A Short Story About Getting Published on Longreads, and Why the Timing is Perfect for a Memoir Author-in-Waiting

I'm proud to say I have a new work of nonfiction just published at the wonderful Longreads, home to such a vast range of compelling journalism, essays, and narratives.

"What To Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and A Gun" is something different for me. Though I've written before about past loves, to write this story the way it needed to be told forced me into areas I rarely go on the page: sex, my own youth-fueled dangerous behaviors, and the politics of class and wealth I learned as a privileged young person.

I hesitated at first to send this piece out on submission, worried about what reactions it might bring from those more used to me writing about milder, more "acceptable" life passages. 

Then I put on my grown up writer woman pants and hurled it into the editorial cosmos. It landed at the perfect place, where editor Sari Botton gave it that slight extra push it needed to truly shine.

Once I knew it was going to run, I asked my kids not to read it, and warned my husband (Frank, who is that rare, blessed nonfiction writer's spouse who never tells me what personal stuff I can't write about) to read with caution because he might not like knowing this particular story.

As it turned out, Frank read it and with his usual mix of candor and enthusiastic support, said he was intrigued to know more about who I was in the eight years between when he and I first met (when I was 15), and when we circled back to one another in our mid-20s. I don't know if our sons have read it (how effective is it anyway to put something off limits?), but I think by now these adult children (of 19 and 24) can handle knowing their mother is a flesh-and-blood flawed human who learns from her experiences. And maybe they'll learn something from the story I tell about trusting too soon, conflating sex with love, and ignoring one's intuition.

Some friends and relatives were a little bit shocked and surprised that I told this story. A few, I suspect, are appalled. That's okay. It is, perhaps, a good practice run.

In four months, my memoir will be published and many people (well, I hope many!) will be reading about other parts of my personal life: about what I did with grief; my adult relationship with my parents; what it was like to grow up where and how I did; and how family dynamics, siblings, and other relatives shaped my experiences. And certainly some who read that book -- strangers and perhaps even people I know and care about -- will not like everything it has to say. 

And I'll need my grown up writer woman pants, pulled up and in place. 

Writing in the Discomfort Zone -- A New Essay in The Nervous Breakdown

A lot of writers have a particular writing discomfort zone. For me, it's when I'm trying to write on topics that I feel shaky about, issues that I wonder: do I have the right, the authority, to write about this? Or, that? It's when I seriously ask myself if writing about a particularly vexing experience or situation is territory I want to wade out into, and once there, will I even know what to do?

Then, one of two things happen: I either scribble a few lines in a notebook or start a draft on the computer, but walk away before I even really get started. I decide, this is not my topic, and writing about it is not something I feel confident about. Sometimes though, I plunge ahead: draft and write and revise and edit the darned thing. But then I often sit on it until either the moment passes and I'm fairly sure no publication would be interested anyway--or, I polish it up, swallow that rock in my throat, and hit send.

That's what happened with my most recently published essay, "Unspoken Words that Begin with N (even when they don't)" which found a home at The Nervous Breakdown. Perhaps what propelled me to write and finish (and publish) this time lies in the title itself: things unspoken must be discussed, must be aired, acknowledged and examined. 

The imprinted, ugly words some of us heard as children, when we were being formed   --connected to race, words that illustrate racist thought and action even in places we don't want to admit it existed--do lodge in our core, and crawl back out, unbidden, years or decades later. I thought that was worth discussing, in 2017, in America.

After I sent the piece in, I was fortunate to have good editorial feedback and guidance from TNB editors Chelsey Clammer and Bernard Grant. I love it when I get that kind of collaboration, and I was especially grateful for it on this piece, because even after submitting, I still had one foot firmly planted in the writing discomfort zone. 

We worked back and forth to be sure that the nuance was clear, that as narrator I was exposing flaws without asking for sympathy, and that the piece asked readers to think, not simply nod in agreement. I admit, I had some nervous moments during editing, worrying that the writing stood up to seriousness of the subject matter, that I wasn't being self-indulgent or whiny on the page. I wanted to add something to the conversation about what we carry around from childhood, not simply bemoan it.

At some point, I remembered something one of my writing mentors had once told me: If we only write what's comfortable, what's the point? And, this from another: The only time anything good happens on the page in nonfiction, is when we write outside our comfort zone.

I hope you will read the essay in full, here. And I welcome your thoughts on writing in your own personal discomfort zone.

Image: Black & white blinds-Flickr/CreativeCommons zeze57

Guest Blogger Bernadette Murphy on how X-Games for Nerds Turned into Memoir

In this space, I like to mention how I came to know my guest blogger. This is becoming difficult, as I'm blessed with such a wide and rich literary community; I get to chatting with a fellow writer online, or at a conference, emails or texts start flying, and before I know it, I can't recall how we first came into contact. Such a great problem! So it is with Bernadette Murphy. Let's just say: I'm glad we keep crossing paths!

Bernadette is the author of Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life (Counterpoint Press, hardback May 2016, paperback May 2017), as well as three previous books of narrative nonfiction including the bestselling Zen and the Art of Knitting. She's an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department of Antioch University Los Angeles, and a former weekly book critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Did I mention she's fierce and I admire her guts on and off the page?

Please welcome Bernadette Murphy

We sit at our little desks, maybe sipping café au lait, staring at a screen. Often, we peer out at a world we hold at arm’s length, maybe through bespectacled eyes, always the outsider, the observer, the one on the periphery. To passersby, we appear the portrait of calm and ease. We’re writers, the nerdiest of nerds, the opposite of the REI adventurer, the wimpiest of wimps.

Or maybe not.

Red Smith famously said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” I tend to agree, and believe that the work of a writer, when done well, is as risky as any extreme sport I can name—and requires the same kind of bravery and courage as other perilous adventures. Maybe even more.

In Maureen Corrigan’s take on the female adventure story in her wonderful book Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. she argued that women’s stories have always seemed more placid than men’s, but that the docile exterior is simply an illusion. In women’s stories, even the most domestically focused, there is just as much at stake as with any testosterone-rich alpha-male drama. A Jane Austen heroine trying to decide whom to marry has as much on the line as a climber in a Jon Krakauer narrative on Mount Everest. If our heroine makes a wrong choice, the consequences may be as dire in the long run as a fatal error made by a mountaineer. It all comes down to the big questions of life and death. As writers, this is the territory we mine.

Though I’m a nerd through and through, I’ve found myself taking on more physical risk recently and in doing so, I realized that the two territories overlap and feed each other: nerd meets adventure, adventure meets the page.

In essence, I’m discovering a new kind of tolerance for risk in my writing life, like Lance Armstrong building up strong lungs. The more I engage in activities that test my courage, my tenacity, both my emotional and physical strength, the more I build the parallel muscles that writing requires: Truth telling. Rawness. Vulnerability. The possibility of failure. Being willing to be unmasked as the imperfect human I am. Without these qualities, our writing takes us nowhere, has nothing to tell a reader about the human condition.  

This truth came home to me when I wrote the initial essay that would eventually become my most recent book, Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life. I had just left a 25-year marriage and my skin seemed as if it had been flayed in big sheets. My guts felt exposed, so that even the tiniest shift of wind hurt. I tried to write authentically about the experience, but found myself hiding behind trite metaphors and syrupy Hallmark sentiments. The more I attempted to remain safe by concealing my true self (and, I hoped, protecting my kids from my desperate feelings about the divorce), the more hackneyed my writing became.

Meanwhile, my dear friend Emily Rapp was on the cusp of losing her not-yet-three-year-old son Ronan to Tay-Sachs, a child I had held and cuddled and sang to. She wrote about her thundering grief and the day-to-day experience of nursing a child to his eventual death using a kind of incinerating truth I admired deeply and wanted to emulate. (Check out her heart-stopping memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World.) If she could tell the truth amid such tender-at-the-bone circumstances, limn both the heart-stomping moments and the flashes of unheralded joy, what was stopping me?

I tried to follow her lead. When the first essay that displayed my conflicted, damaged self was published, I cowered, nauseated by what I had written, terrified of what people would think of me. I kept having a dream in which Emily was beheaded by the Taliban. She was executed for her honesty—it was that dangerous and that powerful. And if I continued in her path, what would become of me?

In the meantime, though, I’d started taking more risks in the physical realm, spurred on by a need to feel stronger in my life on a day-to-day basis. Facing the death of my father and the pending divorce, I had the sense that, by training myself to take small risks and building on them daily, I might shift my focus away from what scared me toward what made me feel most alive.

I started out running half a lap, walking half a lap at the high school track with a friend from my kids’ school. We did a 5K and then a 10K together. Soon, I learned to ride a motorcycle and took off on a 5,000-mile cross-country trek with another scared-y cat mom like me. I went backpacking and hiking and ran marathons. I moved to French Polynesia for three months to find out who I was when I stopped being who I knew myself to be in Los Angeles. I learned to scuba dive, ski, open-ocean outrigger canoe, mountaineer, rock and ice climb—all in my 50s. And I discovered that I was stronger than I thought I was.

In finding that physical strength, I uncovered the seed of bad-ass-ed-ness that had long been buried in me. Over time, I stopped worrying about what people would think. And, as a result, I was finally able to write the book I had been wanting to.

Looking back, I believe my creative paralysis can be traced to an insidious lie: The idea that risk by definition is negative, a factor to be eliminated whenever possible. Risk infers the possibility that something bad or unwanted may happen. But risk, for writers, is imperative.

When I first started taking physical risks as a path to both emotional and creative courage, my behavior appeared capricious and unpredictable. So I looked into the subject, craving assurance I wasn’t going off the deep end. Through interviews with neuroscientists, researchers, and psychologists, I learned that risk, the very element I’d attempted to isolate myself from, was the substance that was making me feel healthier emotionally, encouraging the wonders of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, and building my self-confidence. I learned that by deliberately engaging new challenges, even as simple as trying a different restaurant or gym routine, I improve my happiness and safeguard my mental and physical health.

Yes, there are biological, gender, and cultural influences that incline some of us to be more enthusiastic about new experiences than others. Still, risk taking is part of our human DNA, and for some of us, downright central to who we are. According to researchers at Stanford University, the human body replaces itself with a largely new set of cells every seven years to 10 years, and some of our most important parts are revamped even more rapidly. Whether it's creating fresh lung cells, shedding skin, sprouting new hair, or making fresh brain connections, the human body is always in a state of constant flux and change.

So too, I venture, is the human psyche—but only with our cooperation.

Be engaging risk, I rediscovered my eagerness and curiosity, ultimately breaking out of my creative straightjacket. Of course, not all risk is beneficial. Impulsive, emotionally driven risk often creates negative outcomes. But positive risk taking, undertaken with forethought and intention, has become fundamental for me.

I now approach life and writing with a new kind of zest and enthusiasm. I feel emotions more keenly than before, even the tender and piercing one—which, I would argue, is some of the riskiest territory on the planet. Writing honestly is much scarier than skydiving, bungee jumping, and any other X-game challenge.

As I see it, writers are extreme athletes in the world of letters. By grappling with risk in the most demanding realm of all—the world of the imagination—we prove ourselves as powerful and fearless in the very best way.

Get to know more about Bernadette at her website.