Carrie Lamanna

practicing the art of resistance writing

When Private Stories Become Public: The Messy Politics of “Personal” Writing

By

black and white photo of a single barb on a barbed wire fence

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about boundaries. The current state of the abortion debate in the U.S. has forced women into a space where we feel compelled to talk publicly about our bodies, our health, and our sex lives in ways we aren’t fully comfortable with. The Twitter hashtag #youknowme asks women who have had abortions to share their stories to show that women of all backgrounds have accessed abortion services. It’s the abortion debate’s version of #metoo. These campaigns are helping to end the stigma and shame associated with abortion and sexual assault and harassment; however, they also ask women to put their trauma and medical history on display in order to be taken seriously. In short, women have been told they have to earn their humanity.

This cold fact is coming as a shock to many straight, white, cis women who have been able to live most of their lives pretending feminism won and misogyny was dead. We have had to relearn what more marginalized groups have never been allowed to forget: white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy is in charge. It mans the gates, and requires a pound of flesh from anyone asking entry. I’m certainly not the first or the most eloquent person to point this out, but as a writer who blogs about her life and who’s working on a memoir, I have a special interest in the boundaries between the public, the personal, and the private and who ultimately benefits when we share our private stories.

What’s considered public information about us is generally (but not always) straightforward—name, hometown, occupation, marital status, whether we have children, who our parents are. These are all aspects of our lives that are part of some official public record somewhere whether we like it or not. For example, I can choose to not write about my marital status if I want, but the basic fact of whether I am legally married is public information. The personal includes hobbies, political views, taste in music, film, art, etc—things others couldn’t know about you unless you tell them, but not things you want to keep secret from most of the world. What we consider private is information we share with only a small and select group or sometimes no one at all. The private often includes experiences of trauma or loss or past personal behavior we think of as shameful or that’s painful to discuss. But it is these private aspects of our lives that often make for the the most successful and widely read “personal” writing. 

I remember the controversy over James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces. It was marketed as a memoir, but then, after Oprah made the book into a bestseller, it was discovered most of the events in the book never happened. Apparently Frey first tried to sell the book to publishers as a novel, but no one was interested. When he shopped it as a memoir, however, it was golden. But why? Why was a book about alcohol and drug addition and the tragic events surrounding it so much more interesting to readers when they thought it really happened to the author? Would Cheryl Strayed’s Wild have made her into a literary superstar if it were a work of fiction or do we need the image of pretty, blonde Cheryl strung out on heroin, to make the story compelling?

I recently read Educated by Tara Westover. It’s an incredible and moving story of how going to college helped her escape from her dysfunctional and abusive family. I read it for a book club and at the meeting, one member described how she used Google maps to find Westover’s sprawling childhood homestead in Idaho. We were all fascinated with the grainy aerial image as we tried to pinpoint the locations of the various episodes described in her book. Our behavior was a strange form of socially acceptable voyeurism, stalking even. We discussed gaps in her life story—information she clearly and deliberately omitted—and were a bit annoyed at Westover for not telling us everything. We felt entitled to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth because our discussion of the book was really a jury trial of Westover’s life choices. So much of our conversation revolved around whether her choices were appropriate and justified. Why did she get in the car with him? Why did she return home again after what happened the last time? Why didn’t she stand up for herself? We needed all the evidence in order to pass the right verdict. 

This sort of judging behavior (behavior I participated in) is what stopped me from publishing the blog post I started last week on abortion. The ending to my personal private story was that I ended up not being pregnant and not needing an abortion, but I was ready to tell my whole story of abuse in order to justify why teenage me was ready to terminate my pregnancy without hesitation or regret. I was ready to tell that story because so often the marginalized in our society aren’t afforded their humanity and the respect that comes with it—the respect required if we are to trust them to make their own choices. Gays and lesbians have to prove that their love for one another is the same as straight love. Transgender kids have to prove they want to die before we will affirm their identities. Addicts have to bear their souls and ask the world for forgiveness before we will show them empathy. The poor have to prove they work three jobs and go without all comforts to be deemed worthy of assistance. And anyone with a uterus who needs an abortion must first prove they were adequately traumatized. 

I’ll continue writing about my life and I’ll continue helping others to write about theirs, but it’s a multi-edged sword. Our stories can increase empathy and understanding, which we hope will lead to a more compassionate world. Our stories can help those who are struggling in similar ways. But our stories can also fall into a trap that serves the status quo. When we tell our stories in a prescribed way to please those who control oppressive systems we aren’t creating real change. We are just asking them to allow us to exist in some some small and limited way, a way that doesn’t ask them to give anything up. We are just begging a rigged jury for individual mercies. 

Writing Ethics for Monstrous Times

By

Black and white photo of an angel hiding her face with her hands taken from belowMy writing practice has gone off the rails and getting back on track has been an enormous struggle. I am tired, and angry, and sad. Every day I wake up, look at my phone and greet the day’s tragedy or injustice. A bombing. A shooting. Another sexual predator exposed. Another assault on our democracy by Congress and this monstrous presidency. It’s exhausting. And I’m white, straight, cisgendered, and middle class and thus reasonably sheltered from the fallout. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Each day I try to write something meaningful, but most of the time I fail. My hard drive is littered with abandoned words. Once clear thoughts lost in a cloud of data. It feels more urgent than ever to write something, anything, in support of the resistance, but the news stories and the emotions they bring fly at me so fast that some days all I can manage to do is duck my head and scream “fuck you” into the void.

The demands of daily life are even more annoying than usual because I am more annoyed than usual. I find myself cursing at the piles of dirty laundry as I walk past them on the way to the kitchen in the morning. Once there I am greeted by my children’s shrieking. I haven’t even had a sip of coffee and they are talking over one another without stopping in a fierce battle for my attention. As I am prying their hands off the hem of my pajama top, my husband looks up from the newspaper (somehow he is able to read through all this chaos) to remind me that today is the Thanksgiving party at our son’s preschool, so I need to be there at 11:00. Feel my my chest tighten against my attempted cleansing breath as I silently wonder when I will ever have the time and mental space to write again. Every woman I know who struggles to jam writing into the cracks between a full time job and parenting has these moments. I am not special. I am so ordinary I start to feel meaningless.

Maybe all this is why I found Claire Dederer’s essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” so frustrating. I read the first two-thirds of the essay with great interest. She was grappling with an important question we are left with every time a man whose movies or writing or music we love is outed as a sexual predator. Dederer does this by examining her own previous love of Woody Allen films, a love soured by his predatory behavior towards his step daughter, and now wife, Soon-Yi. She seems genuinely angry at the men who tell her she has to view Allen’s films on their aesthetic value alone. She rejects her literary training that says the artist’s life has no bearing on his work.

Then the essay takes an unexpected turn and attempts to equate the monstrous behavior of men like Allen, Weinstein, Polanski, and Louis C.K. with the “monstrous selfishness” female artists have to display in order to finish their work. After telling us about a fellow writer and friend whose husband accuses her of abandoning him and the children to finish her latest short story, Dederer writes

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

I expected what follows that paragraph to be an analysis of how our culture allows men a monstrous dominance and control over women—a dominance that ruins lives. I expected Dederer to point out that their monstrousness is protected and encouraged, while women are unjustly punished and called monsters for desiring any artistic creation of our own. We are monsters for spending our energy on ourselves instead of on the nurturing of husbands and children. We are monstrous for subverting male dominance instead of being subservient to it.

That would have been a satisfying ending to the essay, but instead she avoids the analysis and ends by saying we are no closer to answering the essay’s central question than we were when we started. In fact, she ends by emphasizing that maybe anyone who makes art is a monster to some degree. Think about that for a moment. Dederer ends an essay about what to do with the art left behind by monstrous men, like Roman Polanski who raped a 13 year old girl, with a flip philosophical observation that maybe we are all monsters. That maybe missing your kid’s piano recital to finish an essay is in the same moral category as raping children. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

It may seem like a cute literary party game to wonder if all art, all ambition, requires some level of monstrousness, but the stakes are too high to sit back and pretend that such philosophical musing is anything but patriarchal ideology hiding behind a thin veil of logic. The brave women outing sexual harassment and abuse by monstrous men are exposing that the world is, and always has been, a dangerous place for women. To turn the essay on women and say, “Well, maybe you’re monstrous too” is irresponsible writing and the height of gas lighting. This is the same sort of privileged writing on display in Richard Fausset’s NYT article about the well mannered Nazi next door in Ohio. Fausset claims his objective was to show how “normal” white supremacists can seem, but, as so many have pointed out, he failed because he did not then show how such monstrous racism, while it may be common (just like predatory sexual behavior), it is most definitely not normal—not something we should accept as part of a spectrum of human behavior or belief.

Behavior that is a threat to others must be thrown into relief because if everything is monstrous, then nothing is truly outside the bounds of acceptability. The violence and hatred that are the tools of white supremacist patriarchy require not the false logic of philosophical questions and detached journalism, but the white hot light of a cultural analysis that exposes its monstrousness for all to see.

Writing in traumatic times: Thoughts after one week in Trump’s America

By

Ursula Le Guin’s viral quote from her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards has become the mantra for the writing group I belong to:

We will need writers who can remember freedom.

For many Americans, last Wednesday morning felt like the end of freedom. I know it felt that way for me. I tried to go about my daily routine. I took the kids to school, checked in with my clients, put the dishes away, brushed my teeth, but I did it all with a sense that there had been a fundamental shift in what it meant to be an American—that daily life was now just a thin veneer covering over a great rift valley. I cried a lot. When I finally sat down at my computer to work, I found myself on Facebook because that is where my friends were. We were all there compulsively reading and sharing every article we could find that might offer a way to make sense of Trump’s victory. And we kept asking one another the same question: What do we do now? In the days that followed, as the tears subsided and we turned toward collective action—rallies, protests, petitions, donations to progressive organizations—I kept going back to Le Guin’s quote and the advice my writing group leader gave the group the morning after the election:

We have to write through this.

Because there is no other way. Writing helps us make sense of a traumatic world. I began by reading the words of others. Then I wrote some of my own. I wrote angry screeds I didn’t share with anyone. I wrote comments on like-minded friends posts to work through my feelings and lend support. I read more articles. Then I began responding to comments on my posts that came from Trump supporters. If their comment indicated a desire for dialogue, I responded. If someone was hostile, I asked them to step off because, well, that guy who told me if I didn’t like Trump I was unAmerican and could get the hell out, well, fuck that guy. As I told him, every day of this presidential campaign I have been wearing my grandfather’s World War II Navy dog tags. I wear them to remind myself that he went to war to fight against the kind of fascist hate that Donald Trump represents. This is why our internment of Japanese Americans during the war is so painful for our nation to confront. It exposes our hypocrisy. At the exact moment we were fighting hate and xenophobia abroad we practiced it at home because we allowed our fears to rule our national policies.

My grandfather's World War two dog tags

Wearing his name around my neck also reminds me of a story he told me when I was young. My grandfather was the child of Italian immigrants. They were poor, and he went to work in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania at age 13 to help provide for the family and worked there all his life. When he was an adult worker his mine hired a new foreman, a man from England. During this foreman’s first role call of his new workers, he called out my grandfather’s name. When he answered the foreman looked him up and down and said “Lamanna, huh? I hope your papers are in order.” To this my grandfather replied, “I was born here. I hope your papers are in order!” He was lucky he wasn’t fired on the spot. But the foreman knew the solidarity between the miners as workers was greater than their allegiance to their individual ethnic backgrounds. The Appalachian miners who had long roots in that region of the country were not going to abandon the immigrant miners and side with the bigoted foreman. I am not arguing that there were no bigots or xenophobes in that group. There were likely many. I’m arguing there is power in solidarity. Power when we recognize that when one of us is threatened, all of us are threatened. Whites who voted for Trump gave into their racism (because we all have it), their xenophobia, their fears, and abandoned their fellow Americans.

So no, I won’t get the hell out. Just because my family’s whiteness and citizenship is no longer questioned—because I had the privilege of assimilating, a privilege not extended to non-white, non-Christian immigrants, a privilege never extended to African Americans whose roots in America go back as far as any white person’s, a privilege Native Americans extended to white settlers who then betrayed that trust by systematically stripping indigenous communities of their rights and humanity—I will not use it as an escape route. I will not abandon those who are directly threatened by Trump’s America. I will stand with them in any way they ask me to. It is time for those of us who want to be white allies to start listening to the oppressed in this country. They must be our leaders in this fight.

Here are some things I am doing right now to get started.

Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

© 2017 by Carrie Lamanna Writing, LLC

Privacy Policy