A very short memoir

Yesterday I was talking with someone about my most/least favorite subject these days: What I am going to write next.

"Well," she said, "when I got to the end of the first book, and then I saw where you are now, I wanted to know how you got from there to here. And I think a lot of your other readers will want to know that, too. Since the first memoir covered things that were twenty years in the past, and the second one is more in the present, why don't you write about what happened in between? Maybe that could be the next book."

"I'm grateful for the suggestion," I said. "And I'm glad people want to know how I got from there to here. Unfortunately, that's a one-word story: Therapy."

So...there! I just finished my third book!

I've decided my blog voice is smug and intolerable.

Not unlike my regular voice.

Fictional problems

So after all that big talk about revising my latest story, I decided to skip it for now and move on to the next one -- working title, "Our Abortion" ("Sounds like a fun, light read," observes Dana). This one has been on my mind for a few years now -- I did a draft back in 2001 that I never did anything with -- now I'm starting from zero again. I totally scrapped the characters and situation of the original story, and am basing this one more on this experience of escorting someone to the clinic.

First I sat with my notebook and tried to figure out who the characters were. Of course the narrator is based on me -- they all are, to varying degrees, even the male ones -- but she's also got elements of other people I know in her, a little J., a little S. Then there's the friend -- she's sort of half H. and half C. Then the friend's friend, who's a little bit B., a little bit T. and a little bit M. Another character is almost entirely based on A.

I always write from life, even when it's fiction, even though it's transparently obvious that I'm writing about myself and just using another name. Which is not to say that all my characters are people I know; they're not. The minute I conceive them and then name them (the narrator Jen, the friend Kate, the friend's friend Maura, and the A. girl Amy -- as in ami, the prefix for "friend"), they become their own creatures, with different bodies and desires and outlooks and fates than the people I drew them from. I'm not Jen, and she's not me, any more than I was Jill in the story with the male narrator. You'll notice, though, the prevalence of J names in my fiction.

So my first problem with fiction is the fact that I can't get away with anything in fiction that I couldn't in memoir. I have to assume that the people I drew from are going to recognize themselves; I have to assume that the reader is going to divine my connection to the narrator. So if the narrator thinks something really petty and mean, everybody's going to know that I thought that, or something like it, at some point in my life. I can try to hide behind the veil of fiction, but it never works. I've come to believe that readers will always assume your fiction is based on you; friends will always assume your characters are based on them.

Problem two is that I'm convinced that people don't care much about fiction these days, and especially not short stories. Who buys collections of short stories? How many become top sellers? How many did I pass by yesterday at the bookstore, attracted by the title and then turned off by the form? Which means that I am part of the problem I'm bemoaning, as usual. I'm so brainwashed by the cult of memoir, by the marketing truism that non-fiction outsells fiction by 2:1 or something -- it's stuck in my head that a collection of stories would be a commercial step backwards for me, that it could never live up to the hype of the two memoirs. It's hard to muster up the necessary enthusiasm for a project I secretly think is less than viable. Which is probably why I'm home blogging right now, instead of at work writing (well, that and I have a lunch date and a doctor's appointment this afternoon).

But you know what? Writing fiction is fun. And I promised myself that I'd give myself through December just to fuck around and write things that are fun. No pressure to write anything for publication, no proposals, nothing "usable." As long as I write, I told myself, I'm doing my job.

And who knows? Maybe there is a market for short stories. Maybe people won't blame me for what I wrote. And maybe they will. I'll write them anyway.

Goodbye, little bookie

I went to the bookstore today, looking for books to take with me on our upcoming trip out of town. And normally I'd be all, like, "support small booksellers" and whatnot, but we're so close to Barnes & Noble Union Square, and there really isn't a bigger, better-stocked bookstore around, so that's where I go when I'm out of reads. I also like the fact that they've kept Girlbomb on their "Lives and Letters" table, right there on the first floor by the Information desk, since it came out in paperback in March. I like dropping by and visiting my little book, autographing whatever new copies they've got since my last visit, seeing how many have been sold.

I knew it wasn't going to be there forever -- every time I walked in, I steeled myself to the possibility that it would be gone, banished to the Biography section way up out of sight on the fourth floor. And today was that day. I browsed the New Releases tables, the ones you see as soon as you walk in the store, where the publishers pay extra to have their books placed; then I meandered past New Biography, Paperback Favorites, and Who Knew?, over to Lives and Letters. Where is she, I thought, circling it once, then twice. Damn it, she's gone.

All right. I don't take it personally. We had a good long run at the Lives and Letters table; I couldn't have expected more. All my old contemporaries were gone, too -- no Sean Wilsey, no Danielle Trussoni, no Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Not even Jeannette Walls. There's a fresh crop of paperback memoirs out there now, as well as some old favorites -- Joan Didion, Alison Bechdel. Meanwhile, Cupcake Brown has been moved over to Buy Two, Get One Free.

I ride the escalator up to Biography and locate four copies of my book in the stacks, lowest shelf, so you'd have to be crawling on the ground to come across it by chance. That's what I get for not having a last name that starts with A. I should do like they do in the phone book, I should call myself Janice AAAAErlbaum. I'd get much better placement that way. Except I'm letting go of worrying about placement, for now.

Because the book's been out for a year and a half now -- I'm lucky it's still in stores at all. I'm grateful that I can still do a Google blogsearch and find some nice person saying nice things about it. It's had a great life, my first book. It's made me incredibly proud. I hope people will continue to find Girlbomb, and to enjoy it -- extra points if they blog about it. But it's time to start thinking ahead to the next book: February 26, 2008. Only 154 more days. I'll walk in to the Barnes and Noble at Union Square, right over to New Biography, and there she'll be. Have You Found Her.

Yeah, I'll say. She's right here.

Revision: Easier said than done.

So I finished this 65 page short story about two weeks ago, the story with the male narrator, and I put it away and started working on something else. I knew it wasn't finished, but I wanted to take a little time away from it, so I could figure out what needed to be done to revise it. Now it looks like I'm going to scrap the entire thing and start over.

Re-vision: To see again. I used to think that revision was a matter of line editing, changing a word here or there, maybe knocking out a whole paragraph. Two books later, I understand that revision requires a willingness to completely re-see the project, and to start from the beginning again, if need be. So the first book, which was originally written as a series of interconnected short pieces spanning twenty years, became one comprehensive narrative covering three years. And the second book, which was originally written with two subplots and a really flippant voice, got serious and lost a hundred and fifty pages, then gained fifty new ones.

I have to believe that it wasn't a waste of time, all those discarded drafts, that I could never have made it to the second draft without going through the first. But sometimes I wonder -- maybe it's like a maze, and I could have turned down the right path earlier. Maybe I didn't have to run into the brick wall in order to sense that I was going in the wrong direction. I mean, I knew when I started this story that I wanted it to be short and funny; when I got to page forty or so, I suspected that this wasn't going to be the case. I wrote the next 25 pages anyway.

But I think I know what I want to do to revise it. I want to hew closer to the original premise, which was to write something pithy and masculine. I've been reading the copy of Bastard on the Couch that Virginia loaned me at our writer's group a few weeks ago -- it's helped me to clarify what I think of as a "male" voice. I want my narrator to be more blunt, and more obtuse; less sensitive, with fewer dependent clauses. More dialogue, fewer explanations. Cut out all the backstory. Maybe break it up into numbered sections -- guys seem to like numbered sections. It's not a short story, it's a list!

This is how I see the revision process:

Step one: Print it out.
Step two: Separate it into dramatic beats. Make notes in the margins that indicate what actually happens in each part -- Dan meets Darren. Dan and Jill fight. Dan reflects on his relationship with his mother.
Step three: Take out all the parts where he reflects.
Step four: Kill the backstory.
Step five: Kill the subplot.
Step six: Make a list of the plot points that are left.
Step seven: Rewrite those scenes.

Then put it away again, and once it's sat for two weeks, start over from step one: Print it out.

All of this seems like a really daunting, insurmountable amount of work. Like, wouldn't it be easier to revise my expectations of the piece than to revise the whole piece? So what if I wanted it to be short and punchy and it came out long and feelings-y -- maybe that's just where the story wanted to go, "organically," right? Maybe my first thought was not the best thought, despite all of Allen Ginsburg's exhortations. Couldn't I just, you know, leave it the way it is? Maybe change a few phrases, knock off a paragraph or two, and call it revised?

I guess I could, but, sadly, I know better. A story may have a beginning, middle, and end, but it's not finished until it's revised. That means re-viewed, re-imagined...and re-written.

And for my next stunt...

Still trying to figure out what the next book should be. Part of me thinks it's a collection of short fiction on the subject of friendship, then part of me thinks it's a collection of short memoirs on the subject of friendship. Then part of me thinks I should do some kind of stunt memoir, where I do something crazy for the sole purpose of writing about it, like the guy who read the encyclopedia, or the woman who passed as a dude, or the chick who said yes to everyone who asked her out all year. "What could I do?" I ask Bill. Besides, of course, return to the shelter where I lived as a kid and try to adopt a homeless junkie. That one's been done.

I'd just have to get a wacky job. Or do something weird for a year. Like the woman who didn't buy anything from China for a year. Or the guy who went without toilet paper for a year. Or the guy who sold a book based on the proposal that he'd fuck his wife every day for 100 days straight. They should give the royalties for that one directly to the wife.

"Maybe you could walk around the apartment farting and complaining that you look fat every day for a year," Bill suggests. "You've got a head start on that one."

He's not helping. I'll have to come up with it myself. "Maybe I could go on a spiritual journ..."

"Yawn."

Okay, a spiritual regression, then. Maybe I could live like a seven-year-old for a year, spend the whole time watching cartoons and eating candy. That sounds appealing for about a half hour. Or maybe the stunt has to do with friendship. Maybe I could go out looking for friends. I could post a personal ad, join a singles group, do volunteer work, take a class -- do all the things people suggest you do when you're looking for a mate, but look for friends instead. Except that all sounds really tiresome. And what about the friends I already have, the ones I barely get to see because we're all so busy? Well, fuck them -- if they're not helping me write a book, are they really my friends?

Which is where you come in, dear friends. What do you think I should do every day for a year? What kind of wacky job should I get? Dunking clown at a carnival? Blimp pilot? I bet there aren't a lot of female blimp pilots -- I could be the first! Or I could dress up as something I'm not, try to infiltrate a subculture. I could pretend to be an octagenarian! Or a Freemason! An octagenarian, Freemason blimp pilot!

Help.

Neighborhood watch

We were walking past one of the five United Homeless Organization tables in our three block radius today, when Bill pointed him out, kneeling next to the guy behind the donations jug, acting out an animated story with the top half of his body. It was Ron, one of the junkies from the Union Square documentary. Still out there, looking pale but cogent. Hard to say how he's doing.

We watch Intervention every Friday night, me cheering and booing the various addicts and enablers like we're watching sports. At the end of the show, they always have what they call over at Television Without Pity the BSOJ, the Black Screen of Justice, which is a title card that reads something like "Amber refused treatment," or "Coley has been sober since September 7, 2006." With some people, they leave the card a little bit more vague, like, "Rachel says she has been sober since July," and you know they totally don't buy it.

The Union Square documentary was released in 2003, so anybody who has not cleaned up their act by now has been a homeless junkie for four years, at the least. "That's a long time to do that to your body," says Bill, and I tell him about the guy who panhandles outside the deli on my shrink's corner. He's been there for all of the twelve years I've been visiting her office. The first time I saw him -- his cadaverous face, his ruined voice -- I thought he was about thirty seconds from death. Twelve years later, he is still shaking his bucket.

I don't know what my point is. That people live long, terrible lives to which we're witness? Yeah. That.

Later, after Bill went to work, I yelled at the Scientologists in the subway. I usually do when I'm alone, even though I'm embarrassed of myself as I do it. I feel like a kid whose mom is making a scene -- shut up, Mom!. And yet I do it. "It's a cult," I say loudly, as I pass by their three-table display in the Fifteenth Street underpass. "They want your money. They want twenty bucks for the book."

I know it makes me look like a crazy person to yell at them -- I mean, who doesn't know it's a cult? I actively try not to these days, but they just gall me so fucking much. They're so abusive. And I was cold and wet from the rainstorm, and the uptown N/R wasn't running so it took me forever to get home, so I was feeling abusive too. I'm not proud of this, or the logic I used to dismiss it -- Well, better to take it out on abusers. Like, I'm abusive, but for a good cause.

Then I round the corner and there are the Hare Krishnas, right by the staircase to the not-running uptown N/R. And they're evangelical and money-grubbing too, but at least they give out free food to the homeless. I bet the guy by my shrink's office has gotten more than a few meals from the Krishnas. I don't yell at them.

A Woman Now

I was thinking about what I wanted to read at the Brooklyn College Women's Center -- which knew in advance was going to be an awesome afternoon, and it was -- and I immediately thought of a poem I wrote it the year after college, 1993. I hadn't read it in years; not since the demise of the Pussy Poets. Until today.

I prefaced it by saying, "This is a poem about having sex when you don't want to." To which someone said, "Preach."

A Woman Now

this must be it
this is what you were taught to want
this met him mouth open to kiss and this
two iodine fingers lynch brutal
hangnails tangle crisp hairs and
pinch your lips together

you moan, you don't wince

pushed over and in your
whole clenching nails like a fist
the chafing burn to resist his
rabid quenching does not desist
in the face of your mask
you can't deny but you're not what you do
sucking to keep from drowning
dying for it or from it
a good lover to get it over get it over

just come
hurry up and come
just come
hurry up and come

shaking your whole body no
no notice me notice that I don't want to
do this notice that I am dry under you scraping
raping yourself with lout after lout again
slapping return carriage pounding keys
remorse code signal furied pleas
solace only with his impending release
and you continue to survive
cauterized gouges submitted inside
the surrender of his sudden naked eyes
widens your own perverse pride
cause there's glory knowing how much
you can take before you tear
and you think you must be
a woman now you can bear anything

Way too personal.

I stopped blogging last winter for a number of reasons:

I felt like I needed a change.
I felt like it was sapping energy from my other forms of writing.
I felt like I was getting hacky.
I felt like my ass was hanging out on the internet.

I started again because:

I'm not working on a book right now.
A blog post seems more manageable than an entire other book.
I want to get people interested in Have You Found Her.

But I promised myself, this time I wouldn't get too personal. No writing about my private life. No ass-hanging for me! Similarly, I promised myself in May, after finishing the last draft of the book, "No more memoir." I'm done writing about myself, I said. Time for some fick-tion.

Then I wrote fifty more pages of memoir.

And here I am, blogging about my marriage.

"What can I say?" I asked my shrink this morning. "I'm a memoirist. I'm aware that some people think it's a creatively bankrupt form of art. And yet it's what I do. It's what I've been doing since my very first literary effort at age three, when I wrote (and illustrated!) 'Janice and the Giraf.' I write about my life. Sorry."

"Who are you apologizing to?" she asked.

To myself. Because there's a reason I'm hesitant to get personal again. God, you guys, some of the bad reviews for the first book were so bad -- they hated me. They didn't just hate the book; they hated me. My life choices. My personality. Me.

And I'm apologizing to the book-reading public. I recently read an interview with a fiction writer -- in his latest book, he decries memoir as "desperate...self-absorbed...boring." Boring -- wow. And I find other people's life stories so fascinating. Still, I can see where he's coming from, with all of us memoirists out there, dragging on your arm like a drunk at a party, Lemme tell you my life story...

Still, I'm compelled. I'm compelled to talk about the worst parts of my life, sparing myself no pain and no embarrassment -- and, unfortunately, sparing nobody around me. I know that many people have the same desire to be heard, to share their own stories, and I am compelled to encourage them, despite the fact that I should know better.

Sometimes, when I get an email like I did this morning -- Thanks for writing your book; it made me feel less alone -- I even feel like it's worth it.

Anniversary II: Revenge of Anniversary

His personal ad said: I will be a good boyfriend. I will rub your feet, and tell you you're pretty, and put up with your shit.

And I thought: Bingo.

It was New Year's Eve, 2002. Obviously, 2001 had been no fun for anybody, and we were all looking forward to getting rid of it and moving on to 2002, when, we hoped, nobody would fly a plane into any buildings, and our city would not be blanketed by the sickly pungent smoke of a de facto funeral pyre. I was home alone, as I hate going out on New Year's, and I had nobody that I felt like celebrating with, besides my cats and a bottle of wine.

Around 8:30 or 9, I realized that this was a shitty plan, and that I was going to beat myself into unconsciousness with the wine bottle unless I got out of the house and made some merry. So I threw on some clothes and ran down to the old Collective:Unconscious space on Ludlow Street looking for the Art Stars. Nobody was there. Nor were they at Barramundi or Max Fish, or any of the other places Art Stars were likely to be in those days.

I gave up and returned home, where I started paging through the online personals. I'd sort of sworn off the online personals, after a few botched encounters, but by this time I'd opened the wine and drank most of it and I figured, what the hell. Dick Clark was on in the background, hundreds of thousands of people screaming their heads off in Times Square, and I was feeling that millennial panic again -- it was Y2Kplus2; who knew what would happen at the stroke of midnight?

It was actually the stroke of 11 or so that my life changed, though I wouldn't know it for a few more days -- not until I actually met the man behind the ad, and we had our first date, and our second, and then our third. I think by our third date, I knew: I really, really like this guy. He makes me feel great. I want to spend a lot of time with him. But at that first moment, New Year's Eve 2002, all I knew was that I liked his ad.

In the space where it said where he'd be if he could be anywhere in the world, he wrote Flying over New York City on a crisp, starry night. That's how I feel now, on our second wedding anniversary -- like we're flying through the stars. We've come so far in the past five and two-thirds years; we've traversed a galaxy, at least, from where we started. And there's so far left to go.

He's a wonderful husband. He rubs my feet, and tells me I look pretty, and puts up with my shit. I love you, Shmoo. Happy Anniversary.