Nuptial Vowels

Last week, Dennis defended using “I” in writing. I realize that he meant that it was okay to use “I” in specific rhetorical situations and for specific rhetorical purposes, but, still, his defense made me nervous. Too many writers, I think, use “I” merely for the purpose of therapy.

Writing isn’t therapy, except when it is, and then it usually isn’t writing—at least not in the hands of amateurs. Not publishable writing anyway. If you need some sort of cathartic activity to work out grief over your mother’s death, disappointment over your marriage’s dissolution, or shame over your public humiliation, you should avoid writing, or at least not expect to land a book contract out of it. Instead, I would recommend meditating. Or race car driving. Or praying. Or–how’s this for originality–actual therapy that involves a couch, a shrink, a box of tissues and a bottle of Prozac. The chronicling of death, infidelity, and other such heavy topics should be left in the hands of trained professionals, the likes of Joan Didion or Nora Ephron, for instance.

The conventional wisdom about James Frey is that by exaggerating parts of his personal history to construct his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, he defrauded his readers. Though this is a valid point and he certainly is guilty of a terrible transgression, I think he committed a more serious though subtle literary offense. By writing about his “addiction” so effectively, Frey made everyone with a pen and a past think they had a bestseller in them. His posture and his PR machine implied that the memoir was a part of his recovery.

The back story tells another tale. As an addict, he was pretty unremarkable, a n’er-do-well minor character with a major imagination. When he tried to sell his story as a novel and couldn’t, he and his agent turned it into a memoir and cashed in on his addiction platform. It wasn’t even real therapy. It was born out of a desire to be famous, not healed. He pulled one over on the American public and on “Oprah,” proving himself to be as good an actor as he was a writer, not to mention confidence man. What he wasn’t much of was an addict in recovery.

It’s always been human nature to share one’s suffering. But these days, the impulse to share one’s writing is too easily enabled by technology. Any Tom, Dick or Harry with a laptop and an Internet connection can blog indiscriminately about their Munchhausen By Proxy childhood. The ability to create and maintain a blog gives people a false sense of authorship. If I write, I must be a writer, seems to be the common misconception. The ease with which we can nowadays not only write but also “publish,” as in sharing our musings with the masses, gives people a false sense of authorship. True authorship is publishable writing that is vetted and edited. Like tap water, writing is better in its filtered form.

I tell my students that when deciding if they should include themselves in a piece, whether it’s a journalistic work or a work of fiction, they should ask themselves whether, by including themselves they are going to benefit themselves or their readers. Obviously, if the answer is it benefits their readers, go for it. If it’s going to benefit their readers and a byproduct is an ego boost or psychological healing, go for it. If it’s just going to make the writer feel better, leave yourself on the cutting room floor. So unless you’re Joan Didion, it’s unlikely that your heartbreaks and migraines can be rewoven into something beautiful.

I don’t mean to sound harsh. I just think that writing about the awful things that happen to human beings should be left to the masters. Alice Sebold, the author of the bestselling novel, The Lovely Bones, is one such master.

Her novel’s narrator is Susie, a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered. Sebold herself is a rape victim who has chronicled in horrific detail her own brutal rape. In an NPR interview, Sebold explained to Terri Gross that she deliberately wrote the first chapter of her memoir Lucky, in which she describes the actual rape, before she set out to write the novel. “And one of the things that was very important for me to do was to get all the facts of my own case down, so they had been written, they existed whole in a whole other book, and I could go back to Susie and she could lead me where she wanted to take me and tell me her story in the way she wanted to tell it, as opposed to me feeling perhaps that I needed to really tell the real deal about every detail of rape and violence.”

The takeaway lesson from Alice Sebold’s experience is that a writer needs to explore her own motivations for writing. Certainly, writing Heartburn must have given Nora Ephron a degree of psychological comfort. But that comfort had to be recognized by the author as ancillary; the work had to stand on its own, its worth measured separately from its therapeutic value.

–Barbara