Re-up: When is it OK to Write About Yourself?
what responsibilities do you have to yourself and others in personal writing
Re-up is a new feature here on Sad & Famous, where I’m going to occasionally share select essays from my old newsletter I deleted three years ago when I began this Substack. These will not be focused on sadness or fame explicitly but will probably play with some of the same concepts I find interesting when looking at sadness and fame. I will always label them as ‘re-up’ so you can know to skip it if you’re just here to read about Paris Hilton and stuff I buy. First is an essay about who is the real you and what your real memories are when you write about your life. This was originally published in 2020.
In 2013 an essay I wrote about a former friend, who I will call Marta, was published by a popular at the time, but now defunct, women’s interest type web magazine. The essay had originated, as most of my work between 2008-2017 did, from my ramblings on tumblr. I used tumblr as a sort of incubating area for anything that spilled out of my mind and could possibly be published elsewhere. The Marta essay was one that I had begun, I believe (my tumblr is deleted now) in early 2012 and picked away at in a Google doc until I thought it seemed like it was in shape to submit places in late 2012/early 2013. I mention this, I guess, because that sort of means-to-an-end was about the furthest I really thought about it. Like, ‘oh, this seems good, wouldn’t it be great to get it published somewhere.’ At the time my main ambition was to “make it” as a writer, hopefully of fiction books, but as my personal essays got more attention than my fiction, I thought I could kind of shoehorn them as a way to get attention for my larger body of work, and possibly an agent, especially if something were to go viral. I watched this happen all the time with essays written by young women about their personal lives. Maybe it could happen to me too. How lucky that would be.
The Marta essay remains the most popular thing I have ever written. Some of the people reading this newsletter may be people who found me through that essay. Hello! I didn’t get an agent from it, or any offers of paid writing work, but it did attract over 200 comments of people fiercely arguing with each other about my actions and speculating about what kind of a person I was. So that was...something. Of course I don’t remember any of the positive comments, only the ones that were like “this fake anorexic bitch is just a Francesca Lia Block wanna be and Francesca Lia Block sucks!!!” lol. I also got a number of personal emails, mostly positive, a few from people who wanted to guess at Marta’s “true identity” and thought they may have known her. None of them did. And they didn’t need to guess at her true identity, as I had used her real name and real identifying details about us and where we lived when we knew each other. The web magazine said they would not accept pieces where names were changed and I just accepted that point blank, though now I wonder how they possibly would have been able to check if I had given both Marta and myself a little more dignity than the full monty offered. But back in the day, the full monty was all anyone wanted from young women writers. As far as I can tell, it still is. This isn’t to say I was exploited, this is to say that I was careless and without foresight or advice. This was the heyday of Lena Dunham’s GIRLS. I was thrilled to be published by this magazine, which I adored, and thought that “authenticity” carried a lot more weight than I think it does now. Now, I think authenticity is a pretty slippery fish.
Similar to the time I published a glib op-ed in the alt weekly I used to write for, disparaging a popular local sexist male writer and got lambasted for it in the same paper the next week by another writer defending him, I had put myself out there for attention and then, when I received it, and realized I couldn’t manage it, was no longer sure I wanted it anymore. I was unprepared for hundreds of people speculating on what my life was about. In 2013, nobody was really talking about “vulnerability hangovers” but post the Marta essay, that’s what happened to me, which I experienced in complete isolation and confusion, wondering why I couldn’t just be thrilled for myself, as I thought I would be. It was an unexpected development. I exposed a lot of myself in that essay, including some unusual/shocking facts I guess, that, when I asked an IRL friend what she thought about the essay and the revelations it contained, said, “well, obviously that’s all made up”, which I hastily agreed with to save face in the moment. That was around the time any happiness I felt about publishing the Marta essay began to curdle into a kind of shock at my own stupidity in saying so much about myself online, so loudly, that would then be there for the rest of eternity for anyone to find, like a granite tombstone.
More so than not foreseeing or having language for my vulnerability hangover, was my unpreparedness for my own opinion on the Marta essay as time unspooled me away from it. I remain proud of the essay in the sense that I think the writing is good, the construction of it is interesting and it evoked a strong emotional reaction--which I do want to give people, in spite of everything! I remember the acceptance email from the editor of the magazine, a woman whose writing I (still) greatly admire, saying, “I love this!” and the happiness I felt. That remains a nice memory. What I struggle with now, is what I think of as vulnerability hangover part II. Memory hangover.
The Marta essay is absolutely not an essay I would publish now. I’ve read it through a few times in the years since publishing it and blanch every time. Not so much from exposing salacious details about myself, though I would certainly tread more gingerly in that area nowadays!, but in how Marta herself is treated in this essay, which I feel is unfair and unforgivable. To give a little context to the timeline of my life, 2012 was the year my marriage fully broke. We agreed to separate in December of 2012. We became legally divorced in August 2013. The Marta essay was published in March of 2013. My ex knew Marta, was present for all of the events in the essay and is a main character in the essay. He had very strong feelings about Marta and her role in my life which I had not really considered very critically by March of 2013. I had not considered what was in it for him criticizing her as he did, or my own Pollyanna-ness in regards to his opinions which I considered sacrosanct and holy for the entirety of our relationship, including our eight months of separation and divorce. I trusted these opinions of his far more than I trusted my own. What I see now when I look at the Marta essay, is that I did not have enough distance from him to write it. There is so little of my own thoughts and feelings contained in this “personal” essay about a close friend and so much psychic apologising and capitulating to him and the people in his life about what an awful, messed up person driven by her own impenetrable insanity I was who made horrible, harmful choices and filled her life with “fucked up people” like Marta. If you printed that essay out, washed it in tea and held it up to the light, you could probably read the subtext pretty easily which would say something like: please oh please forgive me, I’ll do anything! And you’d see an image of me in prostration, whipping myself with a cat o’nine tails.
It isn’t that in 2013, I thought throwing someone who loved you, and who never did anything to hurt you, under the bus in order to suck up to people who don’t respect you was a fine and good thing to do, it’s that I didn’t even know I was doing it. I didn’t know when I wrote the essay, I didn’t know when I published it and I didn’t even know in the immediate aftermath of my messy vulnerability hangover. I simply had to get enough distance from the essay to be able to understand my own perspective on it. My memory, now, of the situations shared in the Marta essay are profoundly different. My memories and thoughts on Marta herself are profoundly different, but I’m not going to share them because I feel like the least I can do is never speak directly about her as a complex human person ever again. I have no idea if she read the article. It’s painful to speculate on.
I continued to write personal essays throughout 2013 and 2014, culminating in a chapbook I published about getting divorced and going through a period of grief. I have mixed feelings about this chapbook as well. I am more comfortable with this collection than the Marta essay because I largely focused on my own feelings at the time rather than speaking about specific people. However, looking back on it from even the perspective of one year later, I could clearly see there was a lot I was hiding, there was a lot that I didn’t say or said in a roundabout way because I was scared and many of the essays had an infused positivity that stood as a mask for my real feelings. It took time to realise I was under no obligation to protect my ex and that his reputation was not my torch to carry through life and make sure it was never extinguished, that nothing in our relationship belonged solely to him, that I could and in fact, need to, write about him. This realization was not available to me in 2014 when the chapbook was accepted for publication. In 2014, though I was definitely experiencing grief and writing about it, I was ultimately still tip-toeing through the tulips of it, afraid to openly be angry at a person/situation I had every right to be angry with. I wanted so badly to be a modern divorced girl, chill and unbothered, and though aspects of what I wrote were very honest, I was still holding my breath in that chapbook, hoping I wouldn’t spook the ghost of my ex-husband. Hoping I wouldn’t upset people by seeming like an overtly bitter divorced lady. When I was, in fact, an overtly bitter divorced lady. I just put a layer of ‘isn’t love confusing’ buttercream all over it and hoped I could swallow my feelings down whole. I had become used to lying to myself in order to stay in that relationship and it took a long time for me to wind my way out of the habit, not only as a human being, but as a creative person. In some ways, it is still hard and I really question myself and my motivations now when I feel compelled to explore that area of my life in writing.
Which brings me to the question, ...so, when do you know yourself well enough to write about yourself? Were I to write a follow up chapbook exposing the secrets in my marriage would I then be sitting down to write you in 2027, saying oh my God, I’m so embarrassed, I see now what I couldn’t see then? When writing personal essays, what is your responsibility to other people and to yourself? Should you publish when in the midst of grief and sorrow? Or is that question unimportant in the face of simply writing down where you’re at in the moment as an imperfect record of the present and publishing it if you’re so lucky, or sharing it if you choose to? How do you get far enough away from yourself to write truthfully about something elemental, like your family? How can you know if you are too confused, gaslit, raging, hurt, brainwashed or damaged to write? How do you know there is not some revelation just around the corner that will undo everything you believe about yourself and your memories?
In recent years I have continued to write personal essays, largely in private on Google docs and have not attempted to publish or share them. In anticipation of firing this newsletter back up, I went back and read my old newsletters. I am sad to report what a complete stranger I am to myself. Anything from before November 2016 seems twee and ancient, like who could possibly care, and then, my writing in the aftermath of the 2016 election, woefully operatic. The newsletters were stuffed with opinions I don’t remember having, recommendations of things I don’t remember liking or caring about. Even looking back at a list I wrote of all my favorite books/movies/tv/videogames of 2018, I was frustrated by how I had composed the list. “That’s so stupid,” I thought, “why would I write it like that.” I thought, why write anything. I disagree with everything I say or I read my accounts of my memories and realize I am remembering it wrong or have changed my opinion. There doesn’t seem to be any authentic self or truth I am expressing. My ideas about my own life change constantly. If writing is digging for the eternal flame of the self, then what the fuck am I doing? I‘m not eternal, I’m ephemeral. I thought about how the body remakes itself completely every seven years. I thought about all the leftover quantum realities after only the one we observe becomes real.
But I do like to write about myself and things that happened to me and the people in my life. I can’t seem to really stop. I have been privately tinkering with a memoir, that is honestly mostly about people I used to know, for at least four years now. Yet, there are complex situations in my past I doubt I will ever be able to write fifteen words about. There is a three year old essay on a proto #MeToo-esque situation I was involved in that is like looking through a fucking prism and I doubt I will ever be able to capture its intricacy in any meaningful way. I have a ten year old footnoted essay about the bad experience I had being an au pair in Berlin that continues to elude me. But in the past year, I have realised that regardless of if my memory is always photo-realistic and healthily detached from the emotions de jour, there is great meaning in simply acting to express myself, shoddy and unsound and unstable as I may be. Using my voice to put down in writing my own memories requires me to sit with the chaotic voices inside me and actually fucking listen to them instead of ignore them. To transcribe them and say, hey, I hear you. Someone wants to listen to you and guess what, it’s me. It matters less that it’s the perfect, authentic truth and more that I am attempting the convo with myself. Because from that convo, I can begin to better understand aspects of myself, even if that understanding ends up being, “when I wrote this I was in a lot of pain and darkness that I couldn’t see at the time.” That is more information than I began with. That is information I can hopefully use to build the next rung on the ladder.
This ‘hearing of myself’ doesn’t answer all my questions about writing, it doesn’t heal past damage done by my writing, it doesn’t help with vulnerability hangovers or memory hangovers, but it helps me understand why I continue to engage with the slippery fish process of personal writing, why it still holds value for me even though I’ve fucked it up before and will almost certainly fuck it up again. I think a lot of women writers have been overly encouraged to expose their worst selves online but also, many of my most memorable and meaningful experiences as a reader have occurred via personal essays. For example, I think very regularly of an essay I read maybe five years ago by a woman who discovered after her father’s death that he was a sex addict and predator and how she had to find a way to live with both the father she had loved and the reality of who she had uncovered him to be. I don’t know what her thoughts are now on writing such an exposing essay about her family, and I guess it doesn’t hugely matter. What stayed with me was the power of someone saying, I’m alive and it’s brutal and complicated and frightening and unexpected shit happens. I’m alive and this fucked up shit happened to me and I am in the process of surviving/comprehending it. This is how I feel about it right now. I’m trying to figure it out.
I need to hear from people in this way and I need to hear from myself in this way. Maybe “I’m trying to figure it out” is as deep into ourselves as we’ll ever really get. Maybe sometimes we will have to apologise for it or be embarrassed about it. But expressing this need for understanding, flawed as we may go about it, is probably the most human we can ever be.
This essay was inspired in part by this very thoughtful article my friend Kate Horowitz wrote on writing when disabled. It was written with the disabled and chronically ill community in mind, but I think some of the things mentioned in this article could be pertinent to anyone who is considering writing about sensitive matter in their life