1

“Speak to your dead. Write to your dead. Tell them a story,” Alexander Chee urges.

I nod—-this is what I believe writing should do. It is how writing calls me. Yet when I situate myself in a chair to meet the dead on the page, I am silenced, rendered speechless before the white noise of my own anxiety.

“To stop and respond to anxiety’s challenge is to accept dialogue with ourselves,” Samir Chopra wrote in an essay on the usefulness of dread. “There is a Nietzschean note here: we must display amor fati, a love of fate,” Chopra continues. To love our life, our fate, this thing we have been given to live, the modern human must accept their anxiety as constituitive to personhood. In Chopra’s words, “we must ‘own’ our anxiety as part of us, to be integrated and deployed to make our lives what we wish them to be.”

Among the uncertainties on the anxiety-treadmill, identity looms large. If identity is the loom which constructs us in recognizable forms, identity is also the thing we are continuously looming. The rise of applied anti-othering pedagogies and student-centered classrooms hasn’t reduced the pressure between identifying the speaker and contextualizing the reason for their speaking. The reader expects the writer to be honest about themselves, a process currently inscribed by the inventorying of various metrics, labels, ethnicities, allegiances, memberships, religions, and lived experiences that render one identifiable. How risible, really, that this expectation of identifiability should gain prominence in a country known for resistance to learning anything about others.

2

Writing between languages and articulations of selfhood, Nicholas Samaras describes “an odd sense of a ‘double-exposure’ photograph in countries of exile: one exposure is of normality, the tourist scenes of a village or city; the other exposure is visibly hidden, almost like a transparent overlay, glimpsed more when you stay with people who are trying to help the citizens of nowhere.”

“I’m so fucking tired of having to write a cultural treatise on customs in my homeland every time I want to tell a story about it,” my friend says in an email.

“Are those your expectations or the reader’s expectations?” I reply, forgetting the possibility that the backstory demands often come directly from editors.

My friend says she has no idea which part of over-explaining is rooted in fear of failure, or disappointing the expectations of others. “I think I’m just tired of realizing most of me is national backstory,” she writes, before segueing into a praise of contemporary autotheory, and dropping a link to “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory” by Arianne Zwartjes.

When reality feels fake or overdetermined by emptiness, autotheory offers opportunities for conceptual abstraction and formalizations of memoir that attend to embodied experience. And it is true that many recent books I love occupy an autotheoretic inclination that refuses to obscure the speaker while simultaneously refusing to speak the latest discourse.

3

Is it too perfect that, where I’m from, when we become women, they plant you a tree?

- Terese Mailhot, “I Used to Give Men Mercy”

I was in my late twenties then, and I remember my male friends all coming to me with visions of violence, scripts about what should be done to the rapist, what they would do to him, how these instances should be handled.

- Charles Bowden, “Torch Song”

4

“Some objects felt less like relics from the past and more like artifacts from unlived futures,” Leslie Jamison wrote of the curated materials in “The Breakup Museum”.

“Terribly sentimental” in the most radical way, Rachel Zucker said her Museum of Accidents was “only about finding a way to say, sincerely, that I love my husband.” Staring at the cliche of sentimentality, Zucker refused to obscure what she felt needed saying.

“To speak that most banal of heterosexist clichés and make it really mean something . . . to make me feel it,” Zucker expanded.

“I want a poetry that can say such things," she continues.

I want the saying of such things to read for the seriousness of their commitments. This is not the same thing as wanting the seriousness of their commitments to be judged on the basis of various standards including but not limited to happiness, self-esteem, and duration.

Alas, nothing vibes schadenfreude as efficiently as mounting the platform of moral hygiene to judge other people’s romantic relationships or marriages on the basis of the limited knowledge gleaned from a conversation, a book, a moment, a poem, a sitcom. And perhaps I want a literature that can follow the expanding profits of the self-help industry in the saying of such unsightly things. *

5

I’m fascinated by the way Rolf Potts’ leverages the depiction of selfhood into a memoir that occupies the simultaneous incoherence and determinism of the found text. The found text is also the founding text here. One begins in the story of origins.

Speaking of origins, here is “Begin” from Potts’ “Age, Formative: Found Texts”:

6

In “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” Philip Lopate underscores the importance of creating “a double perspective” that enables the writer to move back and forth through time between the various narrative selves:

In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective, the author’s retrospective employment of a more mature intelligence to interpret the past, is not merely an obligation but a privilege, an opportunity. In any autobiographical narrative, whether memoir or personal essay, the heart of the matter often shines through those passages where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience.

The quality of thinking, the depth of insight and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as the writer is humanly capable of arriving at—these are guarantees to the reader that a particular author’s sensibility is trustworthy and simpatico. With me, it goes further: I have always been deeply attracted to just those passages where the writing takes an analytical, interpretative turn, and which seem to me the dessert, the reward of prose.

Assuming one lives in the United States, it is fair to say that the world survives by the dicta of our lifestyle tastes, our economic preferences, and our deeply internalized sense of exceptionalism. For me, what Lopate calls “the dessert” is the space where the feast, itself, is interrogated, or revealed in a light that alters the reader’s gaze.

The executioner and the victim change places constantly in the scarcity-constructions of late capitalism; the money we make often removes, narrows, or devalues opportunities for others. Given the circumstances, writing from a position of ontological innocence isn’t really possible or desirable—— and this is something to consider as the first-person speaker develops. What do they notice? What do they ignore? How are you rationalizing it?

Lopate reserves a place for "the voice of adult judgement" in memoir: "To reflect deeply on the wounds inflicted on oneself in the past might lead to an admission of complicity in that suffering."

Embodied narration sparkles when reaching the cognitive place beyond simple blame. We know, for example, that survivors of sexual abuse are more likely to become abusers themselves, but we can't reckon with the complexity of this without studying the binaries of guilt/innocence that hide beneath our beliefs and assumptions. “You must side with the world” against yourself, Kafka wrote. That is the gauntlet.

Asterisk

* For example, tell me how you left a lifetime of religious fundamentalism in order to become a secularized version of Happy, Fulfilling Marriage-police based on your extensive counseling and personal therapy sessions now extrapolated into a system of rules that applies to all of humanity. This would be an excellent memoir. It would do something that no one dares to do, namely, reveal the ways in which a judgement-driven socialization can satisfy itself under various epistemic schemes.

Show me how we destroy and dehumanize others in the name of goodness, wisdom, and privilege. Make me uncomfortable. We deserve a bit of discomfort, I suspect.