Confessionals

Can you write without spilling your guts?

The Cut certainly knows how to find a story that will get the internet talking. First with their unlikely scam piece, then The divorce piece, and now the piece on age gap relationships that has everyone on Twitter having an absolute meltdown. Their editorial strategy for personal essays seems to be someone clear-sightedly showing their ass for the world to feast on. The divorce piece I loved; it’s a gutting, brutally honest examination of the writer’s own faults and hideousness in one of the worst periods of her life, how she all but tore her own stability and family apart while in the midst of a mental health crisis, and is steadily rebuilding it and her husband’s trust. It’s uncompromising and she does not come off well, but the pace of it is brilliantly timed and it ends with a steady hope and change that ought to come at the end of a personal essay. The scam piece I actually cannot bring myself to read, to be honest (and now it’s behind a paywall so I can’t anyway), but I lived for the screenshots shooting around Twitter which seemed to reveal the writer putting several thousands of dollars in a literal cardboard box and handing it to a stranger as the victim of a scam. Unbelievable stuff.

I opened up the age gap piece with a juicy relish: yes, come on, here is another surefire Cut winner. I closed it quickly, disappointed and a bit nauseous; I could not get past the first paragraph. It struck entirely the wrong tone. Not only is it verbose and fairly unreadable in its style, it’s smug and self-satisfied, smarmy and shying away from the author’s own faults and prejudices. There is clearly not enough distance and time between the author and her subject matter: namely, the fact that she married a guy in his thirties when she was 23. She extolls the virtues of marrying a man who handed her tastes and habits, who bankrolls her while she works for free and tries to make it as a writer.

I’m not going to delve into the article’s arguments in detail; if I had to read it, so do you, unfortunately. What’s striking about is is not just its shocking prose but also how it professes to be personal without doing any of the heavy lifting to face its revelations head on. What I learnt about the writer, I learnt not from what she said, but what she couldn’t quite say.

The furore that’s been going down on Twitter this week, though amusing, did get me thinking about writers whose writing I find deeply moving and personal but who manage to keep themselves at a certain distance, hold themselves apart from revealing too much, from being pinned to any one experience or letting anything they say define them in any detail. I have just finished reading Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City for the first time. I love their writing and am seeking it out wherever I can at the moment, eagerly anticipating their upcoming book also. One thing I continue to love about their writing is how gut wrenching and personal they manage to be without baring all. In The Lonely City, they relate intimately cringe details about their move to New York in the wake of a breakup, the corporeal sensations of their isolation, the icky and horrid habits they fell into while looking for a smidge of human connection. Not once, however, did they give too much away and leave a hunk of themselves chopped and still bloody on the page in front of me. They speak about their relationship to gender, queerness and transness with a relatability and personability that is refreshing without saying anything they might later regret.

Maggie Nelson is also one of these writers, unsurprisingly!

Perhaps it is their chosen form that lends itself best to this, the way they weave memoir and personal anecdotes within a larger theme to then examine the work of writers and artists that they admire, revealing more about the particular quality of their experience in a fresh light. It allows them to dip and weave away from the limelight, stepping into its perimeter only when it suits them. There’s never a sense of evasion in their writing, however; they are writing truthfully, or as truthfully as they can, but holding the reader at arm’s length. The reader—me—never feels entitled to a bare-all confession, and they know that they’re not going to get it, but what they do reveal is honest.

Joan Didion does something similar to me. Though she has written whole books about grief and losing both her husband and her daughter, and now I and millions of others know what the kitchen in her New York apartment looked like the day her husband had a heart attack and never came back from the hospital, and what Didion felt in the wake of that loss, I feel I don’t know more than Didion wanted me to know. She pipettes emotions and details into her writing with scientific precision so that she can portray an experience without letting it stand to define her. I recently read Where I Was From, a sort-of-memoir about her upbringing in California. In reality, almost none of the book is about her childhood, focusing instead on her distant relatives as a way of abstracting her own confessions. As much of Didion’s writing is, it’s oblique, suffused with feeling but kept at arm’s length so that you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at until she reveals it to you at exactly the right time.

Other writers that have mastered this kind of control, for me, include Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose memoir about motherhood was one of my favourite reads of last year. There’s a scene from it that I think about maybe once a month, still: she ponders her own need to nurse and have children, her attachment to her breast pump, her enjoyment of the quiet morning hours sat pumping milk before the rest of the household stirs. Her husband cuts in asking her to stop having babies now, they can’t afford it, they’re still renting and haven’t a stable home for their family. It’s a clattering of reality meeting her fantasy of continual reproduction and it’s painful and enlightening all at once. Zadie Smith is, obviously, also someone whose essays I look for and love; her recent one about being a teenager and falling out of her bedroom window embodies her skill of revealing just enough, but nothing more than what she wants to. She gives you the flavour, oh so relatable, of that adolescent wanting to be more than you really are, the embarrassing weaving of stories to construct this as your reality, without getting gory or journalistic.

Much has been written and said of late about the era of the personal essay. It defined the era in which I entered writing, and indeed, as a woman wanting to write, it seemed often that that was my way into writing for more and bigger publications. I’m glad that my own run of personal essays has been limited, all told; I’m glad that my many bleeding heart pitches were rejected, as much as it stung at the time. I don’t think I could stand by those pieces now if they existed in the world. It also bears mentioning that as a white woman, I was never expected to reveal as much as my Black women peers, many of whom were expected to not only write, but to want to write, extremely personal essays about their experiences of racism in order to be published. Most of the examples of writers that I have given above, barring Smith, are also white women and nonbinary people; there is a privilege to holding yourself back, to letting people in only so much, that is not afforded to everyone. It’s why as soon as musicians achieve a certain level of fame, they just stop doing interviews (à la Beyonce) and why that approach simply doesn’t work for artists just coming up.

Someone said, however, that they think the Cut editor that commissioned and edited the age gap article has it out for the author because they can’t believe they allowed it to be published like that. I’m inclined to agree; the article’s pretence at aloofness reveals a person unwilling to think critically about the position that they find themselves in, even though they’re published in The Cut professing to do just that. The best kind of personal writing is critical of itself, interrogative of its own position and standpoints, preferably using something else—an artwork or experience or theme or lens—to cast a different light on itself. And crucially, we always end up in a different place to where we started.