Craft Notes
If you date a writer, they’re going to write about you: brutal honesty as performative writing
Not my knee, but might as well be
Jackie Wang here. New around these parts. I write the blog Serbian Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns. There you can find my writings on literature, film, art, theory, politics, music, and culture. My blog is named after a phrase written by Refbatch, a schizophrenic Russian woman who has posted around 12,000 YouTube videos online. She is perhaps my biggest inspiration. You can see a website I made for her here. I also do Eggs I Would like to Fuck. You can listen to my music here.
I am a Chinese-Italian (spaghetti-rice) hybrid and my writing is hybrid; I like to combine memoir, criticism and theory. I am against aestheticized indifference and for over-investment and brutal honesty. Jack Halberstam’s theories of negative feminism and antisocial queer theory describes two types of negativity: one characterized by “fatigue, ennui, boredom, indifference, ironic distancing, indirectness, arch dismissal, insincerity” and another characterized by “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, over-investment, incivility….” I am of the the second camp. I would say that New Narrative writers like Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, and Chris Kraus (honorary member) are of this camp as well. (Speaking of brutal honesty, have you read the new Eileen Myles book? She talks a lot of shit on Kathy Acker. Even though I love Kathy, it’s kind of great.) I suppose this is a good segue into the issue I came here to discuss, namely the topic of brutal honesty as a specifically performative kind of writing and a way to undermine literary boundaries.
*
Recently, I wrote a memoir-style essay on adolescence and the good ole college years (which ended 3 months ago) titled, “On Being Yoko Ono and Loving Samuel Beckett’s Ghost.” Naturally, these years were thick with drama of the familial and relationship sort. But that’s not so bad for a writer—such emotional confrontations can make for good material if you are lucky to have a mean enough father, or crazy enough partner, or weird enough friend. And so on. It’s never a glorious or fun thing to live through, but as writers we are blessed with the potent and powerful tool of language—that thing that makes representation possible.
I’ve always had a philosophical commitment to getting personal—not in a contrived sentimental way, but in a way that expresses utter disrespect for boundaries—the lines between what could be considered appropriate disclosure. In regards to memoir and literary nonfiction, I’ve always approached it with a tell-all mentality, but I often avoided writing about people who might read my writings. I practice disclosure with reluctance and hesitation for fear of being reproached by the people I know and write about. But I had always felt this compulsion to vomit up the dirty, personal shit onto paper in pursuit of some sort of quality—let’s call it total honesty—but an honesty that does not claim to be the truth and admits its distortedness, the limitations of its vision, its inability to be anything other than this situated view of the world.
I sometimes call the practice of putting the everyday on display an example of the life-temporality. People often write with the goal of rendering their literary object totally unrecognizable from the movement of their lives, perhaps out of fear of delegitimization, of being considered trivial or worse, a dumb diarist. But life-modality is informed by living; it’s not a dogmatic adherence to naturalism, nor is it concerned with the imitation of an assumed shared “reality.” The life-temporality can be as cut-up, experimental, and non-linear as an avant-garde text. It is against this idea of seamlessness, contrived and dispassionate artifice, the “artful” denial of the everyday, the erasure of processes, and the elimination of all the moments that surround a text or an idea. Not realistic but more like the ability to see actors in TV shows walk off the set to take a shit: it’s a disdain for self-censorship and a love of making the reader privy to the process, letting them behind the scenes, showing them that there is life behind the words.
Such writing can get you in trouble. If you reject artifice and refuse to disguise the situations, relationships, confrontations, and other subjective experiences that give birth to your writings, the text can bleed into your life, and have real-world implications. Funny that I just plucked the blood metaphor from my head, as today I fell while walking to a bookstore and got a cut that has not stopped bleeding for the last 12 hours. Here I am, bleeding. Life-writing bleeds. Blood writing is always performative.
*
Case study: I write a memoir-style essay and post it on my blog. My ex and her new girlfriend send me hostile messages about including my ex in the piece. I follow up indirectly by writing this blog post. Don’t date writers unless you want to be written about. Here I was, thinking I was a good girl for following proper memoir etiquette by changing people’s names and identifying information when really—I just wanted to pull a Chris Kraus as leave the names and nasty details untouched (see my post on Chris and the feminist implications of her approach). I wonder, if I received such a strong response regarding a representation that I regarded—perhaps wrongfully—as relatively innocuous, what will my mom think if she read the same piece, which loudly speaks of her wild delusions? Since my blog is one of the first things that comes up when you google my name, the horrifying prospect of such a discovery is not far off on the horizon.
The other day I told my partner, “If you date a writer, they’re going to write about you.” She replied, “Well, not if they’re a textbook writer.”
*
My ex’s new girlfriend wrote something to me about keeping my stupid writings to myself. Such a message seemed unworthy of even a dismissive reply. But later, it got me thinking about the ethical implications of writing memoir and literary nonfiction. Is it unethical to write about other people? Since our relationships are the meat of our lives, it seems impossible to write while avoiding people altogether. But if we write about people, we create representations, some of which may be disliked by the represented. I wonder, is the decried demand “don’t write about me!” a form of fascistic, censorial behavior, or is revealing the details of a relationship a violation of consent, even if the names are changed? Do I have as much ownership of my history as the people whose history overlaps with mine? Such ethical problems are nebulous and impossible to answer. I suppose it all boils down to the care and consideration you show toward your representation and the represented subjects. Maybe I acted hastily. Maybe next time I will include a disclaimer—not claiming to be objective—or try to be more responsible even though I think it is detrimental to the kind of unrestrained, unapologetic writing writing I am committed to. Life writing bleeds.
Tags: brutal honesty, introduction, performative writing
I don’t think being overly emotional or mawkish is what makes someone human. I’m more interesting to see a human’s brain at work than their inner baby.
i’m increasingly uninterested in being an “adult.”
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
It is your privilege as someone who’s bothered with writing to write whatever you want. Writing well mitigates but doesn’t erase falsehoods (all the better if untruth is the point). Conversely, people are totally justified in being upset at having seen themselves or fake people based on them or events in which they played hands depicted accurately in writing. It’s just that you aren’t obligated to care. Ethics are at lest one degree removed from people’s feelings getting hurt.
Great post. I wonder about this quite a bit, what we, as writers have a right to write when it involves the lives of others. It’s a balance. Most writers are going to write what they want to write, how they want to write, regardless of whether or not it upsets the people they are writing about. We can’t have it both ways though. If we’re willing to write about the people we love or hate or once loved, we have to be willing to bear the brunt of their reactions if they recognize the uncomfortable parts of themselves in our words. I also think that some writers are passive aggressive and frame meanness and retaliation as brutal honesty and self-reflection because they don’t have the balls to say, “Yeah, I’m being petty.”
This is why I only date high fantasy novelists, so at least if they write about me I turn into some kind of awesome bog monster or a demon or something.
Visceral pic. Me like.
Reminds me of the New Narrativists’ embrace of gossip.
Very, very happy you are here and I will look forward to your posts.
i’m beginning to wonder what people mean when they use the word “sentimental” and whether they distinguish that adjective from the noun form, sentiments. you used the phrase “not in a contrived sentimental way,” and my thought was “can sentiments be contrived?” it seems like “sentimental writing” as i understand it can be contrived or forced. but i’m not sure about sentiments. the definition i have of “sentiment” is “a thought prompted by passion or feeling.” my assumption would be that such a thought would be spontaneous or somewhat illogical rather than contrived. i don’t know. the only things in books that have ever moved me have been sentiments and may have been in some sense “sentimental.” they may have been “snuck in”/”worked up to” amongst lots of less sentimental writing, but nonetheless, to me sentiments are where the human writer is most present in the writing. i’m guessing many writers on here don’t care about humans being present in the writing, or if so, only mutilated, obfuscated, bloodied beyond recognition, depraved, but i like when writers create moments of beautiful sadness or beautiful joy and are unashamed of being what and who they are.
I don’t think being overly emotional or mawkish is what makes someone human. I’m more interesting to see a human’s brain at work than their inner baby.
i should say i’m not dismissing other kinds of writing or moments by any means. i guess i just don’t understand people who dismiss all but the most depersonalized, most dehumanizing, most “bad-ass” writing.
also, i don’t know who or what anyone is, that was imprecise. hehe…
we begin and end as “babies,” though, lincoln. and one is not one’s brain or one’s thoughts. would you love someone primarily for their brain?
i’m increasingly uninterested in being an “adult.”
Can you give an example of “depersonalized…dehumanizing” writing?
Can you give an example of “depersonalized…dehumanizing” writing?
Re: the changing of names. Everyone knows that Dean Moriarty is Neal Cassady.
looks like you consider art and writing in a completely opposite way that i do.
welcome!
Primarily for their brain as opposed to…their emotions? Yes.
i dunno. nevermind
damn.
Yes, and everybody knows that Robert Cohn is Harold Loeb, who said that it was Papa who spent those days in Pamplona mooning after a mean girl.
a) If it’s ok to tell a private truth that shames someone else, why isn’t it ok to lie?
b) It’s better writing – as reflective of / contestant against whatever social matrix – that persists, whatever soap-opera slander the writing perpetuated for, what, a lifetime.
Dodie Bellamy:
“What I long for in writing is the authentic, whether it’s collage, porn, or Alice Munro. By authentic I’m not necessarily talking about verisimilitude or naturalism. Authentic doesn’t need to mimic ‘real’ life. In Bush-hostaged America, ‘real’ life needs to be questioned at every turn. Something can be highly contrived and still be authentic, if it’s upfront in its contrivance. I’m drawn to writing that touches core human issues, how we categorize the world, how we survive the chaos that engulfs us. Gossip as a labor of disenfranchized subjectivity feels rich, as do the cagey subversions of Kevin [Killian’s] Amazon reviews. When the ground shifts beneath the reader’s feet, even the teeniest bit, this is good. The ground is already shifting. We need to start feeling it. I’m particularly intrigued by writing that addresses the body—illness, ingestion, desire, display, sexual passion, subtle eroticism. The writers I most admire celebrate vulgarity and emotion, and, yes, even sarcasm. By engaging the body in their work, they explore desire, loss, human experience that’s often hidden from view.”
actually, here’s a related analogy, hank: one of the reasons i’m not comfortable being a catholic anymore is that the priest, the presider over masses, can’t be a woman and can’t have sex. implicitly, the church is discriminating against/[something] women and suggesting that being celibate is “better”/”more perfect” than being sexually active. to some degree, they are anti-women, anti-sex, anti-the body. i didn’t want to be associated with that. if a writer or a group of writers or a school of writing, whatever, says “it’d be better if”/”you shouldn’t”/”it’s not literary if” re writing about one’s actual human experience, one’s actual human emotions, such as one (limitedly) understands them, however directly one damn well pleases, than said writer/group/school implicitly is, to some extent, in my opinion, anti-one’s actual human experience/emotions via exclusion/condemnation of such things as “valid” elements of “literary writing.” i don’t agree with that. i also don’t agree that “literature” is apart from/unrelated to life as it’s lived/felt.
so i guess i meant that writing that refuses the person, the human, apart from the grotesque/dismembered/self-flagellating vague remains of a human is to some extent “depersonalized”/”dehumanized.” but saying that is reductive of that writing, and not helpful. i’d rather just say i don’t like when people say you “can’t” “should not” write about your feelings/your actual experience because it’s sub-literary or childish or whathaveyou.
once, a writer i was not dating made a character out of me, or at least someone resembling me. i’m pretty sure it was an insult. so: you don’t need to date a writer to be written about. also, i feel guilty about my first two books, where people i know and love are characters. i will never do that again. from here on out: fiction.
also: great post. thanks, jackie.
cool.
I don’t think commenters here disregard writers who are interest in emotion or emotional effect at all. Certainly writers like Barry Hannah, Diane Williams or Denis Johnson seem very Dionysian in this way, yet all are loved here right?
Jackie, try to only date musicians because they’ll generally be too dense and/or narcissistic to figure it out when you inevitably write about them.
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m just not sure I know of any books that are “depersonalized”/”dehumanized.” I would imagine that most literature is reflective of a certain sort of human experience. But despite the fact that I sort of get where you’re coming from, I can’t really get you at the same time, because there’s a certain lack of concreteness to what you’re saying. I would also think that there’s a difference between “depersonalized”/”dehumanized” writing and a writer saying that you “can’t” or “should not” write about some particular thing.
yeah i wasn’t clear. nevermind
Lily,
I thought your first two books were fiction? (Full disclosure: I haven’t read them yet.)
They’re mostly fiction. There’s a lot of Asian American stuff in them, which is no where in any book after my second book. One potential review emailed me when he got a copy of EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION to say he was surprised there wasn’t any Asian American stuff in it, which was partially nice (because he’s read my other books) but also a little insulting (because it imposes pre-determined limitations on me as a writer). Maybe I’m taking things too personally. Who knows.
i’d hate to fall into stereotypes, but my (albeit limited) experience with musicians tells me that Catherine is right.
Jackie, nice story here, and your writing is excellent. As I bow down to your craft, I respectfully do have one grammatical correction for you: In your title, you have the singular “writer” matched up with the plural pronoun, “they” (here, “they’re”). We are seeing a lot of this usage now, especially on social media websites when a singular user changes a profile photo and the auto-prompt generates, “XXXX changed their profile picture.” This is a result of our language being dictated by computer programmers who could not figure out a way to get around automated programming language not being able to sense the gender of a user! The plural possessive, “they,” is now being used as a catch-all pronoun. The best way to solve this is to employ a construct that avoids gender-specific pronouns – social media sites need to have writers correct that code to have “a” or “the” used instead of “their”. You can correct your title by simply changing “writer” to “writers” to match up with plural “they’re”…Hope my correction is not offensive – we are just seeing so much of this usage now that we no longer remember the difference, and we need to take back our language from the computer programmers!
We? Really?
I would like to suggest that “brutal honesty” is a narrow subdivision of the field you describe later on as “total honesty.” There are many kinds of honesty, most of which do not require you to brutalize anyone (including yourself) in order to be effective or useful.
All writing is artifice and disguise–to claim to have “rejected” these things is to be blind to them as they exist in you. The best argument I know against “brutal honesty” is that it’s a knee-jerk approach which categorically excludes the very real possibility of you being wrong–about what actually happened, about what it meant. Your ex’s desire for privacy is no less honest than your desire to give a performance–in fact, her motivations are almost certainly more pure than yours. This is not to suggest that you have to cave in to the demands of every bit character in your life–it’s YOUR life, after all–but self-validating “honesty” should always be met with wariness, and ought to be subjected to extensive internal interrogation before being inflicted on anyone else. Allowing someone to keep silent and/or un-scrutinized can be imagined as a way of showing mercy, which is as honest a value as any other that I know.
P.S. To Jackie: Grammar correction submitted in the spirit of one writer recognizing the sentence ability of another and wanting to help perfect. We need to stand up on behalf of our language here and cannot let the likes of Mark Zuckerberg win (he already has our privacy and passwords). Computer people using incorrect pronouns – and setting up an example currently viewed by about 500 million people – well, to me, it’s akin to us writers telling THEM that 1 + 1 will now equal 3! I think a voice like mine that gets upset with this pronoun misuse is admittedly better suited for life in a cave, though.
You have got to be joking dude. The habit of using “they” as a gender neutral pronoun far predates social media websites or even computers.
Whoops, hit reply too early. Anyway, this is an old trend. My high school english teacher used to cry about it. I can understand why it is annoying, but it is better than he/she at least.
get off my lawn w/ the creepy hatred for computer programmers & the guardianship of language.
I just saw Chris Kraus interview Tom McCarthy at LACMA. I had never heard of her before. She kept my attention more than he did. She is a true believer.
Yeah, Lincoln, the he/she is what they were trying to avoid, but they just needed to correct by not having a gender-dependent construct. In answer to another post here, I do not hate computer programmers (but I will get off your lawn!). It’s just that there needs to be a place for writers in social media – this medium is influencing the world, and we in the States are the origin. Should we not take some responsibility when millions of children, both English speakers and non-native speakers, see this usage? We have a responsibility, I think.
But what I’m saying is that this has been a common (albeit controversial) grammatical practice for a long long time. It isn’t something spawned from social media programmers.
In fact it dates back to at least Shakespeare!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Great post, Jackie, though I agree with Justin. I made the mistake of writing with very little tact, and with even less concealment, about a certain ex, which in retrospect was at the very least objectifying to what had been our relationship–a relationship between two people (I think). Though what I wrote was not a broadside by any stretch, only an account, it was a partial account fused with, if not pretensions to the truth, to any sort of honesty, then pretensions to radical partiality and the acceptance and affirmation thereof, and then that as a sort of honesty, the only radical honesty possible. But that partiality-as-honesty gets politicized, turned out and round its own distortion, and then–because mourning and memory are never preserved, and not even conceived, baldly as such–taken by those who read to be the truth, because you are writing “nonfiction,” and mostly because your perspective as writer is lamentably a bird’s eye, however ardently you repudiate that fact. I am referring mostly to a review of mine that was published on The Rumpus. So yeah, I don’t know, that was my experience, as long as we’re confessing here, and even if we aren’t, there’s that.
haha…high fantasy novelists and textbook writers are the safest breeds of writers to be emotionally involved with
Thanks for the Wikipedia reference, Lincoln – very informative. Hey, I guess I see this as a Shakespearean error – he did not make many! And cannot we not beat this, or dare to? I guess it is high-mindedness on my part. Maybe I put too much value on language, I don’t know. But thanks for the exchange.
And to complicate things even further, in his lectures, VN says: Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult both to art and truth.
A responsibility to do what? Insist on making the language more complicated? Using “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun doesn’t hurt anyone, and it’s practically second nature to most English speakers now, native or not.
i was referring to sentimentality…i was mostly just trying to say that “personal” writing doesn’t necessarily have to be mushy, which is the association many people make. but actually, i’m not even really against sentimentality, although it is obvious and somewhat off-putting when it’s forced or used in a cheap way to pull on the reader’s heart-strings… i don’t like it when things are framed in a universal, you-are-supposed-to-relate-to-this kind of way
Perhaps it is that you put too much of a value on how you feel language should be used. There are no universal rules for language usage. As a creative writer, I would think that would be far more important than feeling distress over the use of they in the singular.
this is soo good! i love dodie. i didn’t even have this quote in mind when i wrote the post, but it fits perfectly.
Whatever happened to plain old fiction writers who invent stories though?
I disagree with one of your points, Roxane, but I think it’s best I head back to my cave! Thanks for the discussion.
i have used they as a singular pronoun intentionally since high school. actually, i brought an article about this into my high school english teacher many years ago. she said, “ok, you can use ‘they’ in my class, but PLEASE do not use it during the AP exam.” i use it because he/she/him/her is gendered and binary. language transforms to meet the needs of the people
it predates computers
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html
P.S. I am not sure if you are Roxane Gay, but if so, keep up your publication momentum! (and don’t take the rejections so hard – so many writers w/be envious of that win-loss record!).
I am Roxane Gay. Thanks. I don’t really take them that hard. I love talking about them, though.
Lol, I think English teachers and those of us who formerly taught are probably high-minded hardasses – and not always as correct as we think we are. Yeah, I definitely see our language transforming lately. Anyway, you have a skill with sentences, so keep on plugging. I did not even address your topic, but I admire the risks you took, and that is surely one thing that cannot ever be taught!
yeah i totally see what you’re saying. i am not using honesty as an extension of objectivity or truth. alec’s term radical partiality fits the perspective i am advocating more. i openly say that my perspective is situated–it doesn’t cancel out the perspective of others. it’s limited. fragmentary. nonfiction or “personal” writing creates real drama in our lives. i kind of embrace the interactions between life and writing. there is a lot of movement outside the text/book object and that’s exciting to me. definitely not trying to suppress any reactions. i know i have to deal with them. as far as the ethical implication…i definitely wasn’t implying that my perspective was right, and i left the questions i brought up unanswered.
My dad is a computer programmer and hacker.
Probably a cool dad! Very similar to writers in the way of brain usage, I think? I see from your other posts that you can write like a mo’fo.
wow…welcome, that bloody knee is just brutal to look at…and for sure, if you date a writer, you will end up in their work, and mostly the horrible stuff, the worst things you do, because nobody wants to read about how you took out the trash and gave the kids a bath and sacrificed softball or that new indie flick for something equally mundane, no…it’s going to be about the weird way you masturbate or the time you kicked the cat or the abortion you had or something else that you would prefer never saw the light of day
Visceral pic. Me like.
IS Stephen crazy?
Lay off the comments, slaw cheeks
And I am sorry now for my self-indulgent off-topic rambling b/c it took away from proper discussion of your story, which has enough merit! I apologize.
Jackie: Hello! Welcome. Way to kill it out of the box!
what a lovely post.. welcome! even “textbook” is a funny euphemism.. i.e. what book isn’t
Regretted comment.
I think it’s important to note the difference between writing that has sentiment and writing that’s sentimental.
In reference to Lincoln’s comment, obviously brains at work are important too. But it’s not just brains or heart (if that’s where we want to say sentiment comes from). If we really want to go at it, we’d need to remember the stomach, and the eyes, and the ears, the reproductive organs…etc.
Great writing is, I’d posit, something like the human body…in flight. Totally relateable, because we all have one, and yet oddly mysterious and impossible.
Nabakov was right.
These days they’re called “journalists.”
The singular they is pretty common in everyday speech, and even Shakespeare, Austen, etc. have used it. Definitely not just a Facebookism.
edit- oops, already covered.
It’s a good thing she didn’t use the word “sincerity”, eh?
I like Dodie, too. …Unfortunately, her stuff is hard to find.
No, no, not journalists: pundits and bloggers.
Lincoln: Actually, I don’t really like any of them very much . . . but that’s just me.
pictionaries…
what makes you so angry?
I wonder how much of the vomit (by which i mean your baggage) is interesting. Usually not so much. Most of it can be made interesting, but usually it all remains pink or orange liquidy mleh. Just saying. You got skillz brah? If so, then write whatever the hell you want and you’ll usually be forgiven. Asking for permission is weak.
Um, am I missing something here? Just because you date someone, doesn’t mean you can/should write Non-Fiction about him/her and publish it and use their real name. There could be invasion of privacy issues. Unless such person is a public figure by nature of being with you…they aren’t treated the same for purposes as you are (assuming you are a public figure). Hope your ex and her gf don’t lawyer up.
Um, am I missing something here? Just because you date someone, doesn’t mean you can/should write Non-Fiction about him/her and publish it and use their real name. There could be invasion of privacy issues. Unless such person is a public figure by nature of being with you…they aren’t treated the same for purposes as you are (assuming you are a public figure). Hope your ex and her gf don’t lawyer up.
cool, james. i feel some desire to add that what is or is not “sentimental” (as it is most commonly used, in the pejorative sense) depends on the perspective of the reader/writer, obviously, and i think the fear of being sentimental (which is reinforced by other writers, workshops, editors, etc.) stops some writers from ever attempting to express their emotions (such as they understand them).
If you date a gossipy, destructive poop chute, they’re going to rat you out: brutal ‘honesty’ as Hall-of-Fame virtue-of-necessity rationalization.
i haven’t said anything crazy. do you have a problem, sean?
if so, i can try my best to fix it for you.
That’s cold, guys. Real cold.
huh? i said i did change the names. and that the things mentioned were relatively innocuous.
i got skillz brah
glad to be here!
no problem. a little grammar lesson never hurt anyone
[…] in your lives (and/or dating someone who writes about the people in her life — check out this post by Jackie Wang. My favorite quote from her post is this one: I wonder, is the decried demand “don’t write […]
“But I had always felt this compulsion to vomit up the dirty, personal shit onto paper in pursuit of some sort of quality—let’s call it total honesty—but an honesty that does not claim to be the truth and admits its distortedness, the limitations of its vision, its inability to be anything other than this situated view of the world.”
That… is… so… RELIEVING to finally witness somebody that got the same gut-writing feeling, need, that I have since years. That’s awesome. I am just discovering we call that “performative writing”. I thought I was inventing a way of writing, by myself, complicated and unexplainable to the rest of the world, in the last years, thinking I’d look weird to express that process. But that is just soooo “that”. There is truly a performative process within that. Neither the content of the process are more important than the other. Only the writer knows what is the performance objective and initial impulse.
Magical!