Lost in Los Angeles

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIV

My penchant for overthinking spilled onto the page, but guessing games don’t make the cut.

By page 193 of my essay collection, I’m still making the same mistakes: starting essays with backstory instead of scenes; writing lengthy origin stories about how I met certain people—and often sharing what happened to them after they were no longer in my life; including every detail about every experience without curating the sparkly bits; and speculating about what other people are thinking and why they’re acting the way they are.

No one knows what a person is thinking and what that person’s motives are, especially when the writer barely knows them, so why hypothesize?

I’m Not a Mind Reader

When I moved to Culver City in 2009, I was pushing thirty-six and still reeling from a momentary marriage, a called-off wedding, and a couple post-relationship, fringe-dude disappearing acts. This would have been an opportune time to find a therapist; instead, I sought experiences that would further deplete my self-esteem and thrust my imaginary family out of reach. My wonky headspace and move to Los Angeles to live with a childhood friend collided, and if this collision had made a noise, I imagine it would have sounded like the space shuttle sonic boom above our house that shook the foundation and launched me off the sofa.

Reading the initial thirty-four pages that recount the self-inflicted rollercoaster of desperation that was my midthirties, I note a few instances of pointless conjecture about the reasons why one of my roommate’s friends spurned my advances, aside from the obvious one: Perhaps he didn’t want to sleep with you, dumbass.

Like this:

“He had willpower of steel—or maybe other women on the side. His personal life was a mystery, part of his game. He seemed to get more pleasure out of torturing me than actually having sex.”

Or this:

“I was beginning to think he had a phobia about intercourse. Maybe he was afraid of diseases, or maybe deep down . . . a good boy was hiding. I could never tell.”

And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t have any idea what he was going through at all. Guessing his intentions—or lack of them—on the page serves no fascinating purpose for the reader.

My Premature Agent Search Was Unsuccessful—Thankfully

I feel compelled to harangue my younger self for expending so much mental and emotional energy for no justifiable reason. It can be grueling to read early drafts of a me that’s me—but also not me anymore. On the plus side, I am grateful my full-court press to find a literary agent didn’t pan out when I hadn’t rewritten my manuscript yet. That the essay collection never found a home is a blessing—and I never use the word “blessing.”

One agent read it front to back in one day and said she was interested in seeing a revision that dealt with my anxiety and trouble saying “no” in other aspects of my life aside from romantic love, but that wasn’t the direction I was compelled to go in.

I pitched another agent face-to-face at a conference who said, “This is exactly what I’m looking for,” and then she read my manuscript. At first she wasn’t a solid “no,” but she was rightfully ambivalent after peeking under the hood because this version isn’t tight or multilayered enough, in part because of the excessive speculating.

Turn the Guesswork Inward

The assumptions continue with another lad I liked who “talked to me like a real person.” He was a recent Los Angeles transplant and “hadn’t been in town long enough to play fake LA games with women, I figured.”

We had just met. I knew nothing about him. How did I know if he was a game-player or not?

In another attempt to infuse feelings into a real person, I mention my roommate “felt [like he was] in the way, I suspect” when I was flirting with yet another one of his buddies.

Instead of wondering how he felt, maybe I should have asked him!

Even if I’m correct in my theories about the drives and sentiments of men I knew when I lived in Los Angeles, they have no place in the text. The more imperative question is why I was acting like a teenager in my thirties, hiding behind a fake “quest for merriment” that concealed a lack of trust in my own judgment about people’s character; a deep-seated fear of rejection; and the engrained conviction I didn’t deserve the fulfilling life I wanted.

Attempt to Answer the Vital Questions

To unlock this chapter, then, is to magnify only those scenes that endeavor to unravel my own motives and feelings. The men’s actions speak for themselves. Holding the reader’s hand undermines her intelligence; what she thinks based on my retelling is up to her.

So, in the fifteen-page revision, I start with a key middle-of-the-story scene inside “The Lodge,” the room in our house that resembled a log cabin—the setting for much of the mayhem that ensued in the time between Easter 2009, when I moved in, and Halloween 2010, when I moved out. After leaving the reader with questions about what happens next, I explain my current state of mind, tying this chapter to the previous one, mentioning the abrupt departure of a person I considered important—the “launch point for a tailspin.”

And instead of spotlighting the interiority of the supporting characters, I underscore my own gobbledygook in relation to others’ behaviors I can actually observe. In other words, I examine my desperate, sad self—an element an early writing teacher indicated was lacking—stating things like, “It fed my inclination for people-pleasing,” and “I had entered the unattractive realm of wanting people to like me at the expense of me not liking myself,” and “I pursued every guy based on a mere twinge of attraction.”

By the end of the chapter, the reader knows the most pertinent absurd, amusing, and distressing events that transpired in 2009 and 2010 inside The Lodge in Culver City—excluding ones I know for certain would upset my old roommate, with whom I’m still friends—a conscious choice to circumvent that which is Not My Story to Tell.

A New Anonymous Character

As I reinforce words that first appear at the beginning of the chapter—underpinning my midthirties conviction that love and happiness are reserved for others—the reader is now primed to meet a person who is completely absent from the essay collection, someone my second mentor gently nudged me to consign to a rightful—yet anonymous—starring role after I shared workshopped pages I’d cast aside. Leaving this person out of the manuscript felt like a glaring lie of omission.

But how does one write about a person totally anonymously? It’s not easy, but it can be done.