On criticism, embarrassment and making art
Hello,
My new year resolution for 2022 was to work on feeling less self-conscious/embarrassed. Embarrassed of taking up space, of having a voice, of dreaming big, of being a person, of wanting to write. I felt seen when I came across the following paragraph in The Way She Closed The Door by Miriam Towes:
Another evening, I walked for miles on the river, feeling embarrassed about everything, specifically about writing, about being a person who moved words around, trying to make something. I mean, it was all so embarrassing, and it had to do with being a grandmother, a mother, a useless daughter who got exasperated trying to take care of her old mother, and was afflicted with this need to write things down.
Embarrassment has had a strong grip over me for as long as I can remember but it’s only in the last few years that the feeling shifted out of proportion. A couple of evenings ago I met a few of my closest friends for iftar. We came together after a long time apart and in the moment I remember thinking how warm, content and happy I was to be there, to have them in my life, to be seen and understood by them. But the moment I stepped away from them and made my way down the stairs to my train, my mind bombarded me with thoughts of how insensitive I was during the course of the evening, how they must be judging me for it, how I must have hurt their feelings. I fought the urge to message them and clarify my stand, my intentions. The embarrassment was so strong that by the time I got home and my husband asked me how the evening went, I burst into tears. I then made him listen to each interaction I was worried about and reassure me that it wasn’t as bad as I seemed to think it was. Finally, he told me, ‘they are your friends, they love you, they know who you are. They will never doubt your intentions.’
This seemed to help. I stopped crying. But his words opened up another understanding for me. Since my first book was published, I’ve become highly sensitive to the thought of being misunderstood by my loved ones. This is even as I become more detached from strangers reading my work and reacting to it. ‘They know who are you. They will never doubt your intentions’ is how I must have felt about most of my family at one point but then my book was published and they did misunderstand me and took offence and called me names. It’s been almost three years since then but I feel the repercussions of that estrangement even today.
Writing my book was an attempt to overcome the earlier embarrassment I felt for existing. But post-publication I ended up with even more embarrassment than I began with. Just when I was starting to feel overwhelmed by it all, I came across the following in the review of a PS5 game called Uncharted 4 in The White Pube:
I was on an art course because I’d been convinced from a young age that I was going to grow up to be a painter. I didn’t know that halfway through my degree I would be writing about art instead of making it. I felt funny about this shift, shifty. I couldn’t talk to my tutors about all this writing I was doing because then they’d know I’d stopped making art with my chest; they’d know I was the wolf among us now. So, this conversation with the artist was important to me. We spoke about my writing and nothing at all of art, and it felt good and secret and useful. It made me realise that writing was my priority. And in the end, our casual chat became a very special moment, because she made a request of me that I am still trying to fulfil to this day.
She asked me to keep a sense of embarrassment in my writing. Now, I realise that sounds like a neg. But she said that as I move forward, as I write more, as my writing gets more visible and my audience grows and changes, I should be careful to remember embarrassment. She spoke about radical vulnerability and then about embarrassment not just as subject matter but as a texture. I should never polish my writing past a certain point, she said. It should be an un-generic, unprofessional, emotional, personal thing. Embarrassment should be sought and protected in spite of the discomfort that comes with it. Embarrassment would give a text a soul, and with a soul it would stay mine.
I understood what she meant. It was like she’d come to give me a warning at the beginning of a fairytale before she disappeared never to be seen again. I’m still thinking about that conversation all these years later. I think she was onto something. Because yes, there’s pretty much always a layer of embarrassment when we’re at the very start of our relationship with making. Making any kind of art is embarrassing. Like, that’s a thing you made when you could have just left well alone, kept quiet.
This helped me understand that embarrassment is a natural (and maybe even crucial) part of the creating process. And if I’m feeling it more acutely in my life right now it must be because I’m making my life as one makes art. That my existence is art.
I thought I had healed from that bad reaction but it all came back in full force when I started writing a proposal for a new nonfiction book. I asked why I was doing this to myself. Maybe the following from Parul Sehgal’s review of Pure Colour by Sheila Heti answers it:
A Japanese folktale concerns a young acolyte so obsessed with drawing cats that the elderly and perplexed head priest sends him away. In time, he finds shelter in an abandoned temple that, unbeknownst to him, is haunted. But he has ink. He draws cats all over the walls, the beams, and the floors. Tiring, he tucks himself into a closet to sleep, but wakes to the sounds of violent struggle. When the temple falls silent, he creeps out. The mangled body of a giant goblin rat lies on the ground. From the walls, the beams, and the floors, his cats look on, their mouths bright with blood.
What writer does not dream of her work rising up to protect her? What writer does not, at some point, endure the opposite—the awful vulnerability of her words in the world, and her inability to defend them from being misread, even mutilated, by those goblin rats of malice, envy, laziness, mere incomprehension?
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti is an excellent meditation on art, criticism, grief and more. I’m reading it slowly, a few pages a week. In February I watched Merve Emre’s interview Sheila Heti for London Review Bookshop and I often come back to this conversation. There is so much here to unpack and reflect on, especially what it means to be a writer today, the purpose of making art and how we are all here to critique, that we don’t actually enjoy it but we won’t be human without it.
Emre asked what it feels like to write wildly successful works and have them read the wrong way, to essentially be misunderstood. Heti’s reply below, transcribed:
Art for me, making it, is the only way that I can really encounter the world so that is in conflict with this egoistic desire/ambition to be great. It’s in conflict with this very sincere childlike impulse to make something. And I guess it’s in negotiating those that the trickiness of being an adult artist lies. Like, you have to stay as 100% wholly close to that original making lust. And then also have a relationship to being in the world because I think that the world [pauses] it’s an interesting thing with Ferrante like sort of disappearing but I’m interested in the appearing. I think that there is a lot of value in appearing, you know? And I don’t really exactly know what that is but I think it has to do with conversation, encountering other people and in some ways it’s more godlike to disappear and more humble to appear even if it’s seen as more great and egoistical to appear. In some ways it’s actually the opposite. Weirdly.
When I was in the throes of receiving criticism from loved ones, I used to think about Ferrante. I used to envy her for keeping her identity separate from her work and hence (maybe) protecting herself from (certain kind of) criticism. But after listening to Heti, I feel almost proud to have withstood criticism and continue to make art. I feel more human.
I’m looking forward to reading Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins. The following paragraph from the NYT review reminded me of the work of another author I love, Claire-Louise Bennett.
For one thing, she is a rereader, circling the same texts for decades. She describes the hallucinogenic realization that to read a book is to absorb, consciously or not, all the other books that influenced that book, as well as the books that influenced those books, and so on; to interpret even one paragraph on a page is to vector endlessly back in time.
Checkout-19 by Claire-Louise Bennett is a reader’s book, a book about books, a book about living as a writer. I read it over a few weeks in spring and came out feeling like a different (truer) version of myself. Another book that I can’t stop thinking about is Vladimir by Julia May Jonas. Both are different from each other but in my mind came together in their narrator’s preoccupation with creating/writing, a preoccupation that I share with them.
The latter also had a mother-daughter relationship (a personal weakness of mine in books) that I found quite interesting. A few other books on the subject which I enjoyed so far this year include Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, The Home by Penelope Mortimer (a writer who led a fascinating life) and most breathtaking of all — Deceived with Kindness by Angelica Garnett. I’m looking forward to my paperback copy of My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley arriving next week. I’ve heard great things about it and the way it explores mother-daughter relationships.
In December I finished the first draft of my novel and earlier in the year I started rewriting it. After two attempts at rewriting, I gave up on the draft completely, deciding that writing fiction wasn’t for me. It took me a while to realise that I was approaching it in exactly the same way as I did my memoir. And that both these forms are too different for me to be approaching them in the same way. My major obstacle has been plot so now I’m back to the outline process, making all the important decisions at this stage before going back to my draft. Shakespeare and Company’s podcast episode with George Saunders (on reading better, writing better and living better) is helping me stay motivated through it all.
A few weeks ago I came across a book in the neighbourhood book box by Yukio Mishima titled The Floric of the Beasts. It’s not the kind of book I usually pick up but I look forward to reading it after I came across this profile of the author.
I went to see Francis Bacon’s paintings at the Royal Academy and I can’t stop thinking about them. I feel like a whole new language has opened up for me since spending time with Bacon’s work. I read up on him obsessively after and found this review of his work titled Francis Bacon’s Frightening Beauty quite enlightening. I’ll be thinking about the following for a long time to come:
Bacon wanted his work to convey human emotions, but not unambiguously. He said, “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.”
I also went to No 20 to see Tom de Freston’s exhibition titled From Darkness. If you are in or around London, do make the trip. It was especially moving to be surrounded by his work after reading his excellent memoir Wreck: Gericault's Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea.
I got myself a Mubi subscription to watch Drive My Car — a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. I loved it. I watched The Souvenir a few years ago, completely forgot about it and recently learned that there exists The Souvenir Part II. When does a story end? Who decides? Does anything ever end? I watched it yesterday and found most of it to be quite engrossing and intelligent, especially the scenes with the mother and daughter.
I finished reading The Movement by Ayisha Malik and it’s not left me. A thought-provoking book, clever and funny. It’s out in July and I want to put it on your radar. Last night I started reading the diaries of Alma Mahler-Werfel. I’m racing through her short, breathless, astute entries.
While trying to find the Sheila Heti interview (above) I came across two pieces I can’t wait to read:
‘Be Silent, Recover My Strength, Start Again’: In Conversation with Elena Ferrante by Sheila Heti
Get a Lobotomy by Sally Rooney, a review of Sheila Heti’s Motherhood
Also on my reading list for today: An interview with Julia Roberts (after Brandon Taylor tweeted about it), Rachel Cusk in Greece and ONTD Original: The Complete History of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard (feels impossible to be on the internet right now without engaging with this).
For those observing Ramadan, I hope the month is going well for you. And if you have children in your life, may I suggest an Eid gift for them? It’s my first children’s book and is titled The Most Exciting Eid. It’s illustrated by the most talented Abeeha Tariq. I had the pleasure of signing copies of this book at Harrods and Selfridges. It’s a joy to be received so warmly by so many children. I hope I can write more children’s books once I make it through my two current drafts (fiction and nonfiction). The drafts are also the reason you see me so sporadically here. I intend for this to be a temporary pattern.
Hope you are enjoying spring and staying safe.
Zeba