046: Border Countries
Emily Ratajkowski, Michael Crichton, Scott Alexander, writing about yourself, and fun gift ideas for things you can't get on Amazon
And real borders are, in fact, very weird.
—Scott Alexander, in “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”
One of the more fraught conversations I had this past week was a short but heartfelt debate on whether or not there is a difference between memoir and autobiography and whether or not both are inferior to biography. Yes, this is the kind of thing that gets argued about in my family.
The first premise was that memoir, with its connotations of self-aggrandizement and transient celebrity, is inferior to autobiography, with its connotations of a substantive life, well-lived and reflected upon. The second was that biography is superior because it is ‘researched’ and, as such, ‘fact-based.’
For me, these premises are triggering.
Let’s take the last one first.
What is a ‘fact’ and what is ‘research’ hasn’t been something I take for granted since college when my “Astronomy 2: Physics of Stars” professor showed us how an aberration of 2 microns (or 1/50th the width of a human hair) could have exponential effects on the data gathered by the Hubble Telescope, but it’s felt a lot more urgent lately. Just the fact that the phrase “follow the science” achieved hashtag/meme/yard sign status at roughly the same time as the American president snoozed through UN Climate Conference, apparently without any blowback, is enough to severely over-burden the less life-threatening, but still apropos questions, Is a biography an objective source about someone’s life? Do we really think that we are only biased about our own lives and not about others?
As to the second premise about memoir and autobiography, here is what I wanted to say but didn’t: I think it’s a silly distinction. I think it’s a form of gate keeping. I think gives unearned credibility to writers within the traditional canon because they spelled words the British way and wore tweed. I think it’s implied that memoirs are written by women and autobiography is written by men. I think it’s kind of mean—in the sense of parsimony. As though we have to ration the number of stories.
I get that sitting around typing words about yourself looks easy. Texting, for example, is easy—far too easy. Posting on social is pretty easy unless, like my sister, you trying to use the form to help people.
However!
(Of course there is a however.)
Assembling your personal experiences into a long form that aspires to be readable requires a hell of a lot of courage and a hell of a lot of craft.
For the past month or so, I’ve been taking a break (mostly) from sending weekly editions of Survival by Book, because I am working on my book, Socially Distanced and hoo boy, I had forgotten how hard the writing life is outside of the good solid ground of writing to a form (ie. a cover letter, a white paper, a six-page Amazon executive brief, or a Substack newsletter). Competence, which gets you a long way if you’re working with an established structure and a ‘best practice’ standard, becomes almost moot. Courage and craft, on the other hand, are non-negotiable if you’re trying to strike out on your own and make it new.
Often these days, a part of the story I am shaping requires me to describe something that is, in one way or another, shameful or threatening to the social order. Sometimes it’s just lightly cringe, such as coming upon embarrassingly earnest journal entries written by my fundamentalist, twenty-two-year old self. Sometimes it’s mid-level cringe such as being twice-divorced. Sometimes it’s therapy-grade shameful or threatening, requiring self-inventory and truth-telling that borders on reckless—the kind of stuff that shall find its way into the book, but probably not the newsletter.
To tell these personal stories well—the happy along with the sad--I have to apply the craft of writing. This means spending a lot of time sorting through material to find the storylines and images that best lend themselves to multiple layers of meanings. You have to do this methodical, relentless, sorting even if the material is from your own vulnerable and precious life. For me, the process looks a bit like dumping a big box of words and phrases on a table. First, I look for the ones that sparkle, or shapeshift, or in some other way signal that they are special. Then, I push them into groups based on similarities in season, sound, color, or other signifiers—the relevant literary terms here are probably motif and theme. Next, I try to assemble these shimmering groups into a sequence that has a beginning, middle and end, and, unless I want to bore you to death, rising tension. Here, the relevant literary terms are probably conflict, catharsis, and closure (and, if I am Joseph Campbell, this sequence should also include ‘a woman as temptress,’ an ‘atonement with the father,’ and an ‘ultimate boon’ amongst other archetypes). This all has to happen before I can even get to things such as syntax, style, voice, and humor.
Going back and forth through the process of doing a fearless and searching moral inventory of your experiences and then detaching from those experiences enough to be able to sort, catalog, and rearrange them into something that gives literary pleasure is a lot of emotional and creative labor. Last year, when I was spending 98% of my life safely inside my house, I had time to do the junior varsity version of this work on the weekends for Survival by Book. This year, with more things that I might want to say “yes” to on the weekend and more ambitious writing goals, I am having to figure out how to work on my personal writing projects during the work week, as well. Suffice it to say that having enough time for this, as well as making sure I have clean clothes to wear, an occasional vegetable to eat, and the semblance of a social life is a challenge.
In conclusion, please do not cast shade on the memoirist.
~
When I am writing hard, there are a lot of things I can’t read because the writing style is distracting. I am hyper sensitive when I’m doing the word-sorting thing, and if not careful, I start imitating the style of whatever I’m reading in my own writing. It’s a bit like that thing that happens when you're talking with someone who has a different accent than you and you find yourself accidentally parroting their accent back to them.
Once in awhile, this porousness to the words of others can work in my favor, though, as was the case when I read Emily Ratajkowski’s new book, My Body, earlier this month. It’s an excellent collection of essays that are made of the lucid, unpretentious prose that I will spend the rest of my life trying to master. When it comes to a work of unflinching honesty, I might even have to toss in a comparison to Joan Didion, with the caveat that there is a quality of love for her fellow human beings in Ratajkowski’s essays that isn’t always present in Didion’s. For example, in her essay about her childhood, “The Woozies,” Ratajkowski writes about the selfishness, codependence, and neurosis that plagues all families at some point or another, while at the same time painting a picture of the bonds between parents and children that will have you calling your mom or dad just to tell them you love them.
The same deft handling of dialectical themes is true for the essays, “Blurred Lines” and “Buying Myself Back,” both of which the media has clickbaited into 180 character, “me, too” style synopses that are shadow versions of the real thing. “Blurred Lines” describes what it was like for Ratajkowksi to achieve career altering success for her role in a music video directed by a woman, staffed by women, and shot in a safe, fun, and even empowering way. It also describes what it was like for her to be nude in the video and what it was like when someone crossed the blurry line between professional and personal when it came to her being nude on set. In “Buying Myself Back,” she takes on similar themes of empowerment and exploitation while also bringing an interesting twist on how to leverage a non-fungible token (NFT). These essays and several others also engage directly with the paradox of how the success of her modeling career is the reason she had a large enough platform to secure a major book deal, as well as the reason people were skeptical about her being able to write a book of essays.
The throughline that was especially salient to me, though, was the universality of self-criticism in women and how it coexists with our awareness of our sexual power. It’s why I think men should read this book; it holds powerful insight into what men experience as mixed signals from women when it comes to sex, attraction, consent, and confidence. This interview with Trevor Noah captures a bit of this idea:
In it, Noah does an admirable job of asking challenging questions while making space for Ratajkowski to speak to the nuances she is trying to convey. I like that he asks her about the “paradox” of making a critique of the commodification of the body while profiting from it, which gives Ratajkowski the chance to say she’s making a critique of capitalism. I also like how she explicitly avoids, as she says, “blaming individuals,” and focuses on making a critique of the dynamics of power, noting that “this culture can be bad for both women and men.”
The other book that I could safely read without ruining my writing vibe these past few weeks was Michael Crichton’s 1988 autobiography, Travels. And, though I did not control the circumstances that led me to pairing the travel memoir of a wildly successful, multiply married, dead, white, male, writer, screenwriter, and director with the book, My Body, I am happy that it happened. Crichton and Ratajkowski are both creative rule-breakers and innovators within their professions and wildly financially successful within a system of rewards that makes them uncomfortable. But the violence—physical, structural and psychological—that Ratajkowski encountered before she turned thirty is almost wholly missing from the Crichton narrative which encompasses thirty years of his adult life. To me, it’s a fascinating contrast.
Here’s one example that I don’t think that Crichton would even have thought was notable: during his time as medical student, he stopped going to work when faced with a rotation in a chaotic psychiatric ward helmed by an incompetent attending physician. Let me say this again: he just skipped the rotation. Based on his telling, there were no consequences whatsoever. He went on doing fine at medical school and then once he graduated, he decided, on his own terms, to not be a medical doctor. As a woman, I found this occurrence of consequence-free, fully-formed self-preservation instinct in one’s early twenties to be breathtaking. Of course there are exceptions, but I don’t know very many women whose version of this story wouldn’t have come with a lot of anguished questioning of the self and ethics, as well as at least one, if not multiple, instance of physical vulnerability, outright harassment, sexist condescension, or career-ending censure. Would that we all had more of this kind of self-fulfilling chutzpah.
It could be noted that being a white man with Harvard credentials in the 1960s might have helped with the chutzpah. It almost certainly gave him the contacts that he needed to help him publish his first novel. On the other hand, his first novel was the mega best-seller, The Andromeda Strain, which he wrote while in his early twenties while also attending medical school (and not during the skipped psychiatry rotation.) It’s pretty hard to take that away from him, and I personally wouldn’t want to.
What matters to me, given how good this book is, was getting to go around the world with him. In Travels, Crichton gives us a lively series of vignettes that don’t take the reader through an explicit psychological and spiritual journey, but rather lets one unfold as a low-key second journey that runs in parallel to the travel diary. It’s a book about a highly examined life in which all of the questions are looked at and taken to their logical destination—whether the destination is the ends of the earth or the furthest reaches of the soul. He begins with nine chapters that could stand alone as an essay called something like, “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Medical School” and continues with stories of adventures in everything from trekking up Kilimanjaro, to deep sea diving off the coast of Bonaire, to directing the film, “The Great Train Robbery” in Ireland. Read it as a virtual escape to some of the most exotic places in the world; finish it for the surprisingly vulnerable and thought-provoking descriptions of meditation, auras, and other spiritual mysteries, and even an exorcism, albeit the crypto-occult, Hollywood version. It's a study what it could look like to never take anything for granted, including your capacity to heal and grow.
~
As I type this, I can hear the creak and groan of the iron gates that protect the American citadel being pulled back in and padlocked against the onslaught of the army of Covid. For me, it is all of a piece, this going back and forth across the line of demarcation on what we are doing right now. For months, we have been “opening up.” Now, we are “locking back down” to prevent the invasion of Omicron, FKA Nu, FKA as the SARS-CoV2-variant-of-concern, B.1.1.1.529.
The pleasure and joy of getting to travel outside of the U.S. last month is still painfully fresh in my mind. So, too is the fact that I think I might be too comfortable being inside my personal hobbit hole. Who will I be when this is over? What will my life be like? What should I be doing to prepare for what's next? Will this ever really be over? There are so many unsettling questions. We are all existential travelers now, clutching our tattered vaccine records while we border cross back and forth between Richard Scarry’s “Busy Busy Town” and the Sheremetyevo airport transit zone.
Substacker, researcher, and writer Scott Alexander’s essay, “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories” makes this ephemerality into an exercise in rhetoric. He starts with an imaginary dialog in which he explores the arbitrary nature of categorizing animals. What if whales could be fish? He asks. Would the story of Jonah in the Bible then be true? From there, he takes on the arbitrary nature of map borders “Real borders are, in fact, very weird,” he says.
The border between Turkey and Syria follows a mostly straight-ish line near-ish the 36th parallel, except that about twenty miles south of the border Turkey controls a couple of square meters in the middle of a Syrian village. This is the tomb of the ancestor of the Ottoman Turks, and Turkey’s border agreement with Syria stipulates that it will remain part of Turkey forever. And the Turks take this very seriously; they maintain a platoon of special forces there and have even threatened war if their “territory” gets “invaded” in the current conflict.
Next up are the medical categorizations we use in psychiatry and other medical disciplines. Alexander tells the story of an OCD patient who could not stop going back into her house to see if she had turned off her hairdryer. They tried all kinds of medicine and approaches. One day, a psychiatrist said, why don’t you just bring your hairdryer with you when you leave. Et Voila! The boundary on what is normal is redrawn and the patient is never late for work again.
Alexander then takes the case further, daring to explore the nature of gender categorization. As he says, the general assumption has been that the presence or absence of the Y chromosome is the deciding factor. But, as Alexander points out, this, too, is a border project. The categories we attribute to our bodies are also arbitrary—we, in fact, made them ourselves. Now, he’s not saying that categories don’t matter. He’s not saying we can just switch categories anytime we want to. On the contrary, he’s saying they matter a lot and we had better talk about them with a good deal of thought and logic. Switching the deciding factor from does the person have a Y chromosome to how do they identify is, he says, a “boundary-redrawing project.”
It can make for some boundaries that look a little bit weird – like a small percent of men being able to get pregnant – but as far as weird boundaries go that’s probably not as bad as having a tiny exclave of Turkish territory in the middle of a Syrian village. You draw category boundaries in specific ways to capture tradeoffs you care about.
He’s saying, look, we can reorganize our systems, and it might well be time, but let’s be smart about it and keep the big picture in mind. We need to make sure we can actually get something good when we do it. This makes sense to me as a matter of survival during historic hinge points. Go ahead and question the paradigms, but do it carefully. Borders and categories serve important, practical ends, this is no time to put limits on imagination or discernment.
What does this mean for us? It means we all have the freedom to travel outside the borders of conventional thinking even if we are stuck back inside our homes. We are not stuck with the old habits and assumptions. We do not have to use the categorization established by the tweed-wearing dead guys who would have spelled it as categorisation.
Whatever you are doing in your life right now—writing book, going to school, learning a trade, making a health care decision, getting married, staying married, not staying married, buying a house, selling a house, parenting a child, hosting a refugee, taking care of an aging parent—whatever it is—it’s a lot of work to stay open-minded and open-hearted to the possibilities for good outcomes in the face of large amounts of negative or polarizing information coming at you from the world. It’s especially hard when you feel like you risk being labeled as an outlier or contrarian. We all have risk factors for loneliness. Yet, we can make this easier for each other. We can make more space for the the infinite variety of the human soul. We do this by not letting our assumptions go unexamined because we “believe in science” or “it’s financially risky” or “it will be hard for the children.” Children are way better at this than we are, by the way. It's usually us who it will be hard for, not them. You don't have to be a writer to tip a few of your stories out on to a table and look for the ones that shimmer or shapeshift. What are they telling you? Where might you like to go in your personal development? The virus shouldn't be the only thing that gets to throw off a variant.
The borders between fact and fiction, bodies and souls, gender and sex, sex and love, class and race, public and private, selflessness and self-preservation, freedom and safety, risk and reward, and money and time are most definitely weird. This is the good news. It's one of the only truths we can count on right now. So let's get to it. Whither the border?
Holiday Gift Guide
Black Friday is so 2010. Why not shop the Doodle Dispatches Holiday Shop?
Pictured: whimsical Advent calendar; mat finish (ie. compostable) wrapping paper in “Sartorial Foxes;” mat finish wrapping paper in “Microdoodle Festive” (with just a hint of my personal favorite, “Sartorial Turkey Stocking Cap” in the background); and “Swordplay” coasters.
Pictured: professionally printed, 12 inch by 12 inch prints, signed and dated by the artist: “A Very Silly Dog,” “Courage Mes Amis,” “Tall Poppy”, and SBB’s personal favorite, “Comfort Reading.”
You can find more prints and kinds of gift wrap, as well as Christmas ornaments, and other delightful things at www.doodledispatches.com/shop
Need more ideas? How about Survival by Book t-shirts and hoodies?
Or, for the person who already has everything, how about a gift subscription to Survival by Book?
That’s it for this week. The writing goal for December is to get you one excerpt and one regular newsletter. I shall do my best. —xoxo, Courtney
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