Feedback as an Act of Compassion
How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VIII
What’s the effect on a writer when an instructor’s critique goes beyond the page?
It’s 2011, and I’ve signed up for another online writing workshop with one of the same instructors I worked with at Gotham Writers Workshop. Only this time the platform is her own setup. For the past three years since I ended my last “real” relationship, I’ve racked up dubious experiences with men who aren’t right for me, and my self-esteem is plummeting, but these romantic blunders make for excellent storytelling—if told properly. As I make poor decision after poor decision in a loop of desperation, I stockpile material for personal essays, my future manuscript, and sessions with a therapist.
One such example is the five-and-a-half-page, single-spaced essay I submit for critique about a year-long off-and-on fling that isn’t quite over yet. I spend four paragraphs setting up the scenario with backstory before I get to how I met this dude who is, in his own words, “in no place to be anyone’s boyfriend right now.” (Pro tip: If someone says that to you, believe him.)
“Shortcut Origin Stories”
In the fifth paragraph, I set the scene for how we meet and describe his appearance, including the hat he’s wearing to cover his premature receding hairline. It’s my ex-boyfriend’s birthday party, and we’re in a sweaty, crowded Irish pub in Newport Beach. (Remember the guy from the Del Taco drive-through? Yeah, that ex-boyfriend.) My ex plays matchmaker and gives his childhood best bud’s little brother my phone number in June. We don’t get coffee until August.
None of this is important. Girl meets boy. They talk in a bar. There’s a spark. Girl’s ex-boyfriend gives boy her phone number. They make plans to get coffee two months later. So what? Many encounters start like this. What makes this one unique? (“Shortcut origin stories,” my 2017 book coach says.)
It gets slightly more interesting in September when the twenty-eight-year-old first kisses me in his mom’s driveway as we look at the stars through the constellation app on his phone, pointed up to the sky, spinning in circles. Cute, right? But again, so what?
Next I spend a few paragraphs recounting an exhausting trip to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios with the bouncy young man and his peppy haunted-house-enthusiast friends, where our age disparity is glaring. (In 2010, I’m thirty-seven.) I write, “The highlight of the night was when we sat on a tram wearing 3-D glasses watching dinosaurs. Resting.” At 2:00 a.m., when we say goodbye in the parking lot, I think this isn’t going to happen. (Second pro tip: If your gut tells you this, listen to it.)
The Beginning Is Not the Beginning
I get why I include the trip to Universal Studios: to show the gap in our energy levels. However, I can venture even further into the timeline of our courtship before I write the first scene. There’s no such thing as “the beginning.” There’s only the point where you decide a piece of writing should start, and I agree with the instructor of this workshop when she says the essay should commence toward the end of the second page: “The first time we had sex was two days after he buried his father. I was an escape.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The setting of our “love nest” for the next few months is inside a plywood haunted house in his mom’s driveway—a building as temporary as our relationship, which I state explicitly.
The instructor’s feedback is cogent: “Take out any lines in which you explain things. You note the haunted house is a metaphor, and your intimacy is as makeshift as the structure. Trust your readers to understand this. Let the metaphor reveal itself.”
Everything but the Kitchen Sink
In the first and second drafts, I employ the “kitchen sink” method, including every detail I can conjure about what went down with this young man: helping him tear down the haunted house after Halloween; sitting on the couch watching TV with his mom’s dog wedged between us; helping him move to his own apartment; helping him clean his own apartment; attending concerts; visiting his sister’s hoarder house; Taco Tuesdays with his friends, who ask, “Are you guys together?” and not knowing how to respond; discussing the future or lack thereof without actually talking about what we’re doing. I slowly peal back the layers, learning about him piecemeal, sensing he’s hiding something. (Hint: He is.)
But why do I invest so much energy in this dead-end, flimsy partnership? When I write the first draft, I don’t have the answer.
In the nine-and-a-half-page, single-spaced revision, I attempt to address my teacher’s question: “What is this relationship about for you?”
I write, “I was scared of my age, scared of not finding reciprocated love before the ticking clock stopped. I was jealous of all the time he had to figure out his shit. I thought being with someone younger would keep me young for a little while longer.”
It goes deeper, but I’m too close to it to see it—and I don’t know all the facts yet. I don’t recognize his self-absorption; I don’t know he’s also dating men; I don’t realize I, too, am emotionally unavailable. It’s impossible to finish an essay if the events haven’t fully unfolded, and the writer has yet to grasp the import of what she’s trying to convey.
“You remain far too unexamined,” my instructor notes, and she’s not wrong.
I include all the conversations I remember, not only the significant ones—like the time we discuss how many children he wants, and he says four while I look at my watch, and he tells me, “You’re fucked.”
“Use dialogue to reveal character,” my teacher says, and she’s not wrong.
Whittle It Down
After workshopping this piece again a few years later once I have some distance, my fairy godmentor from UCLA Extension—whom you’ll meet in the next entry—says I can put the lengthy essay in the “done pile,” but the version I ultimately publish is fewer than eight-hundred words. I cut most of the scenes, whittling down the meaning of the relationship into its essentials, focusing on the plywood haunted house and an analysis of myself, rather than the minutia of a pseudo-boyfriend whom I eventually cut off abruptly. (Is it still “ghosting” if the person you ghost already dumped you?)
I call myself “the queen of involvement with kings of mixed messages” and write, “Deep down I knew this wasn’t love because love is easier.”
“Mock Intimacy in a Fake House” appears in the original essay collection I eventually compile. As I transform the book into a memoir, however, the superfluous essay falls away. The relevant takeaway is not the casual relationship I have between thirty-seven and thirty-eight but my state of mind when it ends: the realization I am no closer to finding a healthy adult partnership and will never have children if I continue to waste time on trivial matches.
Ninety-Nine Emails Don’t Make an Essay
If you rightfully believe a year-long pursuit of a man with narcissistic tendencies nine years my junior who is ambivalent about all women is an unproductive and demoralizing exercise in seeking intimacy while chipping away at one of the last baby-making years I have left, wait until you get a load of this. The second essay I submit for workshop in 2011 is about an even younger male with whom an unlikely connection leads to pointless pining and an unhealthy obsession. That this twenty-five-year-old, long-haired, larger-than-life bartender/roadie and self-diagnosed “failed musician” happens to be one of my former students is (somewhat) beside the point. The crux is I’m thirty-five in 2008 when I run into him at his restaurant when I am at my peak post-relationship-trauma hotness, having cried myself into a size four. I have not fully processed the years with my recent fiancé and former husband. I am free, emotionally beatdown, and eager for any dalliance without a future. Enter a depressed, vodka-swilling, wily sweetheart who is hellbent on self-destruction: my midthirties kryptonite.
In “It’s Still Me,” I curate an ample chunk of the ninety-nine emails he and I volley back and forth for the next few weeks after reconnecting—a flirty, humorous dance that leads to one memorable in-person get-together. In the original draft, I incorporate too many emails, unable to decide which ones to toss. In later versions, while I cut some, I don’t edit out enough before I get to the face-to-face main event—even in the published essay eventually nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In the original, the emails constitute almost six pages double-spaced. So what if the emails are amusing? What propels the action forward?
What My Instructor Gets Right
“This is probably my favorite of everything I’ve seen from you,” my instructor says, but “the emails are too much,” and she’s not wrong.
Her next comment is one I will hear again and again in future workshops from fellow writers and teachers alike: “I want much more about you.” Sure, I write scenes about our magical night together when he says, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” our subsequent correspondence via Facebook messenger, and the months in which I observe on social media from afar as the young man’s life descends into chaos. But what of it? What does this needless preoccupation say about my mental state, and why, again, do I devote so much emotional energy toward someone who contributes nothing in return?
The 2011 draft is fourteen double-spaced pages, and like “Mock Intimacy in a Fake House,” it encompasses the entirety of our brief liaison, including everything we wrote and said to each other, a tour of his tattoos on his friend’s couch, a trip to the grocery store for condoms, a postcoital conversation in what I later determined wasn’t even his bed, descriptions of the videos he posted to Facebook, and online conversations with his friends after he dies.
Both essays initially have similar problems: I do a decent job of writing scenes, but I don’t make decisions about what scenes are crucial, nor do I scrutinize the reasons for my actions and what my choices mean in the grand scheme.
Nothing takes the place of time to gain insight. An essay often takes years of revision before it achieves its proper weightiness, and in both cases, that’s what happens.
Feedback as a Personal Attack
Up to this point, I agree with the instructor’s comments. I am on board with her prudent advice, but her remarks and tone take an upsetting turn. After suggesting I read “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joanne Beard (cool!), she launches into a critique beyond what’s on the page:
“WHY? Why on earth did you get so hung up on someone ten years younger who went on the road all the time?”
The undeveloped—but true—motive for my behavior stipulated in the essay doesn’t sit well with her: something about people-pleasing and wanting to “fix” unavailable men—you know, garden-variety codependent shit.
“I don’t buy it,” she writes.
Say what?
She says she’s the “queen” of comparable conduct and lumps me into a generic category based on her own childhood experiences. (I read her memoir; our backgrounds are entirely different.) She calls me “honey” in a condescending manner and says I “avoid real intimacy,” which is fair, but then she says, “He didn’t care about you.” Even if that’s accurate, why is it necessary to state it while evaluating a person’s writing? What effect does that have on a vulnerable writer who already feels enough shame and lack of self-confidence as it is?
She scrutinizes my character, rather than my work, ending with this: “I hope you’re not feeling too psychoanalyzed, but this is what happens in memoir writing!”
Is it?
I Quit
My reaction to being the target of a borderline tirade from the person I trust with an extremely personal story is defensiveness, anger, and despair. Not only am I not eager to revise the essay, I quit altogether. I don’t write anything for the next two years.
When I recently located the email with the instructor’s twelve-year-old feedback—after having forgiven her long ago—I wonder if I overreacted. Maybe her comments weren’t as harsh as I remember. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the brutal truth. Maybe I was too sensitive. Then I read them again.
Even today, her email is jarring.
Editing as an Act of Empathy
As a developmental editor of other writers’ memoir manuscripts now, I am cognizant of providing constructive feedback while considering the real, fragile human on the other side of the computer screen. An editor’s job isn’t to analyze a person’s choices outside of the story. It’s a judgment-free zone. Editing is an act of empathy. There are plenty of ways to kindly nudge a writer toward self-discovery. Ask pertinent questions, for instance. Contemptuous condemnations aren’t warranted.
Fortunately, in 2013, when I’m pushing forty, I seek a gentle mentor who nurtures me like a delicate plant in need of watering. In her UCLA Extension personal essay class on campus, I hand out “It’s Still Me” to twenty new strangers, my hands shaking, terrified of judgment, only to be met with support, constructive criticism about my writing, and encouragement to revise, publish, and reimagine the piece for my future memoir. Thankfully, the essay that temporarily ends my writing career is the catalyst for my pursuit to complete an entire book.