Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 235

You guys,

It’s been three months since I submitted an essay to the New York Times column, Modern Love, and I still haven’t heard back. Their website says I should be notified in three to four months, “(or longer),” so I should find out… soon. 

For most of those three months I thought my essay was a shoe-in. I imagined the email from the editor, Daniel Jones, telling me my essay has been chosen and how much he loved it. I imagined the phone call with my mom, where I tell her my name will be in the paper soon (my real name, by the way, because the Times doesn’t accept pseudonym submissions). I imagined my essay in the New York Times font. I imagined jumping up and down and screaming to Sam that “I’M GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!”

It’s all very exciting and sometimes I have to pull myself out of the daydream and get back to work. But for the past two weeks I’ve started to have doubts because the more I read memoir the more I learn over and over again that I cannot cast myself as the victim. 

In today’s short podcast episode I talk about the book Still Life At Eighty, by Abigail Thomas. 

Abigail Thomas is eighty years old and has written memoir, fiction, and books on writing. 

In the Appendix she writes:

“Memoir is not a place to get revenge, or to appear angelic, or to cast oneself as victim. If that's on your mind, write fiction. Memoir should not be self-serving, even accidentally. If you come out as anything but profoundly human, you've probably got the wrong motives for doing this, or you haven't stood far enough back, or come close enough.”

I thought of my essay for Modern Love and realized I cast myself as the victim. It was about my relationship with my mom, and while the ending was beautiful most of the essay painted her in a negative light, like when I told her we were going to start using a nanny full-time instead of part time and she laughed and said, “Why did you even bother having kids?” And when I responded that her comment really hurt my feelings and she said, “Oh my god, I was joking. I can’t say anything to you.”

There’s nothing wrong with writing down what was actually said. But the story was one-sided. It made me the hero.

In the Modern Love Submission Tips there’s a tip about writing about other people. It says:

“As the writer, you are in a position of great power—you control the megaphone—and the reader knows this. You can make people look good or bad. And if the reader senses you’re abusing this power, they’ll think the person who looks worst is you. This is why, as a preemptive measure, the writer should be hardest on himself. Self-deprecation can be among the personal essayist’s most useful tools. Counter-intuitively, you can look good by looking bad.”

Throughout the entire essay, until the end, I made my mom the bad guy and me the good guy. Here’s where I really went wrong: “We hung up the phone and I wasn’t sure which was worse: to say nothing and seethe about it or to say how I felt and have my feelings dismissed.”

Suddenly it’s a pity party for myself. Inserting my thoughts and feelings and opinions is an attempt to manipulate the reader. But my only job is to tell the story. What happened? That’s it.

Perhaps my essay will still be accepted. Maybe Daniel Jones will say he likes it but it needs work, and then I’ll have the opportunity to edit and make my mom more of a hero and me more of a villain. Or I’ll get the rejection email and lay on the floor for a few days because I will not, in fact, be a published writer in the New York Times. 

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Until next week,

Charlie