My friend Dan Savage and I got to talking recently about how we are hampered in terms of writing about our personal lives. Now, anyone who knows Dan’s oeuvre or my oeuvre might find laughable the idea that we consider ourselves hampered. We each have written quite a bit about our intimate lives. I mean, his book, The Kid, is one of the most exquisitely honest memoirs ever written about the messy realities of a couple’s naive desire for a child, desire which, if you’re lucky (as he was and I was) is followed by the greatest love triangle of your life: you, partner, baby. Dan has written at length about his love life, his family life, even about his mother’s death. Me, I’ve written about having a sexually transmitted disease, about my miscarriage, and about my dream of having my governor sitting on my naked chest.
Oh yeah, we’re reticent.
But really, there are things even blabbermouths like us can’t write about. To do so would violate the trust and privacy of certain relationships. Most especially the relationships with the guys who are trying like hell to love us for the rest of our lives.
Even though it was great to hear from Dan that he struggles with the same frustrating self-censorship, I really wish I hadn’t had this conversation with him, because lately all I can think about is the stuff I can’t write about. I find my literary brain completely overtaken by the forbidden, and so I’m getting no writing done.
I mean, I would really love to write about why my sister ended up a nun and I ended up a sex researcher. I’d really love to write about what my blackish (multiracial) brother said to me about Obama the other day. I’d love to write about a call I got last weekend, a private consult on a possible “sacrifice” separation surgery of a pair of conjoined newborns. I’d love to write about what it was like working inside ISNA for ten years, and why all the gossipmongers about the organization have everything exactly backwards. I’d really love to post here the fan letter I wrote recently to the food writer Calvin Trillin, about how he saved me by writing about his Alice.
I’d really love to write about a bunch of things I can’t even allude to here.
At the end of the day, there are some things more necessary than the exquisite pleasure of writing a good story. There are some relationships that are important enough that you have to leave yourself a little raw rather than healing yourself with a nice narratization. Making that choice means having no regrets about your work. I keep reminding myself of that….
But sometimes I wonder to myself if that self-censorship is why I have trouble thinking of myself as having accomplished my lifetime goal of becoming a real writer. The more personal the writing, the more it feels like fiction, because the more critical details and complications you (I) have to leave out. The more it feels like fiction, the more it feels false, and real writing is not false (though it may be fiction).
I’m not sure where this blog (no less this writer’s block) ends.
I guess I wish there were a place where you (I) could send off written truths for safe keeping, a sort of Wailing Wall for writers. There have been a few times in my life when I have had people who have functioned as my Wall, taking in the scraps of paper on which I’ve written the saddest memory or most fervent hope.
But, as I’ve been learning, the more public you become, the more private you must become.