Writing From Shame Is Hard, But It’s Still the Best Place to Begin
My freshman year of college, I fell into a bad friendship that rattled my sense of self. I’d always felt myself to be an independent person—but I couldn’t stand to be apart from this friend, who struck me as so amazingly brilliant that life was dull without him. I’d always felt grounded in my priorities, my goal of building my skills as an artist and writer—but now I let him tell me what to do, let him tell me which classes to take, so that we would stay together. I changed my social life, made new friends and dropped others, according to his wishes. When his carelessness began to move towards cruelty, it still took me another year to see the problems and extricate myself.
Junior year was when I took the fiction workshop with Amy Hempel that reframed my ability to think about this distressing episode. In my notes, I recorded that Amy advised us to write from shame. This was an elaboration of the famous prompt from Gordon Lish, write the thing you did that “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” A time you did something you swore you’d never do, or the worst thing you ever did. Over the years, I’ve internalized this as an injunction to write from shame—it’s a more flexible prompt, one that goes beyond a discrete act to track with a whole lifetime.
My first novel, The Ash Family, came directly from tackling the shame of that bad friendship. The Ash Family is about a young woman who runs away from home to join an off-the-grid cult. I recognized, in the narratives of cult-followers, that part of myself—my eagerness to devote myself to a person I thought was a genius, to follow someone else’s commandments, to find safety in an unyielding, unkind structure, and to relax into a lack of agency.
For better or for worse, a necessary condition of writing from shame is intentionally forgetting that your friends and family will read the book. When it came time to publish the novel in 2019, all the honesty and intensity I put into the book came rebounding back onto me in the form of intense embarrassment. With each copy-editing pass, it got harder and harder to read what I’d written. By the time I held the finished book, I couldn’t stand to flip through the pages. Maybe I am a particularly shame-filled person, which might be why the Amy advice has resonated with me for all these years. But I also think this is part of the publication process for many writers, and one I wish we talked more about. Writing is private, intimate, solitary, but the goal of publication is to go wide. Every writer has to deal with this two-faced mandate.
My disclaimer—“It’s fiction!”—can’t vanquish my feeling of exposure. I try to keep in mind that my own shame is just an instigator for made-up characters and plots; then the logic of the work, the material, carries me someplace new. But my burning face at each and every reading reveals that there’s still a high degree of personal truth in the fiction.
The slow-moving emotional catastrophe of publishing my debut did not take away any of my belief in the importance of writing from shame. On the contrary, I’ve accepted that as the feeling that I made something of substance. Fiction is the art form that most directly lends itself toward depicting the individual mind at work, and grappling with shame sets the mind moving in high-stakes ways. I watch myself squirm and I pounce. And this is what makes fiction that excites me—fiction that is passionate, transgressive, honest.
My second novel, The Absolutes, which was just released on July 11 from Mariner, is maybe, in terms of shame-exposure, even worse than The Ash Family. It’s a novel of erotic yearning, full of explicit sex and absolutely indefensible decision-making. (The plot concerns a woman’s affair with a married Italian aristocrat.) I endowed my protagonist, Nora, with her own rifts in her sense of self, her own inexorable progress towards doing things she swore she’d never do—including destroying her own long-term relationship, hiding from friends, and skipping out on all of her responsibilities to abet marital infidelity.
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Nora’s actions harm her friends and family, while my novels—to the best of my knowledge, at least—don’t. But Nora, like me, is exploring the perplexing rewards of discomfort. She darkly dramatizes my own attempts to overcome self-doubt and fear of judgment. Shame functions as the fence around the actions we are willing to take. It defines us and confines us. In the book, Nora repeatedly chooses to push past her shame in pursuit of a higher connection. And in my attempts to depict her with honesty, I’ve written my bravest book.
If you love to write and have a story you want to tell, the only thing that can stand between you and the success you’re seeking isn’t craft, or a good agent, or enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but fear. Fear that you aren’t good enough, or fear the market is too crowded, or fear no one wants to hear from you.Fortunately, you can’t write while being in the flow and be afraid simultaneously. The question is whether you will write fearlessly.