I’ve reached a milestone recently. The chapter outline of my manuscript calls for twelve essays, and I recently completed the sixth.
It’s been too long of a writing process, though that’s understandable enough.
It was 2015 when I first started contemplating writing a book, and back then it was to be a memoir. A lawyer friend of mine introduced me to an agent, someone who made a decent living getting book deals for aging rockers. And we swiftly went about putting together book proposal.
But after I ran down the set of ideas that I had been playing with to a friend he recommended that I read My Lives by Edmund White and that set off a wild tangent in my writing process.
We were riding the uptown A together at night, having a typically spirited conversation about literature two artists are prone to have with each other within the din of a loud, speeding train at the end of the day. He thought of the book because it is a memoir told nonchronologically, with each chapter dedicated to certain people in the author’s life, rather than just the next episode in his own life—one is about all of his therapists, another about all of his lovers, etc.
The book fascinated me and before I knew it I had discovered the genre of the personal essay and began reading collections by Joan Didion and Charles D’Ambrosio. I soon decided that everything I wanted to write about would be best served through the container of a personal essay, a lone, self-standing chapter which could be approached on its own terms, severed from the commitment to the structures of a larger book, such as a memoir, with their artificial impositions of plot, overarching narrative and so forth. I would instead write a bunch of essays, perhaps publishing some along the way in journals, and eventually they would all be collected under the title of one volume.
I was heartened by what seemed to have been a path laid out for other authors of like temperament by another essayist, the great Leslie Jamison, a student of D’Ambrosio’s, who wrote of one of her collections that it had wanted to be a memoir until it could only be personal essays. This lined up with my own experience of finding myself constrained by the preoccupations of a memoir and suddenly liberated by the possibilities of the personal essay.
This sort of evolution does not occur overnight. In discovering this genre I had set myself back greatly, for it required me to read a great many of the best examples of this art form and to take several classes and workshops. It also required me to continually revamp the book proposal I was crafting, a process of revision that had me migrating from one agent to the next. And because of the “memoiristic” component of the project, my writing needed as much time as possible to sort of “graduate” to a level of humility and consciousness that can only happen through years of self-examination. My lens was very foggy when this project started ten years ago, but it has finally cleared up quite a bit. I’ve also managed to more or less teach myself how to write along the way.
And so here I am in the middle of the manuscript, a project that has become something of a Fitzcarraldo, a leviathan I push up a mountain, an improbable beast to which all of my cellular energy is committed to getting over the pass. There’s no book deal, yet, though, thankfully, there is a completed book proposal which reflects the best intentions of this effort and which a publisher will hopefully at some point be interested in taking a chance on in the near future.
For a long time during this process, I refused to begin writing the manuscript until I had a book deal. I wanted the security of knowing that another party had cosigned my idea before I began the painful process of excavating all of the material laying within me. I didn’t want to go through that alone.
However, as one year bled into the next, I found myself in the conspicuous role of “the guy who keeps talking about that thing he’s going to do but hasn’t done yet.” I had to let go of this need to be accompanied, as though I couldn’t go out into the wilds of this process without a chaperone.
In the fall of 2023, I made the decision that I could no longer wait for the gears of the industry to come around to my project, that with each passing year, the fetus was kicking more and more forcefully against the uterine wall, demanding birth. So, I began writing the rough draft. And now my goal is to have it done by New Year’s Eve. Fingers crossed.
One thing this process has shown me is the degree to which arriving at what can be deemed an authentic conclusion is really the result of a horribly painful ordeal with personal demons. Every discovery that can then be transcribed onto the page comes at a great cost, and often in shapes and contexts which seem to have little to do with the particular theme of that which was discovered. I might have reached some honest conclusion about the meaning of, say, my undergraduate study, perhaps linking it to some painful disappointment in my teens, but the grief I then felt for weeks after reflected almost none of that matter; it seemed to be ambient and general, with no detectable residue. Clearly, a shock wave had been sent through my being.
And yet, we are fallible, even when it comes to the arrival of these conclusions. My therapeutic process is riddled with inconsistencies and convenient beliefs. The authenticity of my “process” is a matter of consciousness, an inherently subjective endeavor that is more closely aligned with spirituality than anything empirical. In going through the personal trials required of me to write this manuscript, I may have experienced something that feels like reality, but, at the end of the day, I can only do my best to make what feels like reality align with actuality.
GenXers like myself regularly pop up in the news these days. We are a sullen cadre. The world was a boomer’s world for so very long and it seems as though they passed the baton not to us but to the millennials. This is of a piece with the original imperative of our generation, which was to at all costs reject the status quo given to us by our parents, teachers and any other authorities. We are the generation that decided that what is authentic can only be an internal matter, subject to the authority of the conscious self. Our great cultural innovations—punk rock, independent cinema, hip-hop, postmodern art—were more or less the creations of very late boomers, but we were the principal audience of these new forms, and as a result, we have inherited the mantle of a certain purity of artistic intent of which those art forms, being inimitable and unanticipated, serve as prime examples.
Perhaps we are guilty of a certain presumptuousness, as we were convinced we would be the next thought leaders. But every time there’s a news story about us these days, such as this piece I read yesterday, it seems that the main point is some irony, some sense in which our great contribution would never see the light of day, at least not in the way of our forefathers nor their grandchildren. This is the millennials’ world now, not ours (was it ever ours?).
Every word in my book will live and breathe according to this story, the GenXer’s ironic malaise. Indeed, there is a great pessimism running through it. That’s fine. That’s my generation’s great skill set. No one does nihilism better than we do. There is no coincidence that one of the funniest of our jokes, the “Debbie Downer” skit on SNL, is an exemplar of nihilism. Yet, can it be said that Debbie Downer has ever uttered anything short of the truth? The humor comes not just from the context but from the ineluctability of her words. No one ever criticized her takes, only her lack of etiquette. And GenX, so unlike their woker and more careerist successors, never gave a hoot about etiquette.
Let my book be both true and false in this exact sense. I am a Dengler Downer. I am not going to write a happy story. This might make some things in my book “false.” My life is not an unhappy one, I am glad to report. But verisimilitude is not the autobiographer’s lot, even as honesty, both intellectual and spiritual, must guide his pen. This is a balancing act between that most GenX-y thing, authenticity, the reflection of deeply personal values and beliefs, and the sense in which this authenticity is almost always reactionary, a response to some status quo in the world of the real. There lies the fecundity of a book that is both true and false.
There is a difference between the reflection of a mirror and the reflection of a pond. It might be telling that it was in the latter that Narcissus fell in love with his own image, not the former. Perhaps the ripples in the water, which surely distorted his likeness, afforded him an opportunity for a more biased interpretation of what was being reflected back to him. He fell in love with himself, though he did not fall in love with something factual. Yet, Narcissus did not know that the reflection he fell in love with was his own and soon thereafter, from the futility of it all, turned into a gold and white flower, today’s daffodil. Let this be the “truth” of my personal essay collection—a product of what might be deemed a good kind of narcissism—that the falsity that I make of what I see—something borne of the truth but, like a poem, not “factual”—might flower into something nonetheless beautiful.
