On Taking Yourself Seriously

...she types from a Pep Boys at which she had no idea what they meant by "wheel lock key"

Something beautiful happened to me recently, and it got me thinking a lot about celebrating, which then had me thinking about the permission we all need to take ourselves seriously.

In December, I won the Chicago Review of Books for Best Fiction award, or the CHIRBy, for Hot Springs Drive.

That is Rebecca Makkai!! announcing my win

When you publish a book, which is a wonderful miracle and should be celebrated, nonetheless you are filled with a miasma of emotion in which you ask yourself, have I done enough? Is this book enough? Is it doing well? How do I know if it’s doing well? Do people like it? Do people like me? Am I pretty? You look for external validation because it feels like the only way to know. There was a moment, just before you submitted it to your agent or your editor, in which it was still wholly yours, and you felt proud of it, or at the very least you felt an ownership of it. But then it comes out and it belongs to the world. For me, personally, I struggle mightily with taking myself seriously. If I feel an emotion, I first figure out how to make someone laugh about it before expressing it. I downplay any achievements. I rarely let myself grasp onto any pride in my work. This, I believe, is due to a learned pattern of never showing pride, never thinking I’m special. But what I’ve come to understand is that I end up believing it. I end up believing that my work is laughable, that I am a joke, that I shouldn’t expect anything from publication. I circumvent any criticism by saying it first myself, often leaving the listener or reader sort of baffled. And I don’t want to do that anymore! I want to celebrate every small win. I want to feel proud. I want to take myself seriously.

After I won, lots of writers in the room approached me to say they loved my enthusiasm, that they were excited and energized by my speech. I think writers are some of the most hard-working, self-motivated, dedicated workers there are, and I think we have lost the ability to truly celebrate. When I heard my name called, when I heard that I’d won, I was filled with joy, and I wanted to share it, and I had finally learned how important it was to feel it.

Taking yourself seriously is a practice. In the novel-in-a-year workshop I teach, I’ve heard time and again how important it was to them that they were taken seriously as novelists, that what they were working toward making was real, that it mattered.

There’s a cynicism that I dislike in myself, an urge toward reducing my feelings or experiences into something people can laugh at. I think that urge started honorably. I think I was searching for a palatable way to connect, and I think that is true for a lot of us on social media. Pain can so easily be slotted into an established meme format, or a recycled tweet (Men would rather X than go to therapy), and it truly does feel like we’re all part of the same human experience, but when that’s all it is, when everything starts to feel like it must fit into those easily recognized online patterns, actual emotion and true connection are no longer the point. I’m not saying anything new here. The gamification of everyday life in the form of likes and shares has been exhaustively analyzed. But for me, personally, I’m tired of being the first to the joke.

I read that astounding Rachel Aviv article in the New Yorker about Alice Munro’s horrific treatment of her youngest daughter, and this is not the most important part of the piece, but Aviv has an anecdote in there about how the word “earnest” was a slur in the Munro household. In a home that refused to meet Alice’s daughter Andrea’s reality head on, that refused to acknowledge it, to say it happened, and to take appropriate action, being earnest was also verboten. And thus being earnest was akin to bravery.

I think of how often a friend will text or email something like, Life is hard because I’m broke, lol, or I’m just having a bad day today, lol. That “,lol” has absolved us of our crime of earnestness, has excused the listener from actively engaging, which all of us are forgetting how to do anyway.

Why couldn’t Alice Munro abide earnestness? Her fiction is sincere and true and clear-eyed, all of which adds up to a deep earnestness that feels hard-won but natural. What is it about earnestness that felt wrong to her personally? That felt bad? I have a theory, and it has to do with being a woman. Being earnest belies being vulnerable. When you are making your way in the world, which was very much a man’s world in Munro’s time and is to this day, vulnerability can cost you. Leaving yourself open to the world the way a writer must also invites cruelty to rush in. The world is uncareful, anathema to a writer, to a woman and mother. Women, and perhaps mothers in particular, are especially adept at compartmentalizing, at filing one event away so it doesn’t interfere with the more pressing thing. Munro watched from inside herself, had compartmentalized her marriage, her child’s pain, her own role in all of it, so effectively that she wrote herself right out of the story. She failed at protecting her daughter; she did well to protect herself. Had she felt able to look directly at herself, without first fitting on the lens of her male partner, the male world at large, perhaps she could have shown some conviction. This would require taking herself seriously. Allowing for the messy emotion and the unanswerable questions to coexist with her duty to her daughter. Easier said than done, a tragedy instead.

Why hasn’t it felt safe for me to be earnest? I could make the argument that writing and publishing a book is the ultimate form of earnestness, of handing over one’s soul and allowing the world to pick at it in the pure hope that they simply read it. Part of me wants to shriek, Pathetic! And part of me remembers how important reading is to me, to my practice, to my life, and I want to shove that other me down the stairs.

And so I ran to the stage, and I celebrated, and it felt very, very good.

Some of the best advice I’ve ever been given was told to me by a known grifter. Somehow, that makes what she said all the more true. I was on the verge of making either a life-changing decision or staying right where I was, and I could not see the right thing to do. Her advice: Listen to what the voices are telling you in the dark. I think she meant the voices that exist inside me that are not first filtered through my own inhibitions and doubts about myself, my fears of what the world thinks, my bruised childhood. That she first seemed to be saying, You still exist. The pure you. And that she next seemed to be saying, You have never stopped trying to help yourself along. Listen.

I’d like to write as beautifully as Alice Munro; that has long been my dream. Now it’s tempered with, But not at the expense of my own humanity. And yet humanity has been my life’s work, of highlighting it in the darkest places, of showing its maddening shortcomings, its baffling contradictions, its striving for grace, its hideous beauty. I wrote an imperfect novel about a flawed woman who made some terrible choices, and I am proud of that.

What does taking oneself seriously look like? For me, it’s a genuine acceptance of praise, or in this case, an award. It’s not a downplaying or a brush-off. It’s pure, heartfelt gratitude. It’s a confidence that I know how to work, and that I work hard. It’s knowing I still have so much to learn, so far to go. And it’s remembering that when I feel unworthy, or doubtful, there is always, always the work. The making. It’s knowing that I will fail, that I have failed, but sometimes there will be moments where I’m wearing a sparkly shirt and holding a cherished token and yelling, My kids will be so proud! into a microphone.

Today, after publishing five books, the CHIRBy is my first award I’ve ever won or been nominated for. And I am so fucking happy.

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Did you see that Britney’s younger son came to visit her for Christmas? She posted a video of him opening a present, which appeared to be an enormous black shirt that he pulled from the tissue and held aloft. “Wow, that is nice, that’s really nice,” she said, as though she’d never seen it before, hadn’t picked it out, like maybe it was a gift from another family member? But then he thanks her and she says “You’re welcome.” So it is from her but not from her. She hadn’t seen him in two and a half years or maybe three. She says they’re like twins except he’s a boy and she’s a girl. Her posts about him are sandwiched between the requisite videos of her dancing in a bikini whose bottoms she keeps trying to push down. I think a lot about what growing up being endlessly objectified must do, how it might make you want to just be yourself, a mom panning to her pretty Christmas tree in excitement, but also have an unquietable urge to show your body, to have it viewed and assessed, to be looked at with blank desire. Britney’s posts often feel like she is cycling through selves, landing on one for a very brief moment, living inside it as fully as she can, and then cycling to the next one. There’s that compartmentalization again. Her son is a young man now, able to meet her where she is maybe, able to let her mother him, buy him a nice shirt, at the very least ask an assistant to go out and buy him a nice shirt. Of course I teared up when I saw these posts. Britney the mother, Britney the child.

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I’m reading Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones, and wondering how I have only come to it now. It’s Cruddy meets The Road. One of the novels I’m writing is set in a future dystopia in which women have lost almost all their rights, and so Dibbell’s book feels like it’s in conversation with what I’m trying to do. I feel egged on, encouraged, enthralled, excited. I, the narrator, is very funny and very guarded. The world feels real, nothing ever explained all that thoroughly, which makes my mind feel alive with questions.

I went to a party on New Year’s Eve, something I haven’t done in years, not since before I was a mom. I have felt a bone tiredness, a weariness, a loss of socialization skills, for years now. There are a lot of reasons for that—I’ve always been a homebody, I have three kids, I am an introverted extrovert, the golden age of television, et cetera—but dancing at a party in my neighbor’s house and kissing my husband at midnight felt like a bit of a reawakening. Happy New Year, here’s to reawakenings.