Writing Is My Drink (25 page)

Would Look Like to Me?

12. Write for ten minutes on this topic: “How Much Failure am I

Willing to Tolerate to Reach That Success?”

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13

I Feel so, Uh, Vulnerable

And then it was Monday morning. On Monday morning I wasn’t

a writer but a mother dropping her kids off at school, imagining

myself as still anonymous in my gray stretched-out sweatshirt.

But this particular Monday morning was the first time I would

catch the awkward expression of an acquaintance who’d sud-

denly learned too much about me. It was the face of an acquain-

tance who’d read about my personal life by pulling the
New York
Times
out of its blue plastic bag and unfolding the paper in her well-appointed breakfast nook.

“I read your essay yesterday,” she said, blushing. “I wasn’t

sure if I should be reading it—it seemed so
personal—
but then it was in the newspaper, so I . . . ,” she said, her voice trailing off.

The way she said “personal,” I instantly understood—

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whether this was her intention or not—that “personal” was code

for “wrong.”

“Wel , yeah, if it’s in the newspaper, it’s pretty much fair

game, right?” I said goofily. Real y, why hadn’t I prepared for this moment? What was the protocol here? How is one supposed to

handle this weird blurring of the public and private lines? Of

course, I should’ve expected that people would read it and react,

and yet somehow I did not anticipate how “exposed” and vul-

nerable I would feel.

Often my memoir students will describe themselves as “shy”

or “reserved” or as “private people.” And while that might seem

like a contradiction, I get it. While memoirists might get por-

trayed as the brashest sort of exhibitionists—the Auntie Mames

of the literary world, braggarts overeager to share their most in-

timate secrets—I’ve come to believe that’s real y not the case.

Some—perhaps most—of us are, in fact, drawn to memoir be-

cause we haven’t found another way to express ourselves, be-

cause we’ve never been sure how to come clean about who we

are, a step we intuitively understand to be vital to human con-

nection and happiness.

I’ve always been something of a hider—a hider who can ap-

pear to be very confiding and open, at times even confessional,

but who’s still keeping a few of the key cards tucked away. A

hider who’s longed to come final y out of hiding.

I’m convinced that every writer has a genre that is her match,

a form that is her objective correlative, the literary equivalent of the way she needs to be in the world. Of course, there are writers

who can work skillful y in many genres, but I still think there’s

one genre that matches the note that hums out from a writer’s

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center. Before I found memoir, I wrote autobiographical fiction

and autobiographical poems. I longed for memoir before I re-

al y understood that it was an option available to me—that I re-

al y could write about my own experience without the burden of

pretending I was making some or all of it up. I think what I’ve

most wanted from writing all along was, in fact, the very thing

that set me on edge that Monday morning: the vulnerability that

exposure creates, the “Ol y ol y oxen free” that cal s me out of

hiding. And the longer I teach memoir, the more I’m convinced

that this yearning to come out is a widely experienced one—that

many of us find that the pretense that ordinary life seems to re-

quire is one that keeps us isolated.

In the fall of 2005—two years after the demise of
Light

Sleeper
—I got my chance to decide how clean I real y wanted to come in the world. I got another e-mail from the
Brain, Child
editor who’d interviewed me for the article on the “momoir” publish-

ing trend, this time suggesting that if I ever wanted to send the

book out again that I might try her agent, a young up-and-comer.

After a bit of hesitation over the prospect of more rejection,

I nudged myself forward. I might as well try, I thought, and sent

him the manuscript. He replied quickly that he wasn’t interested

in
Light Sleeper
(yeah, yeah) but wanted to know what else I had.

He real y thought I’d have all these manuscripts lying around the

house? I told him I just had a few chapters of a memoir about my

divorce. The truth was after the first grief-fueled months and the

high of the
New York Times
article, my writing had ground to a halt as the idea of churning out another manuscript that would

meet who-knows-what fate while trying to make a living and

parenting two youngish kids was less than inspiring.

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The agent wanted to see the chapters. I sent them. He got

back to me within a day and said that if I wrote up a proposal,

he’d have no problem selling it. A proposal for a memoir? That

was possible? It was. I wrote it. And ten days later, he sold the

proposal in an auction.

Uh.

Because I didn’t ful y believe the proposal would sell and it

all happened so fast, I was stunned to find a book contract in my

hand for a book that would be named
How to Sleep Alone in a

King-Size Bed
. Even the title seemed crazy personal.
Bed?
Sleeping alone in my bed was the topic for my book? Dear God, what

had I done? Yes, I suddenly had the type of success I’d barely

dared to hope for, but now I was as terrified as I was excited.

I guess I’ll be writing about my divorce then and people will

be reading about it, I thought to myself, dread rising. I guess all this was the obvious consequence of writing said proposal and

sending it off to an agent, but I wasn’t prepared for the book to

actual y sel . I certainly hadn’t been prepared by my experience

with
Light Sleeper
, the lesson of which I had presumed to be: Sure, you will toil away writing a very personal book, but never

fear—it will never be read by anyone other than a few editors

in New York who will skim its opening pages to determine its

unworthiness.

But after spending a yummy chunk of the advance—my first

purchases were a handheld immersion blender and a nutmeg

grinder, which seemed like madcap indulgences—I was able

somehow to forget that others would be reading what I wrote

and just got busy with the work of writing the book. Over the

next year and half, I kept myself so occupied with writing and

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editing the book that I was able to ignore the idea that strangers

and—worse—people I knew would be reading about some of

the most personal and private moments of my life.

Final y, though, the publication loomed. Now every story

of people who got in way over their heads—from
Double In-

demnity
to
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
—seemed to be telling my story. I’d once wondered why people who committed major crimes didn’t seem to be ful y cognizant of the hor-

rific consequences that could befall them. Now it made sense.

So
this
is how it happens, I thought almost philosophical y, as I shook with fear. It helped, though, to know I wasn’t alone. Bernard Cooper expresses this experience perfectly in his brilliant

essay “Marketing Memory: Life After Publication,” about his

own, very similar experience on the eve of the publication of his

memoir
Truth Serum
:

Of course, in the three years it took to write the book, I had deliberately explored personal subject matter. But a good memoir does more
than dredge up secrets from the writer’s past. A good memoir filters
a life through resonant narrative, and in doing so must achieve a
balance between language and candor. It was not the subject matter
of my memoirs that I hoped would be startling, but rather language’s
capacity to name what was once nameless, to define what had once
been vague and chaotic. The chief privilege of writing a memoir, it
seems to me, is the opportunity to go back and make sense of events
that left you dumbstruck, mired in confusion, unarmed with the lu-minous power of words. I’d purposely chosen intimate subjects, not
in order to make them public, but because they drove me to probe
more deeply the hidden meaning, imagery and metaphors embed-1 9 5

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ded in memory. Only when the book was on the verge of publication,
however, did I realize that this gambit might be treated not as an
aesthetic strategy but, rather, as a matter of exhibitionism.

A matter of exhibitionism, indeed.

On the first day of my memoir class every September I pass out

a sign-up sheet for the workshops. Without fail, the students fall

all over themselves to sign up for the last day of the quarter.

And no matter what they claim, it’s not
real y
because they want more time to work on their pieces. Whenever they workshop,

they—being the mortals that they are—will likely still spend ap-

proximately the same amount of time on their pieces.

No, the true reason for wanting a delay is terror of exposure

and the vulnerability that exposure inevitably forces into bloom.

Sometimes I forget their terror, having sat in the safe seat

of the teacher for a few years; but then I remind myself of the

workshops in the MFA program, the sensation of exposure that

inevitably accompanied the sharing of a story. I felt like a turtle with its shell pried off. During the week in between the distribution of the piece and the workshop, I would obsess over what my

professor and classmates must be thinking as they read it.

That feeling of exposure was identical to what I felt on the

eve of
King-Size
’s publication. It doesn’t matter if the audience is twenty or a few thousand or more. The lizard part of us that

holds the fear doesn’t bother calibrating the fear based on the

number of readers. For Lizard, exposure is exposure: a plain and

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simple threat to our survival, to the social façade that allows us

to hold professional jobs and glide in and out of PTA meetings.

So, if it’s a threat, why on earth do we do it?

Because sometimes the safe thing is what’s dangerous; some-

times the safe thing puts our happiness at risk. Sometimes the

safe thing is suffocating. Sometimes the reward of self-expres-

sion is worth the cost of vulnerability.

In the TED lecture “The Power of Vulnerability,” researcher

and author Brené Brown explains how our happiness, in fact,

depends
on our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable. Even though we might imagine fame, glory, and praise are the tickets

to happiness, Brown asserts that the true source of happiness

in life lies in our connection to other people. But in order to

have that connection, we must be willing to reveal our authentic

selves to others. People who believe they are worthy of connec-

tion tend to be willing to routinely take that risk and are, as a

result of that risk taking, continual y reestablishing their con-

nection to others.

So what unravels the connection for so many others? Shame,

Brown says. “The one thing that keeps us out of connection is

our fear that we’re not worthy of love and belonging.” She goes

on to explain that many of us struggle with the very idea of wor-

thiness. We tend to avoid feeling vulnerable and choose to duck

away from opportunities that might reveal our authentic selves.

Truly connected and fulfilled individuals—a group whom

Brown refers to as “the Wholehearted”—are characterized by

a willingness to “ful y embrace their vulnerability” and possess

“the courage to be imperfect” and therefore are able to experi-

ence “connection as a result of authenticity.”

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Yet, as Tom Petty once said, “even the losers get lucky some-

times.” I wouldn’t say I’d been living the life of the wholehearted who “ful y embraced their vulnerability,” but I did back into my

vulnerability, and suddenly I was risking more than I ever would

have sanely and soberly chosen to risk.

Brown was right. Shame had been keeping me in hiding and

it had been doing so all my life. When I was a kid, I was ashamed