what secrets to keep

and thoughts on detaching from your work

When I was 18 I was, briefly, in a long-distance relationship. I lived in New York, and he lived in Ohio. 10 years later, that ex-boyfriend moved to Austin and invited me to his housewarming party. We had sort of stayed in touch after breaking up. My husband was with me at the party, and the other guests (aside from the ex’s mom and grandmother) assumed it was the ex and my husband who knew each other. At some point, it came up that this was not the case. I can clearly remember my ex immediately looking up and catching my eye, his unspoken words of “I don’t want to get into it.” So I said nothing and the ex vaguely explained, “we knew each other in high school,” which was not exactly true (I was in high school, he had graduated the year before).

I could tell you a lot of things about him, but they’re not really relevant here.

I’ve been participating in a workshop this month with Writerly Love, and submitted a chapter from my memoir-in-progress for my workshop. Some very kind and encouraging words were said about my pages, which is, of course, nice to hear and makes me want to keep working towards a final draft. The chapter in question covers the beginning of a (different) relationship, and I was surprised (and a little amused) to hear that the character read as a “fuckboi.”

Part of the problem, it seemed, was me pulling back so far on revealing personal details that the reader could not clearly see the character (who, despite his faults, was not a “fuckboi”). So again, how to tell the truth without telling someone else’s story? It gets tricky when what I know was revealed in intimacy and overlaps with the narrative of my own life. I had more than one boyfriend with his own daddy issues, and that’s compelling.

I don’t have a lot of qualms about discussing badly behaved boyfriends. They acted the way they did and, to paraphrase Anne Lamott, if they wanted to be written warmly about, they should have behaved better. But, where is the line when dissecting a relationship when it was so obviously impacted by childhood trauma on both sides?

My fellow writers in the workshop had solid advice: write a draft where you tell the truth, then go back and change details. The final version would still contain the emotional truth. Maybe it’s my autism, but I really struggle with this. Does it make sense to change where or how this person grew up, when I can only see it as fundamental to who they were?

I’m tinkering with my draft now, and playing with creating clear boundaries on the page to indicate that I am intentionally being vague in places. I don’t want to tell someone else’s story, I just want to tell mine. It’s not even close to the same thing, but I think about this reddit thread a lot (allegedly written by the memoirist Sarah Hoover’s sister).

The workshop was also a good reminder of the importance of detaching from my work. While I can make an honest effort to workshop my pages and see if others are reading into it what I hope they are, I cannot actually control how readers read my work, and their opinions of the characters (who are also real people!) within the pages.

From the beginning of my memoir project, I felt strongly that the reader wasn’t meant to have a strong opinion of the ex-boyfriends. In an ill-fated outline workshop many years ago, the instructor asked me, “Why are we spending so much time on guys who are clearly not right for you?” “Because it’s not the point,” I replied. “The boyfriends are supposed to be a type of mirror for all of this other stuff that’s going on.” (This workshop killed my momentum on my memoir for years because the instructor was so dismissive of what I was trying to get at. And- she broke the unspoken rule of speaking to the memoirist directly versus referencing the narrator.)

These days, I’m not sure that’s entirely possible; the reader will come to their own conclusions if someone is good or bad. But essentially: I am not trying to villainize anyone. The reader should see the good in the boyfriends because the narrator did.

And seriously, I hope nobody comes across as a fuckboi- except the ones who were.

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