This week I was asked an interview question that really got me thinking: “Much of your writing is deeply personal and provocative; some of it seems almost intended to shock. Is there a cost for being so forthright?”
A lot of us who choose to write memoir or personal essays come from dysfunctional families. We’re taught from childhood not to reveal our family secrets. We’re told, “Don’t air dirty laundry.” We’re discouraged from telling the truth even amongst family members. Even to ourselves!
Clearly, I am a rebel.
It has never been my goal, however, to shock, only to be brutally honest. I write the way I really speak, think and feel.
I believe that we’re as sick as our secrets. I decided that I didn’t want to be sick anymore. I no longer wanted to hide those thoughts, feelings and events I’d always been ashamed of.
When I first began writing and presenting essays about life in Iran, people in my workshop class asked me, “Don’t you think Iranians might take offense at some of the things you’ve said here? Don’t you think you come off as a bit bigoted?”
The question bothered me a lot. It was the first time I realized that I could offend with my stories.
It took me a few years of writing (not to mention therapy) to recognize what I was after. Yes, I was writing about people I’d known and their own tragic stories; about culture shock; about my own marriage, frustrated by serious cultural differences and an army of in-laws who regularly ate my liver for dinner, but what I wanted to capture was the effect that living in Iran had had on me. I wanted to uncover, mostly for myself, how I had ended up so over my head in the first place.
Even when I figured all of that out, for the longest time my stories lacked depth. They were sarcastic and had no point. They were burdened by a smokescreen of justification.
One day my mother gave me Anne Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies. I fell in love with Lamott because she threw a spotlight on all the bad stuff that lurked in my own heart. All the fear I had about myself.
And in a book about finding God, about Grace and personal salvation, Lamott wrote about the messy life that had led to her transformation. Though the details were different, I immediately recognized myself:
Life was utterly schizophrenic. I was loved and often seemed cheerful, but fear pulsed inside me. I was broke, clearly a drunk, and also bulimic. One night I went to bed so drunk and stuffed with food that I blacked out….I made seven thousand dollars that year and could not afford therapy or enough cocaine. Then my married man called again, and we took to meeting in X-rated motels with lots of coke, tasteful erotic romps on TV like The Bitch of the Gestapo….
Her writing was, to use her own words, “so sexy and intimate and stark that you almost have to look away.” I wanted to lift her words and rearrange them on my page because “Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it’s so touching when you get to see something real and human.”
It dawned on me, then, that what was missing in my own writing (not to mention life) was honesty. I had started with the idea of, “Look what happened to me!!” But what I needed to explore was, “Look, what happened to me?” I wanted to be real like Lamott.
I decided, then, that it was OK to be the flawed hero of my own tale. A damsel in distress who was also manipulative, insecure, aimless, and confused. It wasn’t my job to look good. It was my job to write about the glaring mistakes, the failed expectations, and the hearts that got broken; to admit that I wasn’t just an innocent victim.
For every sin I’ve committed, I know that there’s someone else out there who carries the same sense of shame. And that has spurred me on. That has made me dig deeper in my writing, to say what most people are afraid to say. To say what I’m afraid to say.
I believe that in order to get what we want most in life—connection with others—we have to have the courage to tell the truth, regardless of who will disapprove. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We have to risk opening ourselves up to criticism.
Everything changed in my life when I stopped hiding who I really am/was. The world opened up and I grew to approve of myself, even though I sometimes put others off.
Putting yourself out there is the best exercise there is for standing in your own power. And there are consequences to writing about yourself and others.
Beyond the usual nastigrams we all receive the second we hit “publish,” and the occasional embarrassed look I get when someone’s read the rare piece I’ve done about sex, there have been costs. By breaking the family rules, I’ve pissed people off, or sent them reeling.
My mom read something I wrote years ago and got her nose out of joint. She made the decision not to read my work; which freed me up. But, machismo aside, it doesn’t make me feel good to know she disapproves.
I write about very adult topics, about my relationship with their dead father, and some of the things I reveal have been far too much for my kids to take. I believe the revelation that their father took a second wife while he was married to me changed the course of my daughter’s life in particular. I regret looking to her for support and feedback. I wish I could take it back.
Over the years, I’ve had a wonderful outpouring of support and love from readers. I learned that what I had to say—as hard as much of it was for me to do so—made a positive difference in their lives.
For this reason alone I will often tell my writing students this: Your REAL audience is desperately waiting for you to put into words what they are feeling, what they are yearning to hear.
