Hello,
My Saturday mornings are usually reserved for reading the week’s (sometimes month’s) bookmarked articles, the ones I didn’t get a chance to skim through in between work emails, chores and life. I started with Parul Sehgal’s The Case Against the Trauma Plot. I love Sehgal’s work and devour anything she writes. She was the reason I bought a NYT subscription and when she moved to The New Yorker I shelled out money for that too. But something about this piece didn’t quite hit the spot. Luckily for me, I had Brandon Taylor’s substack rebuttal next on my to-read list. In emotional support trauma Taylor goes where I wanted Sehgal to go. And then a bit further. I found Taylor’s take a lot more compassionate without being sentimental. I appreciate that in a writer. His take on writing from life was interesting too:
There was a moment recently when a friend expressed a feeling of betrayal that I had taken some features of his for a story. He said something like Nothing in that story is real. It’s nothing like how I am. And I said, Right. Because it’s not you. And he said But people will think it is real. People read fiction as real now. This friend is a writer. Of nonfiction. We both knew that there was nothing real in the portrayal of the character outside of a few glancing details. Anyone who knows him knows that the character is nothing like him. Has nothing at all to do with him, in fact. He knows it. I know it. Everyone who matters knows it. But he felt that other people would be apt to read too deeply into the story and would think that he was one way instead of another. And I can understand that. I can understand his feeling of betrayal. I apologized. We moved on.
But I have been thinking about that lately. The way that people read fiction these days, on the hunt. One of my creative writing teachers used to describe the kind of attention he wanted us to bring to workshop stories as reading like a prosecutor. This strikes me as a form of paranoid reading in which the reader approaches a text from the defensive supposition that the author is out to deceive and beguile and misdirect. You look for holes in the author’s defense through which the poorly disguised light of biography shines. I think it’s very boring, personally. I have said this before in other essays and in interviews, but I don’t find biography very interesting. I don’t find resonance between an author’s life and their work interesting either. I simply do not care if a character is someone I know or is based on someone I know. That sort of thing stopped being interesting to me when I began to write stories and realized how mundane the alchemizing of real life into fiction is. And how ubiquitous. And yet, in the imagination of many readers, countless readers, there’s this notion that writers are secretive and are carrying out mysterious experiments on the fabric of reality in our little dens and caves and workshops.
As a writer who is moving between nonfiction and fiction, this lack of interest is very much of interest to me. Earlier in the week I read Passage to Parenthood by Akhil Sharma. I think Sharma is one of the few writers whose fiction and nonfiction reads equally brilliantly. He confronts his truth in a way that few writers do. As an example, from the passage on choosing an egg donor for IVF:
A few of the young women were very pretty. One Brazilian woman was achingly so. I was attracted to these women and felt confused by my desire. Because theoretically my sperm were going to fertilize their eggs, it was almost as if I were going to impregnate them. This felt dishonest to my marriage. Also, we would presumably have a child who somewhat resembled the donor, and so the attraction I felt toward the young women seemed creepy and vaguely incestuous.
In Passage to Parenthood he also mentions his parents a couple of times:
My sense that I was worthless had come, in part, from my mother, who I believe is mentally ill (a diagnosis she disagrees with). I remember her telling me that people wouldn’t even spit on me if it weren’t for her. (She now denies this, along with most of my other recollections of our conversations.)
My father grew up in a troubled home, and if he hears good news he shakes the news suspiciously until the happiness dies. When I told him I had got tenure, he suggested that I was foolish to be happy since I still wouldn’t earn much money. Once, my mother wanted to get hearing aids, and he told her, “Why? If, by mistake, some good news does come for you, I will write it down.”
I recognised them immediately from his novel Family Life. And I’m thinking of him again in light of reading Brandon Taylor’s thoughts on writing from life. It’s been years since I read Family Life but I continue to be haunted by it. Would I feel differently about this novel if I didn’t know that it was based on his life? I wonder. But today I’m thinking about the woman who inspired Akhil Sharma’s best known short story titled If You Sing Like That For Me. He wrote about the woman in Why I Hate My Best Short Story. In it he revealed that a married woman seduced him when he was fifteen and that their affair carried on for a decade. The piece ends:
I’m surprised that, decades later, I am still so affected by her. In general, I try not to think too much about my past. Yet I read “If You Sing Like That for Me” now and I find myself jumping out of my skin. After each paragraph, I have to get up from my desk and pace around. Talking about the story, my tone becomes contemptuous. It is strange to think that, to readers, this story means nothing like what it means to me. It is strange, also, to think that I created Anita because I was at one time in love with X, and that while the sympathy I extended to my fictional character was worthwhile, the person who motivated it was arguably undeserving of the same. But that is what it means to read and write fiction.
At the end of last year I completed the first draft of my first novel. I imagined writing a novel would be different from writing a memoir. In a lot of ways, it is. But also, essentially, it’s the same. And that scares me. With nonfiction you write what you know. You write with a certain amount of self-awareness, even self-consciousness. You feel like you are in control of the narrative. But in fiction what you don’t know writes itself and reveals to others something about yourself that you haven’t yet figured out. What I’m clumsily trying to say here is that I am feeling even more vulnerable while writing fiction than I ever did while writing my memoir. This has come as a surprise to me.
It got me thinking about the relationship between vulnerability and honesty. Vulnerability was not modelled to me in any positive way growing up. To be vulnerable was to be weak, it was to open one’s self up for emotional abuse. The opposite of vulnerability is the appearance of perfection and that’s what I was taught to pursue as my life goal. Brené Brown put a finger on it in an episode of How To Fail with Elizabeth Day. She said something about perfectionism that put my entire childhood in perspective: Perfectionism really comes down to one question ‘what will people think?’ and you have already lost when that’s your driving question because there is no way to control perception or manage what people think.
But changing one’s pursuit from perfectionism to self-compassion isn’t as easy as taking the first exit. To unlearn a primary belief system that’s shaped our sense of self requires hard work. And it is made harder by the obstacles others place in our way. It took me a long time to understand that perfectionism only works if everyone else is pursuing it too. Because what would be the point of achieving conventional success when others have stopped valuing it? This is why our vulnerability threatens those around us. You think it’s because they don’t want us to be happy, but really it’s because they are too scared to make room for happiness in their own lives. Our vulnerability reminds them of their own cowardice, and who wants to be constantly reminded of that?
I started the new year with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. Incidentally the book is mentioned in Parul Sehgal’s trauma piece and alluded to in Taylor’s newsletter too. Another highlight of my January reading was Lily King’s short story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. I am a big fan of her writing since I read Writers & Lovers in 2020. I was ecstatic to discover there were more books by her to read and Euphoria is definitely one of the unmissable ones. Speaking of unmissable, make sure to get yourself a copy of Wolfskin by Lara Moreno, translated by Katie Whittemore. It’s a remarkable and piercing look at family, human connections, cruelty, motherhood, loss, anxiety, control and broken relationships. Above all, it’s a story about two sisters who are trying to find their way back to each other. Masterfully translated!
I read a couple of brilliant French novels in translation — The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir and Babylon by Yasmina Reza. About Babylon I wrote to a friend that middle-class dinner parties going wrong is now my favourite genre. In response she recommended Sally Potter’s The Party which is now on my list. On the topic of films, I enjoyed The Lost Daughter on Netflix. I still remember the way my heart split open for Leda when reading Ferrante’s novel.
In response to my previous letter a friend asked if I enjoy transcribing/translating from Urdu and Hindi. I actually loathe it because I know I’m butchering the languages that are so dear to me. I try to avoid it when I can but through my limited exposure to South Asian thinkers I sometimes come across ideas that I want to ponder over with you. Like this moment from Hadiqa Kiani’s interview. Kiani is a Pakistani pop star turned actor. She was asked if she missed the presence of a man [partner] in her life. Kiani replied: If my companion is insecure of my success then I did rather not have one. Pretty standard answer. Then she asked the interviewer, ‘Shall I tell you the biggest cost I’ve paid for my music?’ Below is her response to her own question:
My own loved ones became insecure. That’s the biggest cost. And sometimes I think to myself: why did I choose this? I didn’t choose this to become famous. I chose my passion. It wasn’t my agenda or my target or my motive to become famous. To be recognised by everyone around me, to be called larger than life, THE Hadiqa Kiani, icon and role model etc. I didn’t choose this for myself. But now sometimes I get scared of too much success. I tell myself not to be too successful in case it gives my loved ones a complex. I don’t want them to have a complex about me. They are established. But I’m scared. I feel it deeply.
This is an unusual amount of honesty from a South Asian woman of such popularity. The kind of insecurity she mentions takes up the space usually reserved for self-awareness, honesty and vulnerability. And without these, it’s hard to have a conversation, to reconnect, to feel joy for those succeeding in life.
From around the internet I enjoyed Hanya Yanagihara’s New Yorker profile, this very reflective interview with actor Ben Whishaw, Farrah Storr’s newsletter on saying farewell to motherhood and Brandon Taylor’s thoughts on West Elm Caleb via Jane Austen.
It’s been a halting start to the new year for me. My thoughts feel cloudy and my intentions unclear. I’m struggling to write. I’ve to keep reminding myself that I’m grieving. That things will get better. That I’ll find my way back to myself. If you are feeling the same, I extend these reassurances to you. Because they are true.
Zeba
On fiction and nonfiction
As a writer of fictionalised memoir who aspires to one day write fiction, I find these musings on fiction and non-fiction comforting and helpful. Thank you, and wishing you all the best with the continued work on your novel.
This is such a beautiful letter. Thank you for sharing.