the map
I’m testing out a new communication style where, instead of inviting total strangers to dilly-dally in the labyrinth of my extremely exacting thought process, I cut straight to the end: a challenge to pick up what I’m putting down, trusting they are smart enough to get all the way there on their own. (With my best friend, of course, I still enjoy charting a course through ideas and experiences; she is safe enough to think aloud to. Tim Rogers once called this style of essay-writing, to me, “taking the reader on a little walk.” I like walking with my friends.)
I had accidentally passed my street, so I drove on into the next town, where I’d have to go to execute a safe and legal U-turn anyway. I pulled into the drive-through car wash, and I decided to pull all the way through it.
People can’t reach the keypad, so there’s always an attendant standing next to it. The attendant asked me which type of car wash I wanted.
“Basic, please,” I told him.
He immediately attempted the upsell.
“Baaaaasic, pleeeease,” I sang to him.
“But your car will look brand new with our Premium,” he said. “You get the—”
I do not like the greasy film Premium leaves on my car. Instead of fully explaining why I don’t want extra gloop on my car, or arguing about the other merits of the Premium wash, I cut straight to the end, to my primary concern: “Something’s wrong with my paint,” I said to the attendant, frowning.
He looked over my sedan. Thanks to being parked outside for 12 years, the car’s epoxy is crackling and peeling on the trunk. This is easy enough to see at a glance. And I doubt it’s a good idea to massage gloop into the spots where my car paint is exposed. Again, this can all be perceived at just a glance.
“You just need a cut and buff,” the attendant said to me.
Now I was interested. “Really!” I said, putting my elbows on my steering wheel and eyeing him appreciatively.
“Yep!” he said. “Just take it into any body shop, they can do that for you,” he said.
“A cut and buff,” I said, turning the phrase over in my mouth for the first time. “Thank you,” I said to him, “for this excellent advice.”
He punched in a Basic wash. I handed him my debit card.
My girl group chat was talking about Lindy West’s new memoir and widespread reaction to it—particularly as compared to her previous effort, Shrill.
We agreed that Shrill was appreciated because it offered an assurance, a universal truth—your weight shouldn’t hold you back from living your life—and we agreed that her follow-up, “life isn’t that simple; there were other traumas I hadn’t dealt with yet,” yanks that assurance away again. (It also invites people to weigh in. West wants a witness, an audience, not a rescuer or a judge, but of course an invested audience is going to feel entitled to strong opinions about what she should be doing.)
There’s another problem, too: West’s experience isn’t universal. An audience is going to eye her with hostility and go “you are describing what is very much a you problem now.”
It’s tough, I told the group chat, because this is the connective tissue—the work—but no one wants to see the real work, the cognitive labor, the uncertainty, the emotional mess. They don’t want a map of how you got there, they just want the happy ending.
And I guess that’s fine, because people chart other courses to get to the same destination anyway. Are you saying I should follow the same roadmap?
Another problem, my friend C suggested, is the way West is now an accidental career memoirist. So there’s sudden reason to mistrust her personal account: if this is her career, she’s an unreliable narrator. It’s all gristle for the mill, right? So now she’s obligated to provide constant updates, constantly self-reporting her movements. (I pointed out that this is the source of my ire at reality television: once people have inadvertently obligated themselves to overshare, it seems impossible to tap back out.)
If you’re going to write about the Work, it has to be fiction, I said. That’s the only conclusion. Memoir writing—that is, creative nonfiction about your own life—is for the birds.