Interrogate Yourself

This week, I had a couple of students submit revisions and I marveled at the changes they made to manuscripts I’d read before. It made me think about how the act of memoir, and maybe novel writing also to some degree, is all about turning the story around again and again, looking for the angles we have not yet examined and excavating meaning even when we’re sure we know everything about the narrative already.

This act of taking the stories of our lives, the tale we’ve told many times before, under many different circumstances, at parties, to new friends, to ourselves, and opening up the details to interrogation is really what the job is about. The kinds of epiphanies that can happen through this process can be felt on the page by the reader and this is part of what makes great writing.

It makes me think about where we are right now as a country and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how there are versions that are so drastically different.

In the early summer of 2024, an acquaintance confessed to me that she planned on voting for Trump and sent me an email with all of her reasons. Much of what she had typed out could be easily taken apart and found to be untrue if she’d only looked. I didn’t have the energy to try to change her mind and opted instead to cut off contact. Right or wrong, that’s all I could do at the time.

It is hard to listen to a story we know is not true, whether it’s our own personal narrative that we’ve been fed by family over the years or whether it’s thirty percent of the country trying to cram it down our throats while calling us libtards. And I don’t know the way out of this except to do my own interrogating of my own beliefs and life story.

There is something familiar about this feeling. I’ve spent more than a decade trying to co-parent with someone who has never looked at his own behavior, even once claiming that I paid a child psychologist to say what I wanted her to say. When everything is always someone else’s fault, it means you have no control over your own life. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge and therefore, the same results will happen again and again.

I am tired, so tired, of listening to ridiculous narratives. I am too tired to argue. It’s been years of arguing. This may be why I like to spend so much of my time with writers, with my students, people who are so busy getting honest with themselves, in writing, over and over again. I read one student’s revised piece this weekend and wanted to jump up and cheer. The incredible insight she found on her second, third, maybe fourth round of editing the same piece was remarkable. Moving, inspirational, thoughtful. Maybe the whole world would be a better place if everyone wrote their memoir the way memoir should be written. Maybe it would be easier to live in this world.

Thank you for reading.

My dog under a table interrogating her fate of not enjoying a lobster roll like her people above her. I did slip her a French fry to sweeten the injustice.