Category Archives: genre

on being young and in love–or on writing memoir and selling yourself out

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Last week I was out to dinner with some friends when one asked me, “Does it bother you that J might read your blog?”

My first response was instinctive: “No. He knows what I’m writing about. He’s always known, since I started this project. And he’s read big chunks of it.”

But, as I let the question settle in, I wasn’t sure that was a good answer. I thought of Joan Didion, who I seem to be quoting often these days, and who famously said that “writers are always selling someone out.” I tried explaining what I’ve mentioned here before, that I don’t know how to write about love stories without writing about our relationship. So, despite the fact that, in the many years we were together, J was generously supportive of my writing, I think carefully about what I post here whenever it also implicates him. I said that I tried to write from a place of honesty and kindness, though I’m often not sure if honesty and kindness can co-exist that easily.

“No,” Jen said as we finished our sushi, “I mean, does it bother you that he can see, you know, what an effect he’s had on you?” No one had ever asked me this before, but in a round about way, I guess I have thought about it.

Cheryl Strayed, when asked at the recent Associate Writers Program conference about embarrassing her ex-husband in writing about the end of their marriage, said, “If you’re going to show anyone’s ass, it’s going to be your own.” And I tend to agree with this idea about memoir. The memoirs I like the most don’t have an agenda or anything to prove. They’re motivated by genuine inquiry, starting with the self.

Jen’s question reminds me of a photograph I came across a few months ago. In it I am sitting on one of the leather couches at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, DC. When we lived in the city, J and I often rode our bikes to the Hirshhorn, but this photo is from our first visit, when I lived in Florida and he lived in Ecuador.

I remember riding the narrow escalator upstairs, standing on the higher step so I was eye to eye with him, and staring into his face as if I might die if I stopped looking. I remember thinking that the people around us could see how I was staring at him, and him at me, and that for the sake of decency, we ought to stop looking at each other like that. But we didn’t stop. We spent the afternoon whispering, and gazing at the art, and then at each other. That we would soon be apart again made the whole experience all the more poignant in my mind, because that’s how you think about love at twenty-two. Continue reading →

some thoughts on the essay, the lifespan of facts, and street photography

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A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the ongoing debate about truth, genre, and the writer’s responsibilities to the reader, at the center of which is self-declared essayist John D’Agata. Well, the debate rages on. I particularly appreciate Dinty Moore’s lucid comments about D’Agata’s rather manipulative approach to what is, in the end, a really valuable conversation about nonfiction writing.

If you haven’t been keeping up, what you need to know is this. John D’Agata (lyric essay writer) and Jim Fingal (fact checker) recently published a book which contains their lengthy and heated exchange about an essay by D’Agata which was published in The Believer. The book quickly reveals D’Agata’s willingness to change the facts on what appears to be an otherwise-journalistic essay about a boy’s suicide in Las Vegas. The two men debate the merits of the facts in the face of larger aesthetic choices, with Fingal representing a relentless (and at times extreme) commitment to factuality and D’Agata interested primarily in aesthetics (the rhythm of a sentence is better, for example, when it says there were 34 strip clubs in Vegas, despite the fact that there were actually only 31).

Now, it turns out that even the e-mail exchange was a kind of exaggerated performance piece, with the each man playing his respective role in an attempt to make the conversation less “nerdy,” more “dramatic,” and ultimately, more publishable.

Because I cannot resist, I decided to chime in on this debate in the comments section of Dinty’s blog post and ended up writing a relatively-long response. So I thought I’d post it here as well, for anyone who might be interested in the larger conversation about fiction and nonfiction, essay writing, facts, truth, and the writer’s obligations to his or her readers. If you are a true nonfiction nerd, and interested in more discussion, check out the many other comments in response to Dinty’s post.

Here, for what it’s worth, are my thoughts on the matter:

Etymologically speaking, “essay” once meant “to try” and also “to weigh” or “to test.” And one of the things I love about the personal essay is that it incorporates those historical definitions into its contemporary form. But “essay” as we use it today is a noun that contains the verb. And this noun also contains specific ideas about truth, which can’t be arbitrarily dismissed.

Continue reading →

some sloppy and unrelated thoughts on love and writing

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Today it took three presses of the sleep button combined with Roscoe’s cold nose on my shoulder to motivate myself to throw off the duvet and put my bare feet on the floor. I was forty minutes late to my regular Friday morning writing session, and even after employing  “the Klonsky method”–my friend Dave swears by a precise combination of caffeine and sugar (the mocha) to kick-start the brain–I still couldn’t direct my thoughts enough to put together a proper blog post. So I’ve given up. I’ve accepted that my mind, like most of downtown Vancouver, is going to be occupied by low-altitude haze today.

With that said, I have some assorted thoughts:

Number one, I got a nice e-mail from the folks at Folio last week, and I thought I’d pass it along to interested writers. Folio is a literary journal published at my alma mater, American University. Last year, in addition to poetry and fiction, they started publishing nonfiction, including a short essay I wrote called “On Love and Naming”. Now they’re looking for more nonfiction, so if you’re interested, submit. The staff is fantastic: supportive and easy to work with. They’re also running their first-ever fiction contest this year. So if you’re a fiction writer, enter! If you’re interested in reading, rather than writing, subscribe! It’s a steal.

In other–totally unrelated–news, I stumbled across an intriguing concept today: The Museum of Broken Relationships. The museum is a touring exhibition of donated items: artifacts that remained after romantic love ended, what the curators call “the ruins of relationship.” From their website:

Whatever the motivation for donating personal belongings – be it sheer exhibitionism, therapeutic relief, or simple curiosity – people embraced the idea of exhibiting their love legacy as a sort of a ritual, a solemn ceremony.  Our societies oblige us with our marriages, funerals, and even graduation farewells, but deny us any formal recognition of the demise of a relationship, despite its strong emotional effect.  In the words of Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: “Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator… (there is) no amorous oblation without a final theater.”

I’ve been reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book The Marriage Plot which quotes extensively from Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. And now that Barthes’s book is on my radar it seems to be popping up everywhere. The idea of love–and particularly the breaking of a relationship–as something that contains an element of theater makes sense to me. One item from the online exhibition is an old Nokia cell phone with the caption, “He gave me his cell phone so I couldn’t call him any more.”

In my first year composition classes, I ask my students to write an analysis of an artifact somehow related to their education. The students who really invest in the assignment inevitably return good results: what the red engineer’s jackets suggest about the role of gender in the engineering faculty, how the ads the university uses to attract new students sell a lifestyle rather than an education, the conflicting messages student dining facilities convey about health and eating. I suspect my students would be pretty terrible at writing about artifacts related to love–they are a smart but often sentimental lot–but I love the idea of performing a similar analysis of love’s artifacts.

My favorite artifact from the online exhibition is a Slovenian bread bowl. The jilted lover writes,

You wanted me to bake bread. Because a woman kneading dough is so erotic, isn’t she? You probably thought I’d work up such a sweat that it would drip from my breasts directly into the bowl.

Continue reading →

the power of a deadline

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I decided to enter the CBC’s Canada Writes Nonfiction Literary Competition this week. Immediately, there were two problems with this decision: One, I first heard about the competition five days before the deadline. And two, the regulations included an unusual word count requirement: 1200-1500 words. Ordinarily, writing competitions or journals give writers a maximum word count, but rarely do they give a range. And if they do give a range, it’s rarely so narrow. A full-length essay usually falls between 3000-4000 words. A short-short–or flash–essay, an increasingly popular form of nonfiction, typically has an upper limit of 700-1000 words. Of course, 1200-1500 words is a lot like the length of a blog post, but blog posts–or anything self-published for that matter–were strictly disallowed.

Because I started teaching a new class this week (and, yes, because I needed to go to the climbing gym and to a movie and to a beer tasting event), I didn’t have the chance to start cobbling together a submission until about two days before the Wednesday-at-midnight deadline.

And this is the power of a deadline. I spent about five hours on Wednesday trying to turn a 900 word piece into a 1200 word piece and somehow, right at the last minute, what had been a pretty good scene became something bigger and more interesting. It was a scene that I thought might fit into my book, but probably won’t, a scene about the first time J and I talked about love. Adding another 300 words forced me to ask myself a lot of really useful questions:

What are the power dynamics involved in asking someone if they love you? Or in telling them that you love them?

How can I write about someone I spent ten years of my life with, a relationship that I still have lots of unresolved and complex feelings about, in a way that is fair to both of us?

And why do I keep coming back to this scene, to the two of us at twenty, lying on his old lumpy futon and talking about love? What is it that matters about that moment?

I really like this post by Shanna Mahin in defense of the memoir. In response to the criticism that memoir writing is some kind of misguided attempt at self-therapy, she writes, “If I can come from a place of honesty and love, I might be able to tell a personal story that resonates on a universal level.” And I like Jennifer Bowen Hicks’ argument that an essay should be like “an earnest whisper in another’s ear—how brave. Put away thoughts of black lace and sordid secrets. The sort of whisper I mean can be about hummingbirds or athlete’s foot, an aging parent or eggplant. Its very purpose is not to show, but to say, and by saying to connect.”

I have understood for some time that when it comes to my own love story, my position is the more sympathetic one. I wanted it more. And when it comes to love, we identify with the one who wants the relationship more. The pain of the lover is always deeper, more acute, more compelling than the pain of the loved. Of course we were both lovers and we were both loved, but the story, as I cannot help but tell it, inevitably contains my belief that I wanted it just a little bit more. I was attracted to J for his independence. I loved that he was like no one else I knew. He was (still is) insistently nonconformist. I wanted to be someone who was unafraid to move alone to a village in the middle of the Andes. But since I could not be that person, I decided to fall in love with that person instead.

Continue reading →

on reading your own writing

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Just before bed last night I was looking at what wordpress calls “the dashboard”–your basic blog control panel–when I saw that someone had arrived here yesterday by Google search. The dashboard shows daily “referrers”–links that bring people here–and which pages visitors read each day. For this blog, most people come from Facebook or an e-mail subscription. But for the first time, someone had come because they’d searched for me. Query: “mandy len” Vancouver.

When your online presence is as small and new as mine is, having someone intentionally seek you out sends an electric signal straight to your ego. And having someone stick around and read every post? It’s totally gratifying. Because what writer doesn’t want to be read?

But then it dawned on me that whoever searched for me wasn’t looking for the blog itself. If they know my name and know about this blog, they would’ve just typed in the web address. Or they would’ve searched for “mandy len” “love stories”, not “mandy len” Vancouver. So it was probably someone who had my e-mail address and guessed that Len was my last name, someone who doesn’t really know me. And since I’ve only given my e-mail address to one person in the past few weeks, I think I know who Googled. This realization sent another, more complex signal to my ego which can be translated as a series of questions: What would someone who doesn’t really know me think of me based on what I’ve written here? And would someone who stumbled across this blog want to read the book I’m trying to write? Would I want to read the book I’m writing?

I looked back over what I’ve written and an uncomfortable thought came to me: this blog would probably not motivate me to read my own book. I even suspected that I might sometimes be annoyed by its writer. When she is rushed, she lapses into what Orwell would call “ready-made phrases,” as if she cannot be bothered “to hunt about” for the best combination of words. She is careless and imprecise in a way I often caution my own students against. On a bad day, she and her rhetorical questions might easily be written off as a member of the “Carrie Bradshaw” genre.

I originally pitched the idea of a blog to myself as a workspace, a place to play with ideas, as something that would necessarily be rough and unpolished. I was okay with that. But sometimes reading your own writing is like listening to your voice on the answering machine. Its cadences are familiar, but the tone is warped. You hear as with someone else’s ears, and you become a stranger to yourself. When I was writing with no audience other than my writer’s group, I could be sloppy. I could let things simmer. Or I could polish feverishly. My writers group expected things to be messy, and all anyone else would ever see would be the clean, shining gem that might appear one day in print.

Continue reading →

memoir and the space-time continuum

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A warning: I’m going to talk about science, physics in particular. I’ve been doing a little reading about time. And when I say little, I mean very little, because I am not a physicist. I’ve only ever taken one physics class, in fact, and that was with Mr. Sheffield, who was also our high school’s resident computer expert. Whenever anyone had a computer problem, they’d come interrupt his class. And since this was 1998 and computers were still rare and somewhat mysterious in my high school (I learned to type on a typewriter in the 10th grade), this meant he was always gone. We spent most of our physics class goofing off and copying each others’ answers to questions about how fast a ball rolls down a ramp. I learned almost nothing.

In other words, this one is a bit messy and convoluted, a messay if ever there was one.

——

So I’ve been reading about time, and in particular about different theories of time, inspired by this very simple post on NPR. And reading about time has got me thinking about memoir. Specifically, why we write memoir. And how memoir functions in the world, for both the writer and reader.

Maybe you’re familiar with the idea of world lines. This one is new to me. Basically, from what I can tell, a world line is the four-dimensional path of an object through space and time. So for example, the computer I’m typing on is three-dimensional. It’s about an inch high, fourteen inches wide, and ten inches deep. The fourth dimension is its existence in a given moment of time. So the moment I bought this computer, it was one distinct four-dimensional object. It had height, width, depth and time (the single moment I opened the box, for example). At the present moment, despite having the same three-dimensional qualities, it is not the same computer. For one, between then and now, Roscoe’s wagging tail has caused a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to spill its contents across the keyboard and down onto the logic board. Miraculously, the computer still functions, but as the genius at the Apple shop told me, the computer will never be the same. The computer itself changes, as we humans do, over time. So you can think of the computer as having a unique fourth dimension in each subsequent moment.

The world line idea suggests that time is not linear, but it is in fact just a series of distinct four-dimensional objects that all exist simultaneously. It is only our perception of time that is linear. This is just a theory of course, and there are others out there, but it’s interesting one: that the universe could be made up of an infinite number of four-dimensional objects. You could take each moment of the computer’s existence (and, if you want to get complicated, of the existence of each of its components as raw materials) and pile them up like sand. Continue reading →

the messay: a question of genre

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Reading Brevity’s blog this afternoon has gotten me thinking about genre. Often when I tell people I’m writing a book on love stories they look at me with interest and say, “You’re writing a novel that’s a love story?”

I usually respond by explaining that, no, I’m writing a nonfiction book about love stories. But this description does not make a particularly snappy elevator pitch. Sometimes I say, “I’m writing a book-length essay on love stories,” or “My book is part memoir, part research, part family mythology.” Sometimes I wish I was writing a novel just so I would have the language to describe what I’m doing. But what I’m doing doesn’t seem to have a sufficient genre descriptor. Calling it a book-length essay allows for the wandering approach that Scott Russel Sanders famously called “chasing mental rabbits.” But it’s ultimately unproductive because, frankly, most people don’t know enough about the essay as literary form for a book-length essay to sound remotely interesting. On day one of teaching the personal essay to my undergraduates, I spend a lot of time distinguishing it from the academic essay–a genre they seem to either tolerate or loathe.

But memoir isn’t quite the right word either. My experiences happen to be a convenient starting point for talking about love stories. But in the book I also want to re-imagine the stories I’ve spent my life hearing: my parents’ and grandparents’ love stories, things I could not possibly remember. Annie Dillard says, “A memoir is any account, usually in the first person, of incidents that happened a while ago.” But what if those incidents happened before I was born?

And where does research fit into all of this? Some of the tools I’ve been using to explore the topic include the things scholars, philosophers, and friends have to say about love and love stories. And when I actually publish this thing, in what part of the bookstore or library might it reside? I find myself in a weird, nameless gray area.

But luckily, if that’s the right word, lots of other books fall into a similarly ambiguous space. A few that come to mind right away are: Lauren Slater’s Lying, Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Dave Eggers’ What is the What, Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows, Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, even Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. We don’t have adequate generic words for books like these much less a designated bookstore shelf. All are narrative. All are intensely personal. All are imaginative. But all are distinctly unwieldy creatures when it comes to genre.

So should we coin the messay? The novoir? When we discuss this in class, many of my students are comfortable with blending truth and fiction or research and narrative. To them, a good story is often just that. But I worry about orphan books that so easily find themselves in genre limbo, mostly because I’m aware that that’s exactly what I’m writing.

the problem of voice

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My friend Duffy said to me, “I was reading your blog on the bus and a funny thing happend. I knew it was you. But I realized it didn’t sound like you.”

What did it sound like? According to Duffy, like my thoughts were hijacked by Marcia Brady. ugh.

After asking if I hated him (no), and then buying me a beer, he agreed that voice, when it comes to blogging, is kind of a hard thing to get right. The thing is, you want to seem approachable–likeable–not literary. (At this point, if I were grading this blog entry, I would say to my student “by ‘you,’ don’t you mean ‘I’?”)

But I should know–because I tell my students this–that voice evolves over time. That the attempt to sound like something–like, say, a blogger–wears itself out, and then you just sound like yourself. I spent a year of grad school trying to sound like Joan Didion, but instead of sharp and insightful, my voice sounded affectedly jaded, which might be the opposite of my natural voice.

So now I’m aiming for Jan. She was my favorite Brady anyway.

(the fourth Brady sister)