Yet sometimes even I think there must be something sick about all this confessionalism. This self-loathing comes out of the culture. We cannot help but internalize an absolute disgust for both the diaristic and confessional in our literary criticism. Fitzgerald brutalized for his confessional essays he wrote for Esquire, John O’Hara dismissing his “orgy of self-pity.” This prohibition against writing the self, the fleshly, the feminine, that comes out of modernism. A disgust for Anaïs Nin is perhaps a disgust for the girls with their online diaries.
PHOTOGRAPHY: bad to write the naked, the true, the confessional. I think that is often why we pull back. These great lulls on the Internet. We are sometimes horrified by what we have written, we press erase, or some literally scratch out the post, the strike-through bisecting the words, so that you can still read underneath. We are stricken with this sense sometimes that we are too much self, we gaze at our navels. Often we threaten to take down our blog. This act called “suiciding.” Or we put ourselves on a hiatus, and then come back a few days or a month later. Our dramatic disappearing acts. The theatrical comebacks in broad day.
We are always ready to shut down the blog because we’re worried about who’s reading it, family members, workplaces surveilling us, would-be employers. We worry over being disowned for writing the autobiographical, for divulging info about our psychiatric histories, the truth of our toxic girl-pasts, our gooshy, goopy, confessions. We worry over being found out — by coworkers, family, our students. So some of us already veil ourselves in pseudonyms, in password-protect.
I think about this need for public confession, and how this is often denigrated as not writing. It is perhaps the most crucial thing however to write of one’s breakdown. Why do I feel the need to plug in to my blog and write of my sleepless nights, my three o’clocks in the morning? Communion perhaps. Company. Some sort of public sharing. But when is it oversharing? Self-indulgent? Who owns these terms and who gets to decide? How painful and difficult it is to write of the unraveling, for so many reasons.
For the woman is deemed as dangerous who goes out of bounds, who lacks boundaries (by writing the self, the body, the emotion). The woman writer who dares to spill out of bounds is disciplined, contained. Dodie Bellamy in her essay collection Academonia writing about the unemployability of the woman writer who writes explicitly about emotions and the body. (HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES. We are policed, surveyed.)
The recent incident of a professor at the University of Houston rhetorically disciplining and shaming the poet Jennifer Lowe, who is in their Ph.D. program in creative writing, for the confessional nature of her heartfelt, poetic, blog of the quotidian. As opposed to swallowing this, J.Lowe went public in a beautiful and visceral essay on HTMLGIANT, building this event into a reflection about this emerging form, and the oft-threatened position of the confessional woman writer within these institutions, and, even broader than that, the feelings of shame and smallness women writers can carry around with them, the self-censoring violence.
Although the blog is an emerging form, this question of women swallowing panic about the autobiographical, and often censoring themselves, or being asked to, is nothing new.
The horror/shame/worry: of being discovered, disciplined, ostracized. This is what that student in my creative nonfiction workshop was worried about too, I think. The reason why women use pseudonyms, women have always used pseudonyms. The Brontë Sisters become the Bells. Perhaps Anon is a Woman, Woolf muses in Room. Perhaps this is still true. Genius is a Man, Anon is a Woman.
So, the decision to write the private in public, it is a political one. It is a counterattack against this censorship. To tell our narratives, the truth of our experiences. To write our flawed, messy selves. To fight against the desire to be erased. Why try to make these personal confessions public? Why write one’s diary in public? To counter this shaming and guilt project. To refuse to swallow. To refuse to scratch ourselves out. To refuse to be censored, to be silent. Or to circle around that silence, like a traumatic scene.
Part of the occupation of a woman writer, is still, perhaps, killing the angel in the house, fighting against repression, as Virginia Woolf wrote so long ago. A spiritual struggle against the good girls inside of us (two oppositional forces: we want to write, we want to be loved). Zelda too was forced to choose between her marriage, and being a writer.
But the important thing now is to write. To write. To not hold back. To tell our narratives. To not be stopped. Publishing, even, can come later. But if you censor your writing with a view towards employment, what you’re writing is probably going to be safe and hygienic anyhow.
I decided at some point I was going to approach the position of being a writer in society as being an orphan. I have begun to cultivate this status as an outsider. I think the mad wives have allowed me to do this. The bloggers that I have formed kindred bonds with allow me. They make me feel less alone. I am outside, writing in the margins, for my fellow illegimitate sisters.
I realize my blog may be an impediment, maybe a serious handicap, to future job prospects. And maybe one interpretation could be that it’s immature to go and mouth off about your life and your encounters with the world in such a public space. Maybe others would see it still as a form of self-immolation. I cannot for the life of me get hired here. I’m beginning to get a complex about it. Yes, girls write in their LiveJournals and Tumblrs but I’m not a girl anymore, not in person, I’m supposed to be polished, professional, some packaged thing. On FFIMS I often agonize about whether to tear down the blog and put up a polished professional author website, with reviews of my books and my readings. But I’m tired of trying to hurl my girl-body against the great big unfeeling fortress of academia and old-guard literary publishing.
Perhaps we are already disowned by the culture-at-large. Our writing is a way to fight against this dismissal.
The blogging community of writers that I link to on my blogroll often functions as a legitimizing network — we compare ourselves to each other, we develop an alternative canon. Even though so many of the writers who I communicate with online are outsiders — outside the institutions of writing, whether the major publishing houses or the universities and their creative writing programs. Outside the poetics coteries of academia. We are writers because we say we are. We reassure each other of our potential genius. Because so much of being a writer is, I think, about identity.
I have been told often through this process of becoming a writer that I need to get a thicker skin. Get a thicker skin, they all tell me, the Professor Xs, the editors. Perhaps I don’t need to have a thicker skin. Perhaps it’s okay that I am porous, sensitive, excessive, emotional. But we do need to be brave. We do need to write despite it all.
We need to launch the Bel Esprit for ourselves. We need to save ourselves somehow. Find a space that’s safe, that’s our own. We do not have the unimpeded minds that Virginia Woolf thought was so necessary for great, transcendent literature. But for some of us our blogs are our reclaimed spaces. The publisher of my second novel recently tried to discipline what I wrote on Frances Farmer, advising me to update it more often, urging me to be more positive, to have more fun. Instead I wrote about the alienation and violation of this experience. As the poet and blogger Rebecca Loudon wrote me in the comments as support: “Your blog is like your swimsuit area, no one else can touch it.”