On Memoir Writing, Privacy, and Truth-telling

Or, How I Became a (Slightly) More Private Person

Image credit: Israel Palacios via Unsplash

To my great shock, I have become private about a few things. It's shocking to me because — like, I'm a memoir writer and the least private person I know! I've published things about myself that make me want to jump out of my skin, or bite the page to get my words back.

Even as it also feels blissful to have said them. Telling the truth makes me grin more widely than anything. It makes me feel freer than anything else I've ever done. As Patrick Califia once put it, "Liberty is the right not to lie." It is a very great pleasure to stop pretending — about all the things we're asked to pretend about on a daily basis. And to resist, to whatever extent, the job capitalism has recently foisted on all of us of having a carefully curated public image.

Refusing to lie, for example, about my own feelings of vulnerability, in all their beautiful, unguarded, dripping color; about my feelings about sex, which have never been simple; about bad behavior I've put up with, even though I was an adult at the time; about how much money I have, and how I got it; and finally, about things I have done that hurt others, and were wrong — refusing to lie about these things makes me feel, in a certain way, that evil has no power over me. To a certain extent, what I feel is what the young wizard Ged feels in Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea, when he literally embraces his shadow and it joins him, making him whole.

I don't mean to be grandiose here. I am not saying I have magical powers, or that I am a special kind of person. All I am saying is that I am myself, and I know myself; shame has little power over me. Speaking the truth of who I am, and communicating it to others, makes me feel whole (and in fact glad to be alive) to a degree I really can't overstate.

But privacy is also alien to my culture — in ways that aren't necessarily great. Growing up, I was never led to believe I had a right to keep anything to myself. As an adult, my sister once screamed at me that she would be able to find out exactly how much I spent on a vacation, so I might as well spit out the details immediately. My mother was worse, once deliberately breaking the lock on the door of my childhood bedroom to underscore the point that I had no refuge from her.

My mother shared the secrets of her friends and family members widely to others (including to me as a seven-year-old girl): What one family member had experienced during her first ten tries at intercourse. The allegation that three family members had (separately) lied to the government or swindled. The fact that a fellow participant in group therapy (now a very famous actress) had difficulty achieving orgasm. The sexual assault experienced by a relative who might have preferred not to tell me.

But my mother was also wildly un-private about herself. When I was around 10 — too early — she let me know that her older brother had raped her, and exactly in what circumstances. Earlier, when I was eight, she enjoyed bragging to my sisters and me about the men with whom she was cheating on my father. Also when I was eight, she came home from the porn movie she and my father just seen in a movie theater, and promptly told me the plot: "The semen splashed on a girl's face cured her acne!" I would have preferred not having known these things till I was older.

Privacy isn't just alien to my family culture, but to my political one. When I went to college in the 80s, the Marxist academics my fellow lit students and I adored were clear that privacy was always and only a relic of "bourgeois values." Privacy was to be ridiculed, torn into, and exposed. Please note: I have nothing against Marxist academics, I have even been one. But the ones I read and the lefty queer activists with whom I did political work in the 80s and 90s all tended to deprecate privacy as a bourgeois construct to which no one had a legitimate right.

Brought up to despise privacy and make fun of it, I would get angry at religions that restricted certain sacred knowledge to a select group of people. Part of my anger was about democracy — I still believe, on a general level, that God belongs to everyone. But it never occurred to me that there could be things deemed sacred by someone that they might have a perfect right to keep to themselves. Either genuinely personal things that they as an individual found holy, or things held precious by a community together.

So why am I bringing up the sacred in a piece about privacy? Because what I'm wanting to be most private about these days is the thing that is most sacred to me: my marriage, which is the best thing about my life.

Though I've always wanted one, I didn't have a committed romantic relationship in my life until I was 41. Certainly not the kind of relationship where I trusted the other person absolutely. But I have been a memoirist, in one way or another, since my 20s. Accordingly, I'm used to writing about my dates and my exes and my family and (former) friends without asking permission, adopting Anne Lamott's dictum: "If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."

I also had a certain destructively romantic notion about my writing: that it should always come first, and that doing "great writing" was always more important than the needs of any mere human being. That mere human being might be a partner, a relative, or myself. I think this notion was counterphobic in origin: I was scared that if I didn't put my writing ahead of everything else, I would treat my art as valueless. I was unable to imagine I could value more than one thing at a time.

But in my 40s, I suddenly found myself with a relationship that was just as important to me as writing. I would have thought it was sacrilegious to say that, or unlucky, but there it is, it was true then and it is just as true 18 years later. I realized that my relationship with M was more important to me than spilling the beans about every single matter between us, even though that might have made for some powerful writing. There was other writing I could choose to do. I did not have to write about everything.

About that sense of "sacrilege": I had been treating writing as something supernatural, something I had to sacrifice literally everything to if I wanted it to remain in my life. M has never treated me that way, and I came to realize I didn't have to let writing treat me that way, either. I might be grateful to it, I might even sometimes perceive it as "holy," but it was not something that would ever require me to take a knife to the people I cared about. In fact, it was part of me; I had a right to make choices about it.

M is a much more private person than I am. I like being in the public eye, and I'm something of a ham. One particular reason I adore telling the truth in public is that my father used to hit me for saying certain things. I can't even remember the words that would make him smack me, hard, across the face and head — insults, probably, or things he interpreted as insults. More than anything else in my life, being hit for saying shit keeps me talking, writing, saying whatever I want and being as public as possible about it.

But M isn't like my father. Although she's private, she knows how important writing is to me. Given her particular needs, she's been generous about allowing me to put her in my work. What's different is that she gets a choice, and both our feelings count.

But what about my own need for privacy? I have finally realized I have one, at least about some things. I am well aware that sharing intimate details can sometimes be a compulsion, not a fully-willed desire to speak. I also know that it is sometimes a compulsion for me. And that the publishing industry often rewards writers for being as naked and unprotected as possible. But the publishing industry is not our friend. (It might be our business partner or our employer, but it's not our friend.) A certain women's Internet publication used to offer writers a grand total of $50 to spill their most vulnerable secrets in essays, on which the publication would slap the most sensationalized titles possible: "I Let My Boyfriend Use Me As a Sex Doll… My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina……… I Love Angel Dust More Than I Love My Husband, My Friends, Myself, or My Own Safety." I myself once submitted an essay to that, um, dear, departed publication, and they accepted it. Thankfully, my wiser self stepped in and refused to allow me to sign the contract, knowing they were going to edit the piece so that it read as humiliatingly as possible for me. Also, they wanted ALL RIGHTS to the story for $50.

As one critic of the publication put it, "You Don't Owe It to Your Boss to Turn Your Trauma into Content for Time Inc."

Like I said, I'm someone who adores being on stage. I love being interviewed, and memoir is my freakin' favorite form. But the first time in my life, I embrace having some things that are so special, so sacred, that I don't want to speak about them. Some of these things concern M's and my relationship, but some have to do with me alone. For the first time, I feel an affection and a sense of care towards a whole variety of my personal attributes — quirky feelings, unusual experiences — that makes me not want to necessarily share them. Or at least not share them until I, while finding a way to still hold and protect these aspects of myself, wholeheartedly choose to.

Author’s note: Hi friends, thanks for bearing with me as I write some longer pieces that take a little bit more time than most. Your moral support helps a lot. :-)