Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 242

You guys,

I read through the first draft of my book and cringed at some of the lines, like this one about my ex-boyfriend of eight years:

“We trudged along through another six years together, our entire 20s. He would cheat on me twice during that time and I wouldn’t find out until well after we had broken up.”

I had recently presented a Zoom session to Write Of Passage students that I called Write Unsparingly About Yourself And Readers Will Root For You, and here I was doing the opposite. Oh my boyfriend cheated on me, twice! Isn’t he a jerk? Won’t you take my side, reader, please? 

But the way to get readers to root for you is to write unsparingly about yourself, not others. In today’s Memoir Snob deep dive I read Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, and she shows you how to masterfully do this. 

“Derek sits in front of us in German class, and lately Clarissa and I have been untwisting our Milky Pens, running the pastel-colored ink through his black, curly mullet. Derek is a genius, and he doesn't care what anyone thinks of him, and so we hate him. At twelve years old, he will be the youngest certified engineer employed by Microsoft. At fourteen, he will be the first person implanted with a microchip on national television. He will be honored by Oprah and Bill Gates. At eighteen, he'll die in a motorcycle accident.”

T did not like Derek Jacobs. In fact she hated him. She and her friend were mean to him, rubbing the ink of their pens into his hair during class. Turns out Derek was a genius, and then he died tragically. But T did not apologize for how she and her friend treated Derek. She did not say, We were young, and stupid, and immature, and I feel terrible about this—though I’m sure she did. Instead, she wrote unsparingly about herself—which means she just wrote what happened and the truth of how she felt about Derek at that time. When I read this passage I thought, I can’t believe she’s sharing something so vulnerable. I love her for being so honest. If only I could be this honest. There’s an immediate kinship I feel when writers write the truth in a way that shows themselves in a negative light. Cheryl Strayed did this in her memoir, Wild. Early in the book Cheryl admitted to cheating on her husband, Paul, who all we knew at this point was wonderful and kind. She wrote:

"When Paul accepted a job offer in Minneapolis that required him to return to Minnesota midway through our exotic hen-sitting gig, I stayed behind in Oregon and fucked the ex-boyfriend of the woman who owned the exotic hens. I fucked a cook at the restaurant where I'd picked up a job waiting tables. I fucked a massage therapist who gave me a piece of banana cream pie and a free massage. All three of them over the span of five days." 

There was no mention of guilt or shame in these lines. Cheryl did not excuse or explain why she cheated on her husband with three men in five days because that would be insulting to the reader. When you write unsparingly about yourself you do not include disclaimers or self-deprecation.

In my book, I wrote that my boyfriend cheated on me twice during our relationship but that was unknown to me until years after we broke up. It had nothing to do with the story I was telling, which was about our relationship as I was in it. Telling the reader he cheated on me was only included to make the reader feel bad for me. In my rewrite I deleted the line. 

I’ll share one more about my ex. Here’s how I wrote the original: 

“Of course we did get back together—we couldn’t imagine our lives without the other.”

I did feel like it was mutual—that we couldn’t imagine our lives without the other—but I can’t speak for my ex-boyfriend. And there’s nothing vulnerable about an admission that involves “we.” So I rewrote it:

“Of course we did get back together. I couldn’t imagine my life without him.” 

I couldn’t imagine my life without him feels like a more truthful statement, and the subtle change leaves me feeling very exposed. That’s how I know it’s right. 

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Until next week,

Charlie