this woman’s work

I reread Edith’s Diary last week. It always makes me think of blogs. In case you haven’t read it, it’s a novel about a woman’s who life is truly wretched but the worse it gets, the happier her diary reads. Her son is an alcoholic, lazy misanthrope but in her diary he’s married and has lovely children. She is living two lives and as the false one becomes more real, the more stuck she is in the wretchedness. It’s a frustrating book; you want to shake her loose of her fantasies so she’ll face up to how bad it all is and do something.

I remember watching this friendship implode from the sidelines once. There were two bloggers who were best friends in a larger circle of bloggers (I knew them from an online forum where I was a lurker so it may be that some of you know them but I doubt it). I don’t know what happened but there was a huge falling out. I got a heads up from someone else on that forum (my connection there who inspired my lurkdom) and I — like everyone else — watched the whole thing fall apart. It was big. It was bad. It was ugly. There were secrets shared, confidences exposed for the world to mock, some ugly language thrown around.

It was one of those trainwrecks that ripples across blogs because people take sides. I pieced it together backwards, hunting down archived entries and skipping around links to figure out how it started.

Anyway. The most interesting part to me is that one of the people just went nuts. She used to write like a regular person — you know, life’s ups and downs — and then suddenly everything was peachy keen and the sun shone all the time and every morning they all woke up and danced around the maypole together.

Now my connection had some inside scoop on this person’s real life and of course it wasn’t like that (because whose real life is?) but the picture got brighter and brighter. She was losing weight! And running marathons! And her children were cleaner and smarter and better behaved than anyone’s!

Of course she was writing it for her ex-friend (whose own blog stayed noncommittal and everyday) to let her know that her life was awesome and she didn’t even care that they weren’t friends anymore. Take that!

I think I would have been a blog denial writer myself if I’d been blogging in my teens. I’d likely have created an alter ego and made a virtual life that was nicer and more manageable than my real one. Actually (thinking more on it) I betcha I would have blogged as one of the characters in the stories I was always scrawling. You know, to make ‘em more real.

Because that’s what Edith was doing and what this other blogger was doing — making a better life real by writing it down.

I guess I do a certain amount of this, too. I write an argument with Brett only make it funny and by the end of the entry I’m not as angry with him anymore. (That’s a tip for you — you can now read the subtext of any entries about that adorable Brett and his quirky way of doing things. You now know that I start those entries with gritted teeth, glaring at the monitor.) See, that’s a way of rewriting a narrative to bring yourself to a happier conclusion but it’s not lies. Because truthfully my conflicts with Brett are minor and sometimes I need reminding about that.

With Edith’ blogging counterpart, her denial was so damaging. She couldn’t make it so just by writing it. A sham doesn’t become more solid just because she’s shouting that it’s true. Instead she just pushed people away because a) they figured she didn’t need them anyway since life was so dandy; b) and they knew she was lying and it was kinda creepy.

But the thing is with blogging is that eventually that blogger got her some new readers who didn’t have backstory so they took her at her word and so it was like her imaginary life was true, at least for them and she could take comfort in their comments that affirmed it.

This is why I’m glad there was no interwebz when I was a disgruntled teenager. I think the nature of having so much control over a virtual life would have messed me up for a little while longer than I was messed up all on my own. Truly.

I love logic problems. I used to buy those books when I was a kid because I loved them so much. “Carrie has a blue dress. The person in the green dress wore yellow sandals. What color was Elaine’s hat?” Mmm, good times!

I think writing is a lot like that. For marketing writing I go to my client and they say, “We’re going with urgency here and we have an image of a snake.” So then I sit at my laptop, thesaurus at the ready, and brainstorm. Urgency. Danger. Fear. Blah blah blah. Then I type up, “Don’t wait for danger to strike! Act now and secure your safety!” I send it to my client. He says, “Mmm, too scary. Urgency without fear.” And back I go to write up, “Be prepared. Act now before something really awful happens.” Etc. etc.

Sometimes I have to write something wrong before I can know how to get it right because maybe my client doesn’t know what he wants until he sees what he doesn’t want.

Creative nonfiction is really similar in some ways. I was telling Brett that one of the things I like about it is that you only have the truth to work with — you can’t make something up — but you have too choose which truths to share and how to share them to give a broader, more subjective truth. So if I’m writing about the frustrations of motherhood, I’m not going to share the same stories as I might if I were writing about nostalgia for my kids early years. You could read one and see a disatisfied mom or read the other and see a total maternal figure and they would both be true even if they seem contradictory.

The more complicated, more nuanced a topic is then the harder and more fun it is to write because then there’s room to shade stories with a little paradox but again, it takes artistry to know what to leave out and put in and how to highlight something without taking attention away from your central theme, etc.

I love writing. (happy sigh)