Learning to Steer By Wrecking the Boat

My book was finished a year before it came out and in the time between its completion and its release, I started writing two novels. I did this because it seemed to me that my mind had ossified and my imagination atrophied after so many years of writing nonfiction. I missed the freedom I felt when I wrote as a young person, when the appeal of writing was its limitlessness and privacy, when writing was a uniquely pleasurable act instead of a fraught chore. I thought I might achieve this if I freed my writing from obligations, including a responsibility to truth as fact checkers would define it. I wanted to be unencumbered by the hope that what I wrote would have some meaningful effect once it entered the world.

Writing fiction is not something I know how to do, a fact I’m reminded of every day I attempt it. The struggle it presents frustrates, excites, and gratifies me. I generally don’t mind being stupid¹ ; sometimes I even enjoy it, and there’s a thrill in having my ineptitude revealed in arenas that don’t matter very much. I am happy when I figure out a solution to a problem I’ve created by doing something unnecessary that I’m bad at. Richard Freeman, a yogi whose body appears to be made of melted caramel, used to say² “blessed are the inflexible because they get there before the rest of us.” By that wisdom, blessed are the earnestly striving dimwits.

Right now, I’m working on a short story and when I feel stuck I’ll scour my bookshelves for an example of what I’m trying to do, someone else’s short story with the right vibe to inspire and guide me. Writers aren’t supposed to do this because, the theory is, their writing becomes diluted and corrupt with imitation but I do it anyway. Alas, without success. The problem, I’ve realized, is that I’m looking for fiction that I myself have previously written. I want to see what I sound like and how I do things when I’m writing fiction because I don’t yet have that knowledge. You have to actually do the thing in order to learn how to do it, which is so annoying.

A lot of my current vexation is tied to my conviction that my goals for my fiction are humble. I’m not concerned with being literary nor accomplishing something no one’s ever done before, reinventing the form or whatever. I just want to tell interesting stories simply and well, with engaging, believable characters who have conversations with discernible beginnings and ends while talking with people who matter to them. This feels too literal somehow, like an amateur’s mistake: too simple-minded, too commercial (though I do not anticipate commercial success.) I think it should be easy yet it doesn’t feel easy. Worryingly, it seems I can’t do the stupid thing well, can’t do the smart thing at all.

It’s easy to be disappointed in myself, and discouraged. Sometimes my internal monologue becomes “I wasted my adult life up to this point by not learning how to write the way I want to write now, because back then I didn’t care about writing the way I want to write now, so all those years were squandered and I have nothing to show for them. I’m a bad fiction writer who wants to be a good fiction writer but I don’t have the time left to make it happen. Improvement would take so long that by the time I got better enough to be good, I’d probably just die/be dead. So I would have wasted my life in two ways: by not trying to be a good fiction writer and then by trying but failing.” At other times my brain, bless its heart, brightly says, “I think this is pretty good!”

If you’ve read some of what I’ve shared previously here, you might be asking yourself a question I too am a bit stuck on: is writing fiction (poorly or otherwise) the result of giving up? In light of how consumed I was/am with whether or not (my) writing can matter, a pivot to fun fiction—which is explicitly what I’m trying to write, something highly enjoyable to read—suggests I’ve decided or realized that it cannot.³ And maybe I have? Which feels at first like resigning myself to exercising no power in the world, but an instant of proper reflection corrects that. There is more to life than writing. In fact, only some things in life are writing, and everything else is something different.

Daniel Berrigan’s words to the court during his 1981 trial have been on my mind:

It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.” There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to people. There are other projects I could be very helpful at. And I can’t do them. I cannot.

and this, written in 1969:

We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total -- but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

He’s talking about sacrifice, which I do not feel I’ve sufficiently made. I know I’ll always write, but maybe it should not be my vocation or one of my first priorities; maybe it is one of the “other projects.” And while the temptation of extremity is the temptation to conclude that I can’t write at all, that would be foolish. Berrigan wrote so much. He wrote poetry and parables, theology and Biblical exegesis, memoir/biography and plays. So I have to puzzle over that balance in my own life, as well as the balance between language and silence, fiction and nonfiction, selling and giving. At the very least I think I need to expand my perspective far beyond writing when it comes to considering how I might exonerate my own existence.

I started my novels, as mentioned above, well before An Honest Woman came out. But since An Honest Woman’s release, I have been seized with the urgent desire to escape all of my previous work, to drop the guillotine blade down on whatever cord connects me to it, to be completely free from it like I’ve jumped out a plane or stolen away on a little motorboat. I didn’t feel this way after my earlier books, for a bunch of reasons, but I suspect this sense of spiritual rejection is common for authors and other artists regardless of how their work is received. To think and talk about the same book for so long is exhausting and irritating. To use additional words in service of the thing already made from words very quickly reveals itself as an absurd endeavor.

I foolishly did not anticipate and prepare for what promoting An Honest Woman, specifically, entailed, which was sporadic, intense exposure to people who mistrust sex workers and have no qualms about treating them as distasteful curiosities. This was not the dominant encounter; I was lucky enough to be interviewed by a number of lovely, insightful people who asked great questions. But I had other interviews, long and invasive ones, with clueless and/or latently snide women who questioned me extensively about my time as a sex worker, and each of them left me (embarrassingly, deeply) depressed. For weeks, I was hyper aware of being seen as a prostitute who was desperate for attention and wrote a book to get it instead of being seen as a writer who made sex work one of her subjects.⁴ While this was going on, people from my distant past started popping up as new followers on my social media accounts; relatives texted me about what they’d read in the paper. I felt exposed and misunderstood, and was miserable. I didn’t care about what did or didn’t happen to the book anymore. I just wanted to be left alone.

I know many creators have been asked insensitive questions by interviewers and scads of authors, particularly women, have been savaged by the media and general public. I have not been savaged! But the situation does not feel good by virtue of not being the worst possible. I’ve been thinking a lot about Rachel Cusk’s observation that after the publication of A Life’s Work, “I find that I like women less than I did, and wonder whether other feminists have been in the same uncomfortable position.” She points at an ugly truth I’ve become reacquainted with. An Honest Woman opens with the suggestion that women are more hostile to (female) sex workers than men are, and promoting the book confirmed as much. I had a great time talking with various male radio hosts; they laughed at my jokes, their questions came out of genuine curiosity, we had good chemistry.

It was women who repeatedly tried to triangulate their own revulsion or scorn with questions like “what would you say to someone who thinks sex work is wrong?” or “to someone who says you’re glamorizing something exploitative?”; “what would you say to a young woman who wants to do what you did?”⁵ It was a woman who pushed and pushed even after I said I didn’t want to talk about my family, who mined avidly for trauma anecdotes, who asked me to my face “what was the worst thing that ever happened to you?” which I hope you recognize as a prompt for me to describe a sexual assault.

My point is not “poor me”; I’m fine. Even when I lay down on my bed and despondently scrolled TikTok for a few hours post-interview, I knew that I’m loved, I’m lucky, I’m supported, and this sort of thing can’t hurt me. And yet it does hurt, I don’t like it, and there’s no reason to endure it. My desire to retreat and remake myself as a new writer is about getting away from that, and not, to be clear, about believing my previous work is shameful or bad. I’ve gotten so many wonderful messages about the book, and I appreciate them but I also feel like the book doesn’t have anything to do with me anymore. I have left it on the orphanage doorstep and run into the night, off to commandeer a boat I don’t know how to drive. In time, you may see evidence of the crash.

1  as Reading Writers testifies

2  I believe I heard him say something to this effect on 2-3 separate occasions, but I just want to be clear I’m relying on my swiss cheese-like memory and can’t provide a citation. (Fact checkers HATE her.)

3  I have to table the inquiry into whether or not fiction can matter because of how hideously tedious I find those discussions/lectures. (The short answer is yes it does and no it doesn’t.) I’ll probably write about it more in the future through the lens of a question I find more interesting: is fiction immoral?

4  For many years, I led with my identity as a sex worker as a writer and as a feminist because of my political goals. In my 20s, I was more used to the confrontations and unpleasantries that entails. It’s amazing how completely I’d forgotten about it, and how I’d baselessly assumed the general public was more educated and accepting now than they’d been then.

5  One of these interviews will not see the light of day, which is maybe for the best although it makes the 90 minutes of degradation even more pointless. But I would like to share what came out of me when asked the “what would you say to a young woman” question because I was surprised by how true it is. I said I would apologize to her for not having created better conditions, for having watched this country make her work harder, more compromising, and less safe than it was when I began.