I’m on something of a class-visiting and other-writer-group visiting spree these days and here are the two questions I get asked most: first, how do I write about that? You know, that that. The thing that feels scary, shameful, embarrassing, terrifying to imagine out there in the world. And question two: My story involves other people who behaved badly—maybe very badly-- but who are still in my life. And who will not applaud having this badness revealed in a public space. How do you write that?
I get the questions, I realize, because I am a high-disclosure writer, which sounds better than saying I’m quite the blabbermouth, as we’d put it in my NJ. If we imagine a spectrum that has the wonderful but personally buttoned-up Annie Dillard on one end, I’d be pretty far in the other direction. I write not only about family stuff but about being bipolar, drug-dependent, a psychiatric survivor, and a person who experiences psychosis. A high school dropout. The book I have coming out next month (February) covers among other things sexual predation in a psychiatric hospital and shock treatment in my mid-teens.
The book—The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here—brings in consciousness studies and science, particularly physics. There’s a lot of interviews with scientists and discussion of some of the more fascinating work being done out there: can we say anything is objectively real? Does time exist? Does consciousness exist in the mind only or is it a larger force? I wrap the story of my own mind, what it does and what has been done to it, in these larger questions.
But does that make what I do better somehow? No. It’s just how my mind works. Stripped bare to themselves, these stories need to be told. As do yours. As an editor, I am hungry for those real stories, stories of witness.
In response to these questions I get I’ll give a few bullet-y thoughts, and then I’ll come back not just to the why, but the how.
· We have all as a nation been asked to survive a lot these past four years. Writing is survivorship. Maybe, yes, you are chronicling a suffering. But on the page, you stand free enough to tell the story.
· I used to imagine that when I wrote about psychosis, drugs, dropping out of high school, I put on the page a stick figure who was just that thing. In my head the stick figure had a little sign: Psychosis Girl. I thought that labeled and compressed self was all readers would see, but that is not the case. You are a living, breathing, complicated multidimensional human on the page. Take that in. In giving that scary thing you are only showing us one piece of your completeness.
· Flippantly I might say that if people don’t want readers to know they behaved badly they shouldn’t have behaved badly. I can’t say my experiences with this disclosure issue were easy. People were pissed. They didn’t want to talk to me for a while. But they got over it and if I had it to do over again, I’d be more honest, not less.
The final thought I share when I talk to these writers is that there are drafting questions and there are publishing questions. Drafting questions are, how can I make this the best work it can be? How can I reach down into that muck, if muck there is, and be staggeringly honest and see how that creates a story, whether fiction or nonfiction or poetry--that muck operates in all genres. And how it illuminates some piece of the world only I can illuminate.
So you draft like hell, and you draft fearlessly as hell, and you go back to it, and you make it as perfect and real and human as you can. And only then do you put your feet up and consider those publishing questions: not so much are those other people out there ready but am I ready. Are there ways I would feel comfortable moving forward, if I’m not all damn-the-torpedoes? Would pseudonyms help? Am I ready for this to appear in this kind of journal but not that one? And proceed accordingly, with good people in your life to support you and give you courage. Even if that good supportive and courageous person is you.