(If you’re a book person and haven’t already discovered the delightful Marlon and Jake Read Dead People podcast featuring my old boss, Riverhead executive editor Jake Morrissey, and bestselling author Marlon James, check it out. Marlon James is Marlon James, of course, and Jake is an epic conversationalist. When I was his assistant, we’d spend the first half hour of every workday chatting in his office. Well worth a listen.)
They say, “be vulnerable.” Actually, forget the anonymous they. I tell authors to be vulnerable. Tell the reader about your failures. Tell the reader about your most embarrassing mistakes. Help us relate.
But authors don’t want to do that. They don’t want to reveal their humiliations and defeats. And that’s fair. I don’t want to, either. But advice without vulnerability sucks. We don’t buy the suggestions because, after all, they don’t know what it’s like. They didn’t start with my disadvantages. What worked for them may very well not work for me.
This is so obvious when we’re reading other people’s stuff. But when it comes to our own dark secrets, we think we’re the exception to the rule.
I’m just as guilty as anyone. In Lies, damn lies, and big idea books, I admit to something embarrassing: “I falsified data.” But the story’s about science camp back in 1995, when I was 16.
In The sweaty details, I write, “I temper my feedback, having learned to do so the hard way: by pissing people off.” Do I give an example? No. No author, no manuscript, no thing I said I wish I hadn’t. The real failure, a book lost in auction, is hidden away in parentheses.
An essay called “the sweaty details” with no sweaty details.
Will I tell you about the time I made someone cry in a rehearsal back in college? Sure. It’s OK to be a lousy theater director now, three decades later in a different career altogether. But edge any closer to my ego and forget it. And, of course, we can’t help but implicate others when we spill our secrets. That’s risky business if you’re in business, and always a bad idea when it comes to family if you want to be invited to Thanksgiving. It’s almost impossible to throw yourself under the bus without it swerving into others.
(Note that I’m still not giving you details on making someone cry in a rehearsal. Vulnerability goes against the grain!)
What do we do when we don’t want to show our bellies?
Humor. Get them laughing before anyone can see you cry.
Abstraction. Use lots of words without being specific.
Distance. For most of us, childhood wounds are scarred over, while last week’s mistake is gangrenous.
The pros do it, too. They’ll joke about their dedication to truth (“If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”—Faulkner), but read the biography after they’re dead, and you’ll learn that the “brave” admissions hid larger, uglier secrets. Faulkner, for example, wore a military uniform after World War II, parading around as a war hero, but in reality his time in the Royal Air Force involved 9 months of training in Canada. He may not have flown an aircraft during that time.
The writing teachers who admonish us to reveal all don’t like to acknowledge the truth about telling the truth: its cost. When you tell tales out of school, you pay a price. Art is no excuse when it comes to other people’s feelings. For example, I’m not sure Karl Ove Knausgård has any relatives left to piss off at this point: “I gave away my family.”
Vulnerability is a transaction. Writers willing to pay the price are rare, and that’s why their work means so much to the rest of us. We recognize all the ugly bits we hide from others, and all we can do is marvel.
p.s. Speaking of not admitting vulnerabilities, Jake and I definitely chatted for more than half an hour before I got to work. What can I say? I may not have been the most productive assistant, and I slowed him down to boot…
Self-deprecation is my go-to: it feels like vulnerability, and sometimes it's the perfect play, but when I overplay it (channelling my inner Ryan Reynolds?) I erode the very trust I was trying to build.