Sunday, August 3
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Snazzy indeed!
It's by Lorissa Shepstone, of Dynamic Vantage, to whom I'm most grateful. In the next few days, we'll be adding interviews, podcasts, and an afterword to the new book (warning: contains spoilers!). I'll also be blogging about writer's groups, as per Satia's request, Disney World, as per Clio and Kirsten's, and my ongoing identity crisis, as per nobody's.
Twelve more days until pub day!
My new project sucks, and I hate it. The voice is staccato, there's no detail, it lacks emotional insight, and I can't even seem to remember most of the events, though they took place less than five years ago. I'm tired of writing about myself doing dumb shit; it's getting demoralizing. Was there ever a single day in my life when I wasn't a stupid, self-defeating jerk? Yesterday I was tempted to just can the whole thing and start something else. Then I remembered that I don't have anything else. And that I have to get through a shitty first draft before I can make it into a slightly less shitty second draft. Because writing is hard, but also noble. But isn't a new project supposed to be shiny and exciting? Shouldn't I be buoyed by enthusiasm, the way I was last week, feeling like I was finally on to something? Just the other day, I wanted to run off to Fire Island and seclude myself with my laptop so I could devote all my time to the brilliance. Today I want to crawl back into bed and read books about Disney World. Instead, I will pack up and go to work and wade through the self-doubt, the frustration, the disappointment, the fear that this book could never be as good as the last one, the anxiety that the subject matters produces, the stiff neck, the distractions -- the suck.
Would anybody be interesting in impersonating me online, while I sneak away and write another book?
Duties include responding to emails, rejecting invitations to obscure Facebook applications, and updating this blog. If you want to do some interviews as me, that'd be great, too. Just tell them I was taking notes as the events transpired, the three drafts took about a year total, and no, I haven't heard anything since the epilogue.
Here are some sample blog topics for you to choose from:
Panhandling junkies I have known
Writing is hard and also noble
Look how famous I am
Other people: what's their fucking damage?
I know a bunch of chick writers
"What a world! What a world!"
You could even combine these topics into one super-robo-Voltron post, to wit:
"I was walking past the girl with the star tattoo the other day, the one whose track marks make the inside of her elbows look purple and pulpy, like the La Brea tar pits, and I wanted to write a poem that would make her stop using drugs forever and ever, and then to publish that poem in a well-regarded anthology. The desire to write this poem caused me such burning pain; it was like childbirth, the pain, it was hemorrhoidal, but I bore it, for bearing the pain of creation is my very spiritual purpose on Earth and possibly also Mars. Unlike some people, who are in favor of abusing kittens, and who never text me back even after I text them 800 times! Also, did I mention I met Monique Truong the other night at this book party? She was there with Alison Smith, who I love. What a world!"
1. Grandiose much?
2. I am, like, so Bono!
3. Do you think maybe I should be given thorazine to control my ridiculous messiah complex?
4. I'm positive I've written this exact post about the goddamn speech before but I can't find it.
When I was younger, I came up with the idea of writing a speech, such that everyone who heard the speech would be instantly convinced that love, empathy, and fairness were imperative to their own self-interest and survival, and waste and cruelty would abruptly cease. The speech would illuminate the way in which we could all live in harmony, without sacrificing anything essential to us; it would solve the problem of the individual’s needs versus the greater good. It would inspire everyone who heard it to abandon violence, and to spend their lives marveling at the cosmic miracle of being placed on this beautiful, wondrous, life-sustaining planet with the intelligence to appreciate and affect it.
I still have not written that speech.
When I was casting about this summer and fall for a new project, I kept thinking about it, about the speech. About Al Gore’s movie. About Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. About the thing I could say that would help change the world for the better. Not that anything is going to change the world – there’s going to be death, and entropy, and photosynthesis, and weather, at least until we poison the whole fucking thing to death or blow it up, which I semi-expect to happen any damn day now.
But human behavior can change. Or human habits, anyway. People will always love, they’ll always feel jealous, they’ll always get hungry and tired and bored. But now most of us put our cans and bottles in a separate garbage bag; now we carry little phones around with us and check our email. They’re even thinking of letting women in Saudi Arabia drive cars, can you believe it? What will they think of next? Resource parity? Environmental responsibility? Treating animals with compassion? As the abusive Beatle said, Imagine.
My shrink keeps telling me I should write about politics. I should be blogging about the upcoming elections, she says, about the ways in which gender and skin color are being used both for and against people, about religious extremism and morality. And I know she’s right, at least in part – if I want to write about something important, I’ll skip the updates about my fabulous career, and write some persuasive polemic on the candidates’ positions and how it will affect this most treasured ideal of mine: human happiness.
But I don’t hear it yet – I don’t hear anyone talking about happiness. Yeah, we all need health care; that would make a lot of people happier than they are now. But mostly what I hear is plans to move money around, and when you move money around, most of it just disappears. There’s a lot of talk about “change,” but what’s going to change? Who is going to change, if not ourselves? How do we get saner, how do we get less angry; how do we become more compassionate and more joyful? Who’s going to show us how to get past our own fear, and greed, and the other things that make us hate ourselves and fill us with despair; who’s going to lead us towards profundity and peace of mind, towards goodness? That’s the candidate I’m looking for.
In the meantime, I can tell you about the lunch I had, or the book party I attended, or the reality TV competitions I watch and how I want the people with the most talent and best personalities to prevail. I can go to work and write about female friendships, about familial dysfunction, about love affairs gone tragically awry. It’s all business as usual – blog posts, emails, even memoirs, which I once invested with such hope. None of it is the speech.
Here I am in BUST, interviewed by the delightful Emily McCombs, and photographed by the lovely Meghan Petersen, sitting in my actual living room (for not much longer) and coming off like I am eighty billion years old:
"Emily: My feminist friends and I seem to spend a lot of time lately talking about what a fucked up time it is to be a girl.
Me: Definitely. My girlfriends and I felt like we were on the vanguard of teenage sex and adult girlhood. We felt like we were doing things that generations before us didn't do, and we were coping with things they didn't cope with. But now me and my 30-something friends are like, "Oh my God, the teen girls with the anal sex and the rainbow parties!" We give each other the Home Alone clapped cheeks look. It must be so fucking confusing right now. I think if I were 13 years old, I'd flip out."
(Note: my stepmother says I should always look into the camera for press photos, so I don't come off as evasive, but Meghan told me to look pensively to my left. So I did. Also please note the stack of books next to me -- from bottom to top: Amy Cohen, Jami Attenberg, Melissa Plaut, Amanda Stern, and me. Biffle pile!)
In all the excitement over Have You Found Her (and believe me, there's a ridiculous amount of excitement about it around here -- only three more weeks until it's released!), I have neglected to mention another upcoming publication: my sestina, "The Temp," has been included in the forthcoming anthology, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present. That puts me right up next to poets like Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, and good ol' Emily Dickinson (a fabulously erotic woman, I'm guessing, despite the whole "hermit" thing). The book, which was edited by the esteemed David Lehman, will be released on February 5th; I'll be reading with some of the other contributors at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, on Monday, March 10 (7pm, free). Who knows -- maybe Walt and Em will show!
I finally got back to work today, thank god, though I was distracted and exhausted, and my momentum was shot. I'm working on something I hope will be fiction one day -- right now, I'm writing the true events as they happened from my point of view, in my own voice, but I'm thinking this time I'll go back and fictionalize it, fictionalize myself as a narrator, instead of owning up to everything, instead dragging other people into it. It's not even that I want to protect the other people this time; most of them are not people I particularly love any more. I just don't want to give them any credit. I don't want to acknowledge that they were ever important enough to me to hurt me. I don't want to acknowledge my anger or my pain. But the anger or pain of someone named...Banice! That I could write about.
First draft, though, is the facts. That conversation on my sofa. The beach house. That email -- that series of emails. The rapproachement. I start with a list, to which I keep adding. Try to knock off the scenes one by one. Try not to go back to the source materials, try to remember it instead, crying on my lunch hour, pacing back and forth in front of the Starbucks on Astor Place on the phone, that's not what I said, I never said that, how can you say that? The exact words aren't important; the feelings are what matter.
And the feelings suck. Reliving them sucks. As I knew it would. I said to my shrink, I may have thought of a book almost as painful to write as the last two. Her eyebrows raised. Really. She probably thought it was one of those stunt memoirs, where I'd, like, inject heroin in between my toes every day for a year just so I could write a fucking book about it. Worse, I said, and told her the idea. She nodded. Yeah, that was painful.
Is this the only way I can do it? I tried to skip right to the fictional version, with the characters with made up names. I blended the characters based on B. and D. -- they were both so similar, anyway, with their constant machinations -- tried to make myself a little F., a little N. But I don't know those people; I don't know what they do. I don't know what happened to them. I barely know what happened to me, anymore.
So that's where I begin. What happened? Make the list, write the scenes, get to the emotional heart of it. Maybe then I'll know what I'm trying to say, besides ouch, besides fuck you. Neither of those is good enough subjects for a memoir, much less a novel. But they're where I have to start.
It just keeps happening -- the women of my blogroll keep writing and publishing great books! The past month alone has seen Jami Attenberg's The Kept Man, Judy McGuire's How Not to Date, and now Felicia Sullivan's The Sky Isn't Visible from Here (in stores two weeks early, because she's a notorious overachiever).
I'm already on the record as an ardent admirer of this book ("an unforgettable story, breathtakingly told; this book will break your heart, and make it stronger"), and of the woman who wrote it. From the jacket copy:
"Felicia Sullivan's mother disappeared on the night Sullivan graduated from college and has not been seen or heard from in the ten years since. Sullivan, who grew up on the tough streets of Brooklyn in the 1980s, now looks back on her childhood—lived among drug dealers, users, substitute fathers, and a host of unsavory characters. Ever the responsible child, Sullivan became her mother's keeper, taking her to the hospital when she overdoses, withstanding her narcissistic rages, succumbing to the abuse or indifference of so-called stepfathers, and always wondering why her mother would never reveal the truth about the father she'd never met. But then, Sullivan's volatile, beautiful, deceitful, drug-addicted mother altered the truth in many cruel ways..."
Memoir fans, here's your next must read.
And blogroll ladies -- who's next?
Had lunch with an editor yesterday -- not mine, though I would never ever leave or cheat on my editor in a million years; not for money, not at gunpoint, never. No, me and this new editor only talked business for as long as it took to make lunch a write-off, then we spent the rest of the time talking about ourselves. She's a volunteer, and she works on really smart young adult books, and OMG heart heart heart. This whole biffle thing is really working out for me.
Came home, did some administration, then went to see two friends and their newborn. OMG heart heart heart! You guys, I was holding the baby! And she was making little eat-y fart-y faces at me! So amazing. Such a feeling of contentment and joy in their house. Happy little baby, squirming in my arms. I was like, thank you for having her, thank you for sharing her. Thank you for allowing me access to a baby without having to go through the whole birthing and raising it part. Just wonderful.
On the subway home, I'm finishing Judy McGuire's brand new baby book, How Not to Date. I've been almost loathe to finish it, because reading it has been like carrying around a pocket-sized version of Judy with me, and that's awesome. Then I got to the part where the guy shit his pants in her bed, and I started laughing so hard that spit went down my throat the wrong way and I coughed for three stops.
By the time I got home, I was in the best mood I've been in for weeks. New friends, friends with babies, friends with books = very beneficial.
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