job to reveal the right intimate details, and to think hard about what not to put in as well as what to include. An intimate detail that might feel awkward to address as a reader has already been sifted through, shaped, written and rewritten many times, so by the time it’s in your hands the writer probably has some distance from it.

I agree with Lidia about the forms being less distinct than they’re made out to be currently. I think about a book like So Long, See you Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which might be billed as a memoir today, but in 1979 was allowed to exist as “a novel based on fact.” The story in memoir runs the way story runs in a novel—underneath the surface, using the plot to bring physical shape to what the writer wants to explore.

In my memoir, I wanted to write about the experience of youth and mortality colliding. I tried writing it fictionally and it didn’t work, so I settled on memoir. Halfway through I thought it would be better as a collection of essays but I was too far-gone. But if a writer can find a form that allows the entire ocean of the story they want to tell in, it’s magic. Which was how The Chronology of Water felt to me. Lidia somehow found a form (and I’d love to know how she did it!) that makes room for the messiness and complexity of experience and memory. I know she considers COW to be an anti-memoir, and I don’t want to step on her toes, but the genre sure could use to include it a straight-up memoir, to crack open the formal possibilities.

Yuknavitch: The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric—but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her “life” boundaries. To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only “real” in the space of the text.

The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I’ve read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

Rumpus: Lidia, what you note about the ways people comment on memoir, the liberties they take, is something that has been on my mind as well. Do you ever worry, both of you, about how you expose yourself and about how people may feel entitled when they encroach upon your life simply because they’ve read what you choose to tell them about your life?

Scarboro: I do think about it, but my book hasn’t come out yet so right now I’m in the stage of just hoping for a few readers. When I was still working on it, and getting help from several astute readers, I remember having a hard time when they expressed judgment about the more difficult feelings I articulated in the book. I wrote about my first husband Stephen’s addiction to painkillers, and got the general response of, Why did it bother you, and why couldn’t you just give him a break, since he was sick? Which at first made me impatient and defensive, but when I heard it a few times from people I respected, I realized I needed to address that question in the story, to explore it. I also wrote about the ways he changed after the transplant, some of which really frustrated me, and I got the question, “Couldn’t you just appreciate that he was finally breathing well, and accept and even enjoy his new qualities?” This also ended up giving me a jumping-off point. Now that the book is finished, and I’ve explored the material as much as I want to publicly, I think those same kinds of comments will be much more painful to hear.

Readers might approach me with their own stories of illness and grief and addiction and complicated second loves. That feels all right to me, but I can imagine ways it which it could get weird. I do like when it happens in life—I’d rather talk about death at a party than make small talk. And since these subjects are taboo in our culture, I’m glad to have them out in the open. I always appreciated strangers and acquaintances who were willing to speak about them with me while I was living them out.

Rumpus: I think very carefully about how much I expose of myself in my essays because implied intimacy with strangers is difficult for me to make sense of. I don’t want people to assume they know me because they know of a few experiences I have shared from my life. I don’t want to put too much of myself out there and leave nothing for myself. At the same time, I am sharing those experiences for a reason and it feels important to talk about certain experiences that we tend to keep to ourselves. It’s all rather fraught. How did both of you, in writing your (anti-)memoirs, decide on what to include and what to leave out? How did you begin to shape the stories of your lives?

Scarboro: I started with a much wider lens. I ended up focusing narrowly on my relationship with Stephen, and our relationships with CF [cystic fibrosis]. I found I could only handle the three of us fully—maybe this wouldn’t have been true if this were my fifth book, or if it were fiction, but I felt overwhelmed when I tried to follow threads that involved other people who were important to our story. In order to capture a parent, or sibling, or friend, it would require a hundred pages to give him or her the depth and nuance required. People appear, but my relationships with them aren’t fully realized. I also cut lots of parts of the illness, and hospital trips, letting only a few stand for many.

The hardest part of the story to leave out was a close friend’s sudden death. My friend Steve died in a car crash, and his death was life-altering for both Stephen and me. I still miss him, and think about life differently because he’s not here. Originally this was an integral part of the book. But readers kept saying it was too much. It came a year after Stephen’s transplant, and a week after my dad’s near-fatal bike crash, and less than a year before Stephen died. Of course in life it was too much, too, so I tried to write it that way—stepping out of the narrative. But eventually it just felt too large to be held by the story that I was writing. It deserved its own book. Or to not be a book at all—to never have happened. I couldn’t figure out how to do it right.

People assume that when you’re writing a memoir, you’re making peace with spilling your guts. But it doesn’t feel like that to me. You’re definitely revealing yourself in a way you wouldn’t to an acquaintance, or in some moments, even a very close friend. But you’re in control of every aspect of the revealing.

Yuknavitch: This is what happened to me while I was writing COW. Right about page fifty or so, I was hit by lightning. I nearly fell out of my chair. I felt a ZAP of electricity I’m pretty sure was the collective unconscious. I realized two things: one, I wasn’t writing a memoir. I was writing a WEmoir, meaning, the ONLY reason to keep writing would be if even one other person in the world felt less crazy, alone, messed up, wrong, ugly, backwards, invisible after they read it. I got this weird sort of creative “surge” that pushed me to “tell” beyond the fears I had about telling, fears about the form itself and how it gets trashed (not fancy literary enough, too narcissistic), fears about humans related to me or close to me reading it, fears about my weird formal choices, fears about mean things people could say to me.

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it’s usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.

I don’t think I exposed myself (but I love the way that sounds). What I exposed, or what I HOPE I exposed, are the limits of a narrow kind of storytelling that validates some people and not others, and the limits of a narrow kind of identity formation that validates some people and not others, and the limits of a narrow kind of writing and reading that validates some people and not others. I set out then to call the tribe—misfits, nerds, fuck-ups, loners, sad people, drunk people, people who got in trouble or struggled—maybe all of us. I decided to let the story be about both the mess and the grandeur.

Like Liz, I had to be judicious about what to bring in and what to leave out. I had a superb editor in Rhonda Hughes at Hawthorne Books—without a doubt the most amazing collaboration I’ll see in my writerly life—so that is very important. But how I decided what to follow as a writer had to do with discovering the “through-line” of my own story. The through-line was this: this is the story of a girl who had to swim back through her own life to resuscitate a self. Anything that did not serve THAT story is for another book.

As far as being territorial about one’s own life, that’s a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for “material.” Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

I LOVE what Liz says when she says, “I think people assume that when you’re writing memoir, you’re making peace with spilling your guts. But it doesn’t feel like that to me.” The best memoirs don’t spill the writer’s guts. The best memoirs—like This Boy’s Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance—bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation—the forms and strategies of storytelling—are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.

Rumpus: What do you look for in a memoir? What stands out to you as “good?”

Yuknavitch: I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don’t ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. See what I mean? I also thought of The Lover by Marguerite Duras as a memoir. Most of Carole Maso’s books and Kathy Acker’s novels read as memoirs to me. Paris Spleen by Baudelaire. On the Road by Kerouac.

You can see how my memoir turned out different.

But of the variety everybody else likes too, Mary Karr seems to be understood as the Gold Standard (I learned that way back from Andrei Codrescu, who told me to cut one-third of COW out…ha), but I like Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, Cool For You by Eileen Myles, Yarn by Kioko Mori, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo better… Hell, I even liked Just Kids by Patti Smith, though the writing wasn’t artful. And of course there’s my comrade-of-the-heart Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which pretty much killed.

Scarboro: I agree with Lidia that good memoirs, and I love the way she puts this, “abandon the glory of the self in favor of the possible relation with another.” The memoirs I love best find a way to be deep and wide, even as they are very particular. I need the feeling that the writer isn’t just relaying a story, but is searching to understand it. I’m moved by stories where I can feel the undertow of the writer’s struggle to make sense of what’s happened, to find honest words. A few memoirs I’ve loved are Three Dog Night by Abigail Thomas, Falling Through The Earth by Danielle Trussoni, Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, and The Mercy Papers by my own comrade-of-heart Robin Romm.

Yuknavitch: One thing I very much admired and felt awe about in your book was your insistence on writing about relationships differently (thank you, thank you, thank you) than the oddly linear plot lines we’ve inherited, available to us as women writers. I’d love to know what you think about that?

Scarboro: I’m not sure how intentional it was, but I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about that linear narrative so maybe that’s how it came about. Or maybe it was intentional. I made certain choices—like not including a wedding scene—because I felt like it would be expected, especially from a woman writer, and of course that made me not want to do it. But mainly I wanted to stay as close as possible to the particulars of the relationship I lived out, to articulate it as best as I could, which meant being wary of falling back on a structure that didn’t have much to do with the way I lived.

I was writing not only about young love (ugh!), but love in the face of illness (cue an awful movie), so the only way I could do it was to fight any urge to be sentimental or to romanticize it. Hopefully I succeeded at that. I’ve never liked love stories—or, at least, ones with that narrow plot. I am always suspicious of them in books and impatient with them in movies. I just want a life story. When my editor told me she wanted to describe my book as a love story, I said, “Could it be a love story for the love-story-averse?” I know she means love story in a broader sense, but as someone who rarely picks love stories up off the book table, I’m hoping the other love-story-averse readers out there won’t shrink away from my book the way I shrink away from Julia Roberts movies.

Yuknavitch: I get kind of tired of the “But it’s your life!” attitude about memoir. Do YOU? I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around “memoir”? I’m curious how you feel about it just now.

Scarboro: In reviews of memoirs, reviewers write more about the content and less about the form, than they do, say, in reviewing fiction. I find this really frustrating. The life itself isn’t up for review—the book is. I hate hearing reviewers talk about what a crazy life someone led, or how brave they were. It’s not the life that’s being evaluated, it’s the story, and the way the story is told. Just as with fiction, you could give two writers the same circumstances to write about, and come out with very different narratives.

Rumpus: So many of the memoirs I’ve read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir; the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

Scarboro: When I found out my book was being published I didn’t know that books commonly have the subtitles of “a memoir” or “a novel” so that they can be distinguished for selling purposes. I wanted the title of my book to appear on its own, without the subtitle, but I couldn’t get away with it. I remember when I worked in a bookstore, it was before most had separate shelves for memoirs. At that time (at least at that particular store) memoirs were included all over the place—some in biography, some in with the fiction, some in with feminist studies, etc. Recently, I visited a bookstore that sells new and used books, and for the used section, the memoirs were shelved with fiction. This made me happy. The genre of any book is secondary to the story the author is telling—being the best vehicle that the author can find. I’m the kind of reader who would probably be happiest if all the books at the bookstore were shelved together, so I could stumble across a great book on physics I’d never pick up otherwise.

Rumpus: What are some strategies you use to bring literary shape to your experiences?

Yuknavitch: Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form—semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.

I work from the body—I try to develop a language of the body. I’ve invented a term I call “corporeal writing” around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

With COW, specifically, I was also interested in literally inventing a language that corresponded to the way memory works—specifically in terms of biochemistry and neuroscience. I shaped the words and sentences and fragments according to what I understand about memory. I shaped them around what’s true about the body.

Scarboro: Lidia might kill me here, but I had an aversion to the one literary theory course I attempted in college, so much so that I ruled out majoring in English. But that may have been my bad luck with a particular professor. In any case, I think my strategies come less from an understanding of the larger context and more from the accumulation of all the small things I’ve absorbed as I read—book by book—all the possibilities out there that wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own, whether I love them or run from them screaming.

But it’s interesting, because while we may have come to it differently, what Lidia says, about both memory and the body, speaks to me. Several readers have remarked that MFC is filled with physicality, and I didn’t realize this so much while I was writing, but I see it, looking back. I wanted to get as close as I could to the whole of my experience, and to be as honest as I could. And when I tried to do that, I found myself staying close to visceral memory, to everything that had no words. And then I had to find the words. Many words fell short and got thrown out. (Sometimes I feel disheartened thinking about how many pages I’ve written that are in the trash, but a friend made the analogy to being a musician—hours of practice that go into the final product, but aren’t the product itself—and I like that).

In terms of shaping my experience for the narrative, I was interested in finding a way to convey the underlying feeling, the personal reality, of the life I was leading, rather than conveying the details of the life itself. I don’t know if that makes sense. When I was leading that life, it was always hard to explain that inside that life it felt different than you might think it would, with death always right there in the room. So it was important to me that the book felt like the life, because that was part of what I was trying to write about—to complicate the picture we have—of what kind of life is worth living, or love is worth having.

Yuknavitch: For the record—and this is totally true—I think

The reason I loved theory was that I read all

The material as if they were novels—and then

I placed the authors in my head as if they were

In the novels—Foucault was a suave snappy

Dresser. Kristeva swam naked in moonlight.

Derrida had the best hair and smoked opium

Laced cigarettes.

Rumpus: How, if at all, do you try to “crack open the formal possibilities” in your writing?

Scarboro: I love thinking about form when I read, but in my own writing I love the idea of experimenting with it more than I actually do it. Though I did try in my memoir to not tether myself to the expectation that I’d explore the story only through scenes. There were places I knew I needed a different way to express what I needed to express, or where I’d find myself interested in a particular reflective path, and I’d go where it took me. Lately I’ve been writing essays, and I realize how much I enjoy following the paths that open up unexpectedly in them. Somehow it’s been more natural for me to break open formal constraints, writing essays, than it has been in other genres.

Yuknavitch: I don’t have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I’m a form junkie. One path I’ve used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart—but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into “play”— to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged. To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent—the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.

Related Posts:

• Book Club Member Josh Anastasia on Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
• Falling for Lidia
• “so I took a deep breath and I jumped”
• Fresh Air Fail: What Happens When Personal Writing Draws a Spotlight
• Boston Marathon Roundup

Vomit splashed on my shoes. Another bullshit night on the suck party circuit. (Too Nick Flynnish?) Or: The sheets were sticky. Someone was in the bathroom but I couldn’t remember who. (Don’t overdo. Save scene for later.) Look at good beginnings and think about. Call me Ishmael. The past is a foreign country. Happy families … (check Google).

Define your focus and your target audience. Why is your memoir important?

Others who can relate to an overbearing mother, growing up in the suburbs, problems with substance abuse and relationships, esp. boyfriend troubles (lots). Girls my age and younger girls who may be saved from mistakes. This is an important portrait of life today for my generation. Something like that. 

Brainstorm using prompts from Timothy Orloff’s Scene by Scene: Writing Your Memoir One Step at a Time. For example, your earliest memory.

Sitting in a wet diaper, watching my mother put on coral lipstick and blot her lips with a Kleenex. Watching curtain flutter in sunny window. (Virginia Woolf?)

Your first pet.

The cutest little chihuahua-terrier mix. Liked to chew shoes. Hit by a car when I was ten. Little did I know it was the first of many heartbreaks to come! RIP Corky.

A memory of something that probably didn’t happen. (From Orloff’s “Put On Your Creative Thinking Cap” section.)

Being molested by neighbor Mr. Swanson. Thought I remembered after reading article about repressed sexual trauma in Glamour. His bright blue sweater. Clammy hand on my bare leg. Was sure it happened, then realized, fuck, the Swansons had already moved away by then.

Something that happened that you don’t remember. (Orloff, ditto.)

Being molested by someone else? Uncle Arnie? Tammy’s older brother? That creepy guy who stocked shelves at the 7-11?

A family story you’re sure isn’t true.

Me pushing my little brother into the pool before he knew how to swim. Sunny day, turquoise pool, smell of chlorine, grownups blitzed on the patio. Was I six or seven? Why wasn’t anyone watching us? Remember the splash when he fell, but sure I didn’t push him. “You could have killed your brother,” my mother says. Tells story over and over.

Mom’s story about Dad’s romantic proposal.

A family story you’re pretty sure is true.

Grandma Jean’s story about Grandpa’s romantic proposal. Him kneeling with the ring, waiter hovering nearby with champagne. “Will you marry me, Jean? I’d be the happiest man on earth.” Everyone in the restaurant clapping when she said yes. She ordered steak and shrimp with a baked potato. Big treat.

A conflict between family members dramatized as a scene.

Thanksgiving when Aunt Patti announced that Dad had only married Mom because she was pregnant. Chaos that ensued. I was nine. Tell from child’s pov? Opportunity for dark comedy and wild family dysfunction. Think Liar’s Club.

Your mother’s version of the same scene.

“Your Aunt Patti was always jealous. Yes, jealous! She’s been that way for years. You can’t believe a goddamn word she says” etc.

Your version of your mother.

Where to start? Try to keep it short.

First person monologue: your mother’s instructions to you.

(Re-read Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.”) “Never go out with chipped nail polish. Remember, college is an opportunity. It may be your last real opportunity, so for god’s sake don’t waste it. You’re never going to look as good as you do at 20. You’re not going to find so many marriageable men after you graduate. They may say they’re for equal rights, but they’re not going to want used goods, either.”

Second person monologue: your instructions to yourself.

You tell yourself to get as far from your mother and the suburbs as possible. You vow to embrace slutdom in college and not to wear underwear. There will never be this many good-looking guys with zero responsibilities after you graduate.

Maybe whole memoir should be in second person? Look at Lorrie Moore. Try both.

Scene using all the senses: a time you really felt sick.

There was that time vomiting in the airplane toilet after spring break in Miami. Smell of disinfectant. Nasty blue water and metal bowl. Stewardess pounding on the flimsy door. “It’s time to go back to your seat. We’re landing. You have to go back to your seat.” Sweat on my (your?) forehead. Insides heaving. Lurching against the cold sink, banging head on mirror. (Is that all the senses yet?) Acid taste in my (your?) mouth. (Be more descriptive.)

Dialogue: a time you broke up with a boyfriend, or a boyfriend broke up with you.

“It’s me,” you (I?) told Richard, half-conscious of parroting clichés. “It’s not about you.” (Of course everything was about me in high school. It was never about anybody else.) Can’t remember what Richard said. Maybe “Um, okay. Whatever.”

Why you hated a boyfriend.

Jonathan used to hum to himself. Hum!

Why a boyfriend hated you.

No clue.

An embarrassing sex scene (or two or three).

You were really wasted that time with Henry and his roommate. Really wasted. Would have to fictionalize to compensate for gaps in memory. Definitely embarrassing waking up naked with the two of them in bed the next day, though.

Dark room in Motel 6. Sticky sheets. Stranger in bathroom. Promiscuity a symptom of being molested (according to article). Could have been that retarded janitor in elementary school? If so, cramped closet, smell of Lysol and damp mops.

Consider fucking someone famous (writer? actor? musician?). Describe in embarrassing detail (what’s-her-name’s Adrien Brody thing way too long though!), post on blog under nom de plume, out yourself in memoir. (Possible pseudonyms: Tawny Bush, Fanny French, Izzy Young.)

Meta-commentary on climax and narrative arc.

Difficulty finding shape in life so far. Aimlessness of narrative mirroring an aimless life. Is this a copout?

Memories of addiction (alcohol, drugs, sex, something else).

This won’t be hard. Might do all three. (Throw in eating disorder?)

A moment of despair (choose one).

Stomach pumped in ER? (More of a mistake than a moment of despair. Like really needed to sleep and forgot how many pills I’d taken. Hospital psych consult a joke.)

New Year’s Resolution after worst hangover ever. I will not do this any more, how did it get this bad, etc.

Breakup with Robby junior year. Sleeping and crying all the time. Thought I would never get over. Antidepressant. Found love again. More problems, despair.

Scene with a therapist (turning point).

She wasn’t very insightful. (Also had no fashion sense whatsoever.) Will need to fictionalize. Ramp up dialogue. (Re-read scenes in Girl, Interrupted. Classic.)

Turning point. I am 24. Getting older. Have changed. (How?)

Alternate turning points (choose one).

Pushing my younger brother into the pool at his engagement party. Turquoise pool, bright sun, sounds of laughter, all of us blitzed on the patio. Innocent horseplay. Might be a teeny bit pissed that he’s getting married before me. Confront this truth.

Trip to Disneyland last month with Oliver. Is he the one? Facebook photo with Mickey Mouse (lol). 36 likes.

Try solo hiking? (Wild, bestseller) Shorter hike than Cheryl Strayed’s! Blisters, maybe a hot guy, epiphany, etc.

Some kind of redemption.

I once was lost but now am found kind of thing. Absolutely necessary if this memoir is going to sell. What happens next? Will I find myself in love, marriage? Or as an independent woman? Better be clean and sober, or at least have a handle on it.

Some kind of closure.

***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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• Messing with Memoir
• Exploring the Redwood Forest: Journals and the Private Self
• Poetry Wire: Follow Your Strengths, Manage Your Weaknesses, and Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
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Leigh Newman’s memoir, Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-up World, One Long Journey Home, gets a unique treatment over at Largehearted boy‘s Booknotes, a column where authors are asked to compile a sort of soundtrack to their process. It gives very rich context for writers and fan of writing alike.

When I was a young kid, Mom loved to listen to opera while cleaned the house and I love to watch her. As she dusted with lemon polish and waltzed around the living room, she would tell me the story of Cio-Cio-San and her lover Pinkerton. At the end of act three, when Cico-Cio San discovered that Pinkerton has married a nice white American, Mom would dramatically commit harikari with a broom handle. The opera had a lot of subtext that I didn’t understand at the time about the state of my family—but it was yet another indicator that Mom wasn’t as at home in Alaska as Dad and I.

Newman intriguingly blends classic American country (Kenny Rogers) alongside Puccini, mentioned above, and others on her memoir “about growing up in Alaska … about falling for your own family.” Already a confessional text, Newman’s playlist offers even more intimacy to the narrative experience. Plus, the book sounds great.

Related Posts:

• Fresh Air Fail: What Happens When Personal Writing Draws a Spotlight
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
• Notes For a Twenty-Something’s Memoir
• “Has the Vinyl Revival Gone Too Far?”
• The Ghost of Mary MacLane

Unfortunately for MacLane, her subsequent books did not seize the public imagination in the same way as her initial effort had, though her skill and talent had evolved considerably by the time she published I, Mary MacLane in 1917. Reviewers mocked her for being frivolous, boring, and myopically self-obsessed. She became ill and possibly alcoholic. When she died, broke and alone in a Chicago hotel, her New York Times obituary’s first sentence described her as a “writer of sex stories.”

Over the course of the past century MacLane’s oeuvre has occasionally been reevaluated and she has been minorly republished and anthologized; she has been claimed as a pioneering feminist, notable bisexual and even as a prominent Canadian (she was born in Manitoba). Butte, Montana, where I, Mary MacLane was written and which Mary MacLane reviled for its provincial conservatism, now celebrates her as a famous daughter. But for the most part she is forgotten, and her books are no longer read.

This might be in part because these diaries are not particularly inviting to readers, at least not initially. MacLane’s defiant, exclusive celebration of herself can seem to obviate the need for anyone else’s interest.  After a few pages of declarative sentences that all begin with “I,” it’s tempting to put the book down. But readers who resist that temptation will be rewarded. If you are patient and indulge her for a few pages of “I am a genius,” you will be treated to a glimpse of the Mary MacLane who deserves canonization alongside Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein as an early illuminator of precisely what it was like to be conscious, moment to moment, in a time when personal and honest revelations of women’s subjectivity were not simply shunned (as they are now) but actively, violently discouraged. As I, Mary MacLane progresses, what seems at first like overweening egotism—in part because MacLane describes it, proudly, as such—comes to seem not only understandable but justified.

MacLane had interesting thoughts and the ability to describe and record them, and the temerity to imagine that other people might be interested in them, too. This temerity verged, of necessity, on insanity. Writing at a time when women were supposed to be silent and virtuous, MacLane had to be at least a little bit crazy in order to be able to create anything at all.

Via her diary entries, which are all headlined “tomorrow” in a nod to Macbeth’s soliloquy about the “petty pace” of repetitive, painful days, a portrait of MacLane gradually emerges. Her initial fame, she writes, allowed her to escape her provincial Midwestern hometown and spend her twenties living in Boston and Greenwich Village, with summers in Florida and trips to Europe. While living in New York, she wrote newspaper dispatches of her experience of the city that are some of her best work; these incidental pieces hint at what she might have been capable of writing if she had been encouraged to explore her descriptive powers in a less exclusively self-directed way. But at twenty-seven she caught scarlet fever and had to spend the next two years recuperating, and this is the Mary MacLane we meet in this book. Being ill was “the most crucial bodily adventure she had known,” and she emerged from her sickbed a changed woman, mentally and physically. I, Mary MacLane is a memoir of convalescence by someone who has new cause to record and decode every detail of her material and emotional life.

The tragedy of Mary MacLane’s life was twofold, and its first tragedy is fairly obvious: she was writing at a time when the deep misogyny of American culture had only begun to be exposed and dismantled enough for her to exist, and the patriarchy was not nearly subverted enough yet for women like her to prosper and thrive. But the second tragedy of her life was that the medium she was born to write in had not yet been invented. MacLane’s public diary entries, with their succinct, crystalline descriptions of quotidian events, would have made her an instant star on the Internet, if the Internet had existed in 1902. She was a blogger avant la lettre, to an extent that is almost eerie.

Her concern with the quotidian is what makes her writing so well suited to, say, a Tumblr. She describes her outfits and her meals, her aimless walks and her reading habits, the quality of her shoes, and in doing so she creates the impression of being imprisoned, somewhat, not just in Butte but inside her own mind. She writes of having an overwhelming impression, which she can’t confirm, that there might be women all over the country and perhaps all over the world who are as fervid-minded and as bored as she is, and she wishes she had a way of connecting with them:

While I sit here in this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legionwomen of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs—in Wichita-Kansas and SouthBend-Indiana and Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-NewYork and Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and BowlingGreen-Kentucky; each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of little vapidish crosspurpose: each waiting, waiting always—waiting all her life not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive and nurturing—and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin bright blade stuck deep in her breast; each more or less roundly hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.

The poignancy of this passage has to do with its deep familiarity—versions of it are being written on WordPress and Tumblr and even as Facebook status updates, every day. But it is also poignant because we know that MacLane was not alone; there were women just like her, sitting full of thoughts and feelings that had no outlet. Now at least modern-day MacLanes can easily confirm their suspicions that women like them exist.

***

It’s impossible to overstate how much reviewers hated MacLane and how deeply they held her in contempt, citing her “vulgarity” and calling her book “a revelation of self which is not interesting or sympathetic.” Their insistence on calling her “boring” quickly begins to seem absurd: if she was so boring, why were they so obsessed? Critics also insisted that she was doing the world a disservice by getting attention that they (disingenuously) declared ought to be granted to presumably worthier writers: “Think of the hundreds of poor lonesome girls working away at the making of literature who cannot get their literature printed and published.” When asked to explain MacLane’s popularity, they mostly just threw up their hands in befuddlement: “People go wild over young girls writing slush about themselves,” the author of a MacLane parody “explained” in 1902.

Reading these reviews and parodies provokes the same sense of familiarity as MacLane’s writing does; I’ve read these criticisms before, many times, in reviews of books that were published much more recently. I read a review like this of Sheila Heti’s novel How Should A Person Be?. Just last week I read a review like this of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. And of course, my own first book, a collection of autobiographical essays, received a similar critical reception: I was taking up space worthier writers should be filling, my concerns were trivial, I was not interesting. Several reviewers expressed faux concern at the way I had “exploited” myself by writing about sex and implied that I had “invaded the privacy” of men by writing about my relationships with them.

I had to spend some time wondering about whether I had done either of these things. Luckily I discovered MacLane soon after my book’s publication, and around the same time I read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus.

In that autobiographical novel, which concerns Kraus’s crumbling marriage to literary theorist Sylvere Lotringer and her affair with art critic Richard Hebidge, Kraus anticipates this kind of criticism and addresses it directly. “Why,” she wonders, “does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement?”

Kraus’s revolutionary reimagining of privacy—her calling into question of whom it is, exactly, that “privacy” is intended to protect—saved me from believing that I had erred somehow by attempting to describe the reality of my own life, rather than transmuting it into “fiction” and thereby, at least theoretically, protecting myself and the people I wrote about from “exposure.” Writing about Kraus’s book, critic Elizabeth Gumport explains that:

What the pretense of privacy often does is protect us from reality. It is called on to conceal the fact that there are two realities: the world as it is lived in by men, and the world of women, which has historically been exiled from political and philosophical consideration. It has been regarded as beneath such consideration, its truths narrowly and inescapably personal—rather than universal—and therefore inevitably trivial.

“I must express myself or lose myself or break,” Mary MacLane wrote.

 ***

Before she faded into obscurity, MacLane wrote, directed and starred in a short silent film, released in 1917, called Men Who Have Made Love to Me, which detailed with humor and great detail the different types of men she had encountered; no known copy of this film exists. It is believed to be the first film in which an actor directly addresses the camera and also the first whose director also starred in it. In 2010, my friend the playwright Normandy Sherwood recreated this film, using MacLane’s original script, as part of a play she wrote about MacLane. When I went to see it the audience laughed a lot at how seriously Mary (played by the hugely talented Juliana Francis-Kelly) took herself, but Francis-Kelly portrayed her so sincerely that she seemed to come alive.

After the show, after Francis-Kelly had come out for her curtain call and was walking around greeting friends still in costume, I had the bizarre impulse to go up to her and throw my arms around her, as I would if she’d really been Mary. I wanted to tell her that eventually she would be recognized. Mary, I wanted to say, you will be known as an early practitioner of an art-form that’s only now beginning to come into its own; women are finally making mainstream works of art that are not only valued as provocation but taken seriously as cultural forces. 1917 was too early; so, in some ways, was 2010. But I have high hopes for 2013, and beyond.

I didn’t do this, of course. But I’m saying it now, and if Mary MacLane’s hungry ghost can hear me, I hope she will be a little bit satisfied.

***

This excerpt is drawn from the introduction to I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane, to be published by Melville House on March 19.

***

Emily Gould, Kara Jesella, & Normandy Raven Sherwood will discuss the legacy of Mary MacLane at BookCourt in Brooklyn on Wednesday, March 20. Details here.

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Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott wrote a recent critique of Nolan’s essay, as did memoirist Jillian Lauren and Rumpus columnist Steve Almond.

David Ulin recently weighed in on the issue in his article “Everyone’s Life is Interesting: Defending Confessional Nonfiction.” Ulin claims:

What Nolan is critiquing is the culture of confession, which has without question run amok. Blogs, Twitter, reality television — everywhere we look, people expose themselves.

And yet, the paradox is that the more mindless the narcissism with which we are confronted, the more we need relentless confessional work. It’s the difference between art and artifice, between self-expression and self-importance, and it gets at the key conundrum of this sort of writing: You have to be willing to reveal everything to get outside yourself.

There’s no question that there is a superfluous amount of vapid confessional content strewn about the web. But no writing should be judged by genre alone, and confessional writing should be qualified no differently.

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“[Hamilton] Nolan is right to decry this kind of cynicism,” writes Almond. “But what he gets wrong in his piece is just as important as what he gets right. The reason most people shouldn’t write about their lives, he argues, is because ‘most people’s lives are not that interesting.’…This is—to use a technical term—complete crapola.”

Read the rest at Cognoscenti.

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I’m not sure why this one stuck with me, maybe because I hadn’t read one of these screeds in a while. It reminded me of Taylor Antrim’s cheap essay on the Daily Beast about why some memoirs are better as novels.

Hamilton talks about writers struggling to be read and editors using personal essays as link bait. At last count his essay had 40,737 hits and 182 comments. Blog posts attacking memoir also make for good link bait.

In his piece Hamilton says that most people’s lives are not that interesting. In other words, your life is not interesting enough for a memoir. I would dispute that. Most people’s lives are very interesting but most people don’t look at their lives in an interesting way. The unexamined life is never interesting. If a good memoir was merely predicated on having an interesting life then some of the best books would be celebrity memoirs. These people live a life most of us know nothing about. But celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.

It’s easy to point to bad memoirs and use them to attack the entire form but the form is never the problem. When you attack personal writing you attack Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath. In truth most books are bad and most publishers are risk averse. Many bookstores are going out of business. The changing media landscape has made it harder for journalists to make a living. But that’s not a problem with memoir.

Hamilton says that we are raising a generation of robotic insta-memoirists. He calls this journalism as narcissism. He says when you write about yourself you will soon be all used up and then you’ll start writing bad books. But that happens to everyone, not just memoirists. We get older, we lose some of the heat we had for certain stories. If we’re unable to move on to other fires it’s true that our writing will become cold. So many writers never live up to the promise of their first couple of books. Someone said when we’re younger all we care about is fame and access and when we’re older all we care about is money. What that person meant was that our values change and it impacts our ability to write. David Foster Wallace talked about this, the difficulty of accepting praise for something you’ve already written, knowing you might never write something that good again.

But what about Joan Didion, or Tobias Wolff? There are certainly authors who write many memoirs or novels where the protagonist is a stand-in for the author. Only truly great writers can pull it off, but how many people even write one great book?

As for the larger argument, the argument that isn’t actually argued, but rather stated as if we all accepted it as fact, memoir does not actually equal narcissism. If you know journalists then you know there are many among them you would consider narcissists. And if you know memoirists, especially the really good ones, you know they are more curious than most about the world around them. I’m thinking of the few who I know well, Dave Eggers, Tobias Wolff, Cheryl Strayed, Nick Flynn. These are all amazing listeners. They inhale their surroundings.

Of course, that’s a pretty high standard, but isn’t that the standard we’re aspiring to? I’m sure there are many memoirs written by narcissists, but I doubt they’re very good. Even looking over my own work, my own daily emails, the worst ones are generally written when I’m too far down a hole to connect my life to the larger world.

**

originally published in The Daily Rumpus.

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Lance Ward describes his autobiographical comics in the subtitle of his book KMart Shoes as “a therapeutic exercise” and “a painful memoir.” It’s the psychological equivalent of ripping away a Band-Aid, as he churns out page after page as quickly as possible on pre-set twelve-panel grids. There’s a fantastic rawness to both his storytelling and drawing that still retains a veneer of professionalism. His figures are simple but expressive. He balances image and word effortlessly, even in tiny panels. What makes this comic hum is his use of watercolors to add depth and power to his pages. His understanding of how to arrange colors to help his narrative flow without overwhelming the page is the key to the fluidity of what is a painful story to process.

Despite the spontaneous and improvisational style of his storytelling, it’s clear that Ward did manage to put a lot of thought into the narrative flow of this comic. In telling a number of events from his life in an episodic fashion, Ward uses the narrative device of telling the story from his present-day vantage point. As such, the visual contrast of young Lance with long hair and middle-aged Lance with a bald head and a bushy red beard gives the reader a number of different anchor points to rest their eyes upon. Even as Ward openly discusses how painful it is to revisit these events, he draws himself with his eyeglasses obscuring his eyes. It’s a way of distancing himself, just slightly, from both the material and the reader.

The book covers his life from age five to age eighteen and details indifferent parenting, divorce, an emotionally abusive step-father, constant bullying on account of being poor, and an overall account of having no feeling of self-worth. While it’s clear that this book is acting as a purgative of years’ worth of negative emotions and memories, there seems to be something else at work as well. As much as Ward is spilling his guts, he also seems to be drawing a sort of emotional map of the past. He alludes to this a few times, wondering if a particularly traumatic event at the hands of his family was the cause for his present day mental and emotional illness. Sometimes revisiting a past trauma can be triggering and counterproductive, but in other instances having an understanding of where certain feelings come from can be the key to treating them.

What is heart-breaking about this book is that it didn’t have to happen that way. Even as a child, Ward had a resiliency to him that allowed him to fight back against his tormentors and carve out an identity for himself. Of course, a series of poor decisions led to him being arrested for a crime he didn’t actually commit and further brought on that sense of shame he was constantly made to feel. Given a different environment, Ward could have thrived emotionally at a young age instead of finding himself trying to dig himself out of an emotional hole. That struggle obviously had its price, one that he’s dealing with as an adult, but it’s obvious that art is the one implement that never let him down and allowed him to cope with the world and feel better about himself. Ward is remarkably sanguine about many events in the past, having made his peace with a number of people who had treated him so poorly. He reflects on the many ways in which his life is great now, but sometimes having trauma replaced with kindness is in itself a latent trigger for depression. Kmart Shoes represents the “therapeutic exercise” that has helped lift his depression: the sheer effort of creation (an especially creating something real and raw) is in itself a therapeutic act. Ward has discovered and locked into a style of storytelling that works for him, one with a bold, unadorned, and powerful autobiographical voice.

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“By then Ken’s life was no secret. He’d already fought all his battles. His last battle was against AIDS. I thought about it everyday when I was dancing in the strip joints. I needed just enough cash to get me from San Francisco to D.C., the Castro to Dupont Circle.”

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