Category Archives: essays

Writing Privacy into Nonfiction

Posted on by
Reply
Share

Lest you think my last post on writing proposed lying, deceit, or reckless insensitively writing your nonfiction, let’s consider it from another direction. I want to look at Nancy J. Brandwein’s “Scraping the Bottom,” an essay published recently in the fantastic literary journal Hippocampus. But keep in mind Kaylene Johnson’s essay discussed in my last post.

Nancy Brandwein

What Courage!

Brandwein‘s at wit’s end with her husband, possibly with their marriage. Imagine writing an essay/memoir that coincides with the song “Is That All There Is?” The song hums through my mind as the memoir progresses. I’m reading that Brandwein’s bliss, relief,  and happiness of her once-young fantasies are all but dead memories.

 

“Back then irritation was a precursor to romance. Now irritation, is, well, irritation,” she writes.

I can feel my own grimace grow. I can feel the clench of having been in a relationship too long. But there’s more.

“She is looking at her husband’s profile with seething resentment.”

“I couldn’t help seeing the petrified bedroom and living room furniture as metaphor for marriage in midlife.”

 

There is no telling if the author is still married to her husband at the time of publication, but they were at the end of the essay. In fact, she had a beautiful essayistic twist. Not only does it delight with the subtle capacity for a twist. It also shocks at its exceptional intimacy. Here we have a different angle to exposing private facts through nonfiction.

Unhappiness Requires Liberty to Write

In “Scraping” Brandwein does this to herself and her husband, giving us an intimate view of the interior of one’s life– one that’s

daring in its revelatory details of a crumbling marriage. Yet never once does this essay come off as a ranting, self-pitying journal entry. That’s where a lot of new writers go wrong.

Johnson’s “Privacy in Creative Nonfiction” addressed that. The subject such as Brandwein’s could so easily be initially seen as a question from amateur, yet what we tackle in essays and memoir— literary nonfiction overall— is the legitimate concern of writers everywhere.

 

“It turns out that permission to write about these hard truths is more easily gained than one might imagine—so long as truth, compassion, and empathy are braided throughout the work,” Johnson writes.

 

Here’s another example of how Brandwein might have forgotten the professional side of writing and lost it all to a handwritten entry in her journal:

 

“The last leg of our trip becomes a struggle to keep from sobbing, which is hard to manage when The Shirelles are singing Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Richard wrote out the lyrics for me when we first lived together, his way of saying that yearning uncertainty was now behind us. Thinking of the numbing certainty of our life together, I blurt, ‘I can’t bear it!’”

 

This is indeed an essay. Brandwein brings it round, trying to figure something out in true essayistic style. She doesn’t become sappy or melodramatic. She partially makes fun of herself and tells us what “exactly” happened to get her to turn it all around, to stop being a crybaby. Why did she do it? “There is something freeing about confronting the disappointments and limitations of our marriage.”

 

Asking Permission

Did Brandwein ask her husband’s permission to write this and that detail, to publish the thing? Did he have a chance to look at it before it went to the publisher, even before it was submitted? After all, as Terry Tempest Williams once wrote, “The minute we pick up our pen, we are on the path of betrayal.”

 

Now let’s flip that statement onto its side. Could we see in Brandwein’s essay what Johnson says in hers– that all writing is about revenge?

 

Or we might liken it to Freudian psychoanalysis. “Freudian psychology allowed for the exploration of private experiences, which in turn revealed the motivations behind our public personas.” Freud believed psychoanalysis might allow man to take a deeper look at himself, “to control himself more from within than through external authority…” Johnson writes. We as nonfiction writers do this. We work through our insecurities through our writing (and sometimes psychotherapy too). It is not, however, our responsibility to ensure that the subjects of our work are equally as secure in self-awareness and/or self-exploration.

 

Be on the look out for a third post in this series on privacy in nonfiction. 

Writing Privacy into Nonfiction

Posted on by
Reply
Share

Kaylene Johnson’s “Peering at Privacy in Creative Nonfiction” provides thoughtful fodder for us writers of memoir, essays, CNF. It’s a critical, intellectual though not academic consideration of what to include and what to exclude in these very personal pieces we write. Some people, upon hearing this, may think it obvious. Others might absorb every word of it like a stray cat at a tin of tuna. Me? Her essay gave me cause to think of various ways privacy has affected the essays I’ve already published, though didn’t really compel me to contemplate my future writing. Warning to tender writers: Johnson’s essay could very well scare you into second guessing yourself.

Let me explain.

“For the creative nonfiction writer, perhaps no decision is more pressing than what to reveal and what to leave unsaid,” Johnson writes in The Writer’s Chronicle, the monthly magazine of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. “Exposing one’s self invariably involves revealing the lives of others; one’s story is inextricably linked to the stories of other people.”

For me, an essay is a nonfiction, factual, non-mystical, non-sappy attempt to take readers on a journey. My preference is to incorporate elements of fiction so that it strings the reader along and doesn’t focus on me, the writer, but the concept or experience I’m sharing. The essay or memoir isn’t about me, per se, even if it is occasionally in first person. What’s important is the dialectic the piece elicits.

One writer, Johnson claims, “asks friends, both before writing about them and before sending the essays to publishers, for their permission. In some cases friends said yes to begin with but later decided to remain anonymous.” Really? This isn’t journalism or a biography. I’m an essayist, who, like Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace, turns common icons on their side, attempting to understand them from a different angle. I do not think believe in the necessity of asking permission from everyone who might make an appearance in my essays. That’s not to say that I condone libeling anyone or even making them simply feel uncomfortable. It will happen, though.

On the other hand, but not necessarily conversely, the need for fictional techniques and clever writing does sometimes arise. For instance, in the first essay I published, “In a Sentimental Mood”, the subject of my essay was jazz. I’d just witnessed renowned jazz bassist Ray Brown’s penultimate performance, and consequently had an epiphany about the music. One person helped me see the world of jazz backstage and on tour. That person I did protect. He was sensitive and didn’t know what the ramifications could be if I used his name. I therefore avoided it. His name wasn’t an imperative piece of information because the story wasn’t about him. He was easy to disguise as a deus ex machina, the gasoline in my vehicle tour through jazz. He read the piece during its composition and upon publication. He appreciated my sensitivity to his needs and was happy with the outcome; though had he not wanted me to write about him, he’d have to be written quite differently. Rest assured, however, he would have been in the essay.

As essayists, memoirists, CNF writers, we have the options to include fictional techniques that help us get avert certain problems.

“In these cases, (the writer), like many authors facing the same dilemma, used literary techniques to protect people’s privacy. He changed the details or used composite characters to conceal their identities,” Johnson writes.

 

More on privacy in CNF later.

A Second Look at Damned: Reading into Chuck Palahniuk

Posted on by
1
Share

Some writing techniques of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel seemed rushed, maybe even lazy, to me. As mentioned in a previous post, Palahniuk intrigues me. Damned, which I just finished, marks the seventh title of his that I’ve read. It’s also the one about which I’ve been most critical.

The end faltered. The structure all but disintegrated and often looked like a crutch. The characters lacked dynamicism.

Each chapter begins with a nod to author Judy Blume. “Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison.” It appeared humorous at first until I rethought it: Blume’s market is generally younger than the protagonist’s age, 13. (Bad form on research, Chuck.) These openings are established like prayers or letters. I think they’re set up as a preface of the coming chapter. After two chapters the “Are you there” dulls of repetition. Finally they appear as unnecessary; They add nothing to the chapter. They have, in fact, strangled the entire structure of the book, emphasizing their seemingly rushed structure. For a better time spent reading loosely connected chapters I’d read David Rakoff’s essay collections Half Empty or Fraud.

 

With fewer than 100 pages remaining in the 247-page novel, I finally stopped to ponder continuing with the butchered book. I opted to do so. How would the author end his version of Dante’s Inferno?

I’m glad I did. I love that some authors today allow books “to be continued”, this one included. Given Palahniuk’s obvious play on The Inferno, the loose ends he didn’t tie up, and learning that Madison’s been granted permission to live instead in Heaven (possibly even be alive again), Part II may just be a tilted mirror of Dante’s Paradiso.

One more negative note, Chuck overwrote the foreshadowing to the protagonist’s death scene. Heavy-handedness damped the effect of Madison’s actual death.

Some positives: I’m curious what will become of the existential crisis our protagonist has been cursed with.
What a hilarious folly that Madison might indeed end up like her detestable famous-actor mother in Part II.
How could you not be intrigued by an author whose setting includes such places as the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions, Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, or Dandruff Desert?

In addition, and in true Chuck Palahniuk writing style, there were delightful lines and scenes. These are sometimes what make a Palaniuk title last so long in the psyche. Here were some of my favorites:
“Unpleasant as death might seem, the upside is that you only suffer it once…. You won’t be asked to perform an encore. Unless, just possibly, you’re a Hindu.”
“In Hell, it’s our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us.”
Scene: two characters performing cunnilingus on a demonic giantess– sounds, smells, sights, and all.

Enjoy reading, but don’t expect literary genius. As I said in my previous Chuck post, I don’t consider him literary, but he is a bloody damned good writer. Would I reread Damned? No. I would, however, recommend Chuck’s other titles. He’s too damned tasty and twisted, rhythmic and raunchy to miss.