What We Write About When We Write About The Self
Some thoughts on the recent memoir discourse.
I have yet to read Lindy West’s new memoir Adult Braces, and so this post isn’t about that book or its author. I did however read a (now infamous?) New York Times interview with West that was published a few weeks ago, as well as a number of “takes” that were written in reaction to it. In a nutshell, for those who have missed this particular hullabaloo, West has written about finding herself in an unconventional romantic relationship, and was interviewed about same. She says she is happy with it; a large number of readers found that unconvincing.
I’m not here to offer a verdict on West, her book, or the kinds of love explored therein. However I found myself thinking about some of the literary questions raised within the ripples of this story as it spread throughout the discourse; I, too, have struggled with the way that people react to personal writing, and can relate to the agonizing feeling of being misunderstood by readers, and have wrestled with finding solutions. It has never happened that I have felt misunderstood by my intended readership on a grand scale, but I have felt it in particular instances. The mantra used to be “never read the comments” on one’s own work, but now parasocial relationships with writers are the norm, and readers are encouraged by platforms to tell them exactly what they think. Coming to terms with the eventuality of feeling misunderstood in this scenario is a big part of being a contemporary writer who mentions the self. If you follow me on Substack Notes, you may have seen that this has been on my mind.
To paraphrase what I wrote on Notes: When we tell a story in public via our writing, our readers may not agree with our conclusions. We may reveal things we did not intend to reveal, or give impressions that we did not mean to give. Readers may project things onto our story that truly are not there, but someone is not automatically acting in bad faith just because they took something away from our story that we did not intend. This is the risk that comes with sharing our personal lives through our writing. People may not see in our stories what we wanted them to see. Maybe the reader is wrong, or maybe we don’t see ourselves or our own situations as clearly as we thought we did. Maybe it’s a bit of both. The trick as a writer, and as a person who writes, is to try and have some degree of objectivity about this whenever possible.
It is sometimes necessary to let go of how people interpret us, although this is much easier said than done. Personally, I find that it’s good to keep a little daylight between the self as lived experience and the self as literature, whenever possible. Those who write solely to be seen and understood as people rather than as writers, and invest a lot of their feelings of self-worth in achieving this, are usually in trouble. As Sheila Heti said, “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” The sooner we can accept that all reading is subjective, and that misinterpretation is inevitable, the better.
When I think about the autobiographical writing I enjoy the most, the writer is usually writing about life and experience rather than just “the self,” even when the self and an examination of it are part of life’s experience. I tend to distrust any autobiography where the author seems to be claiming to have “won,” to have figured it all out; who comes across as wanting to prove that they are better and have triumphed, and that this arc is central to the story.
This feels different than when someone overcomes a particular obstacle: run the race, climb the mountain, face the fear, whatever that may be. Sometimes as a reader I get the sense that an author is trying to contort their story into a recognizable narrative shape of triumph or redemption, and this can feel forced. It’s no surprise that writers do this. The prototypical story ending is “and they all lived happily ever after.”
When I was starting out as a writer working in creative nonfiction, I was drawn to try and present my work from within this structure too. I read a lot of “Modern Love” column essays and listened to a lot of stories told at The Moth. The thing about both of these venues—which I still enjoy—is that they are also often the first “big” or professional showcase for the work of a writer who is just starting out. Maybe this is why so many of them conform to that familiar, prototypical shape. Isn’t that what we as writers were supposed to do? Aren’t we the main character in our own story, and isn’t the point of the story to show how the main character has changed? In personal writing, are we not meant to be the protagonist?
The first personal essays I tried to write during this early period of my own work were also adherent to this philosophy: “once I didn’t know what I was doing, but now I do.” There once was a “before,” and now I am in an “after.” I thought this was a prerequisite, but this narrative is both true and false at the same time. Of course within my life things had changed. They would change again. The hero of an essay written at thirty would be the villain of an essay written at thirty-five. It’s perhaps difficult to parse the difference between a story presented as being about a change of states, from points A to B, and one which frames the perception of B as absolute and final.
Maybe I was drawn to these kinds of stories because I liked the easy narratives they provided. Redemption was possible, and all you had to do was achieve it, and then you could write about it, or at least write about your life in such a way as to convince yourself and others that you had achieved it, and then people could stop worrying about you. You had “won.” Your life was good, you were good, and you had succeeded because your writing about your good and successful life had been published. Well done!
There is nothing inherently wrong with the narrative of “I once was lost but now I’m found,” as Jill Filipovic recently put it. The problem with “happily ever after” and “I once was lost but now I’m found” is that it pretends the story is over when it isn’t. It positions the writer as finished, perfect, or perfectly-imperfect, an end-product of their story, when in truth we are always still a work-in-progress.
To write about things one has experienced does not automatically come across as navel gazing, at least to me. I am interested in the experiences of others as a general rule. I want to hear about them, even though, of course, I am not going to like everyone that I meet. Not everyone’s story is interesting, or at least not interesting to me, but on the whole I enjoy reading personal narratives. Many of my favorite books of the past fifteen years have been memoirs.
That said, some people are very interested in the journey of the self as seen through a lens of ever-more-acute self-analysis; I am not. When I teach personal writing, I always encourage writers to turn the lens outward. One can still write about one’s experiences from the vantage point of an outward-facing lens, but the view for the reader is different. Subjectivity is inevitable, but the view is that of the world as experienced from the vantage point of self, rather than the self-as-subject. I think someone like Deborah Levy does this especially well. Rebecca Solnit does it well. Helen Macdonald did it beautifully in H is for Hawk. Levy goes so far as to buck the convention of labeling her personal writing as memoir and calls it “living autobiography” instead. Is this because memoir has become a genre bogged down by self-as-outcome, with change-as-triumph?
I know from hearing her speak that Levy finds “wisdom” in personal writing to be largely cliché and boring, and yet so many of us think that we must first achieve wisdom before we can write about what we have experienced. What if that isn’t true? Writers like Levy, Solnit, and Macdonald, as well as Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits—who deconstructed narrative memoir in her book The Folded Clock, which she called not a memoir but “a diary”—seem to navigate this via a degree of distance or curiosity about the self, rather than wisdom or certainty. This approach doesn’t so much say “this is who I am,” but asks, honestly, “who am I?”
Like I said at the top, I have not read Adult Braces. I don’t know where it falls on this spectrum of memoir and living autobiography, of self-as-vantage-point versus self-as-subject. I don’t feel the need to share my own impressions of West’s personal life in public. But I found this aspect of the conversation to be interesting. What do we write about when we write about the self? How do we survive the inevitable tragedy of misunderstanding? What is the difference between writing about the self, and writing about experience through the inevitable lens of self? Why do I prefer certain styles of personal writing, but not others?
If you like, let me know your own thoughts in the comments.
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Such a fascinating post. Invites deep thinking and is worth a second read after a while. This: "Those who write solely to be seen and understood as people rather than as writers..." made me pause to think what am I doing when I am sharing my writing.
kWow...sohappytoreadandcommentonthiswriting.
thankyou!!