Wanderlust

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.

—From “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed.

I’m greatly enjoying James Wolcott’s “Lucking Out: my life getting down and semi-dirty in seventies New York,” not least for the writing advice. From sifting through the Village Voice slush pile, he learns:

Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble—flip the on switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five hundred word slot: no matter how short a piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted-in.

When she got on a boat to Hong Kong for what would become a two-year-trip, Leila Hadley was 25—an age at which a young lady might do such a thing today, but it was 1951 and she was the single mother of a six-year-old, with five years in PR under her belt. She writes:

“I had wanted to leave New York — not the city, which I loved — but the life I lived there, which seemed to claim from me barely more than an acceptance. I wanted to be a stranger in a world where everything I saw, heard, touched and tasted would be fresh and new, because wonder and awareness seemed to have disappeared from my life, leaving an excessive familiarity with an existence of routine.”

She especially dislikes her thousand-card Wheeldex, progenitor of the Rolodex.

For the rest of the trip, during which she and her son wind from the Far East to the Middle East via Colombo and the Nicobar Islands, read Hadley’s memoir “Give me the World,” first published in 1958 and reissued in 2003.

So I’m standing in the elevator lobby leaving work yesterday, and there’s this other woman leaving her work. We’re in newspapers. And she’s all like, “you’re Elisabeth, you worked in that Seattle peepshow.” And I’m like “yeah.” And she’s like, “I’m Sheila, I worked in these Times Square peep shows.” And I’m like “cool.”

That’s more or less how it went down. Sheila McClear’s “The Last of the Live Nude Girls” has just been published by Soft Skull Press. You can read an excerpt here. I like the title because of the retro aspect — even pre-ubiquitous-Internet, peep shows were retro.

I like this passage:

“At the end of 2007, I left by simply disappearing. That was how you did it. Live girls quit by abandoning their things. The point was to not own wigs, stripper shoes and sparkly dresses anymore.”

This post by the L.A. Times’ David Ulin says several genius things about memoir. To recap: Julian Barnes charged Joyce Carol Oates with “breach of narrative promise” for not having mentioned Husband B in her memoir about being widowed by Husband A. Heaven forfend! Ulin takes issue with Barnes:

“…the memoir, like the novel, is all about shape. It’s not a biography, not a life story, not a transcript of events. In a memoir, a writer tells a story, and whatever is extraneous gets left out.”

Put another way, life is boring. But if you pick out some choice bits and string them all together, it becomes something someone might want to sit down and read.

Can there be any rules about what-all set of facts memoirists should reveal?

Betsy posted about meeting one’s literary heroes. Upon meeting Janet Malcolm, she was nervous and blurted her fandom. To which I can only say that I would have done the same thing. I’ve read Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” at least three times and quote its first line often: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

I read that when I was working on my first book, “Bare,” interviewing women whose stories I knew I was going to carry off and craft into something they might hate or not even recognize. I knew that I was going to put the storytelling above all else.

“Bare” wasn’t pure memoir — it was reported out with other characters besides myself. “Wanderlust” is all memoir. And I may have done something morally indefensible to myself and those in my life. I put the story above all else—well, at the very least, above discretion.

Anyway. Malcolm is a genius. Her latest is “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” about another murder, which I’m going to get even though I read the lengthy excerpt in the New Yorker.

Non-fiction writing: Good or evil?