Gim crack’d

Transmuting the personal

Last night I wrote part of a letter I don’t think I intend to send — to someone I have not spoken to in a long while, and someone I think I may never speak to again. As I wrote, I thought: this is too personal to share with strangers, and I don’t think anything’s to be gained in sending this to her. It’s easier when you’re young, I think. You feel a little proud of your own secrets, and you don’t mind broadcasting your sorrows and victories. It leads to some awkward conversations with your parents, but who cares?

It is different now, and at first I hesitated to write at all. What’s the point of writing when no one else will read it? Blogs attack the concept of a private journal: what do you have that’s worth keeping truly hidden? Just change the names, write under a pseudonym, keep up plausible deniability. But one of the most influential books I’ve never fully read is Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. It was essentially the bible for the writing classes I took in high school, and I think it can be summed up in one sentence: write truthfully, for no one else, every day. We constantly suppress thoughts as too strange, too dangerous, possibly wrong. We do this to survive in society, to keep our friends. But writing well means letting go of these controls — to say what we mean, deep down.

So last night I wrote knowing full well no one would read it, and it came easier than any of the writing I have been doing since “Home Again.” This felt good — but then I wondered, how do I make this into something I can share with everyone? Jerome Bruner writes in Making Stories that stories act as Perseus’s shield; they allow us to look at a hideous Medusa without turning into stone ourselves. It’s only a reflection; it isn’t real. I think I need to find that distance, those clothes to drape over this story. It can’t be as simple as a roman a clef — that feels simply lazy. It has to be — well, somehow magical.

— Chris, 20 October 2008

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