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fandomnumbergenerator) wrote2018-12-30 11:37 am
fandomnumbergenerator) wrote2018-12-30 11:37 am
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Struggling with A Little LIfe
I have been watching myself get more or more disillusioned with fiction, not trusting fiction writers to tell stories sensitively. I am writing a memoir, and so I have been immersing myself in memoirs and romans a clef, looking for comp titles and also just trying to understand the craft. And so I read a lot of stories where I feel like I trust that the author knows what they’re talking about, and that if something shocking happens I am able to trust the author’s authority on the topic of their own experiences.
Somewhere I read a counter to the chestnut, “write what you know,” which was, “write what you understand.” And I think that’s where I run into problems with fiction. People trying to imagine their characters into situations that the writer has no experience with. And no understanding of.
Reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I kept being thrown out of the story by the author’s choices. I stopped half way through to read spoilers on Wikipedia because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it. And found two statements that really struck me:
the novel can be considered a rumination on the strengths and the limits of romantic love, friendship, and relationships among men.
In an article written for New York Magazine, Yanagihara states that “one of the things [she] wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never got better… [for him] to begin healthy (or appear so) and end sick – both the main character and the plot itself”.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life (retrieved 2018/12/30)
They really brought home to me how many dominoes the author had to set up to make Jude’s story such a tragedy. It wasn’t that I felt like the characters didn’t ring true — it was the situation. The extremity of Jude’s trauma, the overwhelming success of the four friends, Jude’s ability to get through his adult life without having psychiatric medication forced upon him.
I don’t think that what I’m asking for is a happy ending. I’m writing an addiction memoir and there’s a huge pressure to have a redemption arc. (My creative writing instructions have been unimpressed by my argument that the fact that I am alive to write the book is all the redemption arc the reader should need.) pAnd the way a lot of writers get around that is to write a roman a clef instead of a memoir, because you are allowed to have a more complicated ending if it is a novel. I’m thinking of a lot of books by women that were too messy to be considered prestige literature (The Torn Skirt, Suicide Blonde, House Rules, I Love Dick, Green Girl, Zipper Mouth). But even there, the writer is not killing off the main character, and also not setting up a whole architecture of despair to punish that character.
I’m thinking in particular of Heather Lewis’s Notice which is a staggeringly grim but also beautiful story which was published posthumously after the author’s suicide. Even that story doesn’t kill off the protagonist, and though it was published with the meta-text of the implied suicide of the narrator after the book ends, the unnamed narrator does at least survive to the end of the book.
When I was using heroin and speed, a lot of my friends and acquaintances had a history of childhood sexual assault or physical violence. A know a number of people who did sex work when they were younger than 18. And those are just the people who felt comfortable confiding in me.
It felt very personal to me, that Yanagihara was misrepresenting my friends and then torturing and killing them. It also felt politically dangerous. I’ve spent a number of years involved with harm reduction and at the fringes of sex worker activism, an arena where fictional stories about trafficking and abuse have a real impact on policy and enforcement decisions. And so stories that are so far outside the norm of childhood sexual exploitation feel manipulative in their own way. A melodrama of suffering.
I realize these are all arguments that are leveled against fanfic in the purity wars. But somehow it bothers me much more with prestige (i.e. literary) fiction than with fanfic. Fanfic is amateur and crowdsourced — there is no mechanism of selection, censorship, and gatekeeping for what is posted on AO3. So yeah there’s a lot of fanfic about drug use, sex works, and trauma really frustrates me. But it just seems much lower stakes. I can test out dozens of fics and find the ones that ring true to me. Which are usually the ones where it feels like the author has a deep understanding of the subject matter, either because they are mining details from their own life or because it is coming out of an obsessive interest.
Somewhere I read a counter to the chestnut, “write what you know,” which was, “write what you understand.” And I think that’s where I run into problems with fiction. People trying to imagine their characters into situations that the writer has no experience with. And no understanding of.
Reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, I kept being thrown out of the story by the author’s choices. I stopped half way through to read spoilers on Wikipedia because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it. And found two statements that really struck me:
the novel can be considered a rumination on the strengths and the limits of romantic love, friendship, and relationships among men.
In an article written for New York Magazine, Yanagihara states that “one of the things [she] wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never got better… [for him] to begin healthy (or appear so) and end sick – both the main character and the plot itself”.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life (retrieved 2018/12/30)
I don’t think that what I’m asking for is a happy ending. I’m writing an addiction memoir and there’s a huge pressure to have a redemption arc. (My creative writing instructions have been unimpressed by my argument that the fact that I am alive to write the book is all the redemption arc the reader should need.) pAnd the way a lot of writers get around that is to write a roman a clef instead of a memoir, because you are allowed to have a more complicated ending if it is a novel. I’m thinking of a lot of books by women that were too messy to be considered prestige literature (The Torn Skirt, Suicide Blonde, House Rules, I Love Dick, Green Girl, Zipper Mouth). But even there, the writer is not killing off the main character, and also not setting up a whole architecture of despair to punish that character.
I’m thinking in particular of Heather Lewis’s Notice which is a staggeringly grim but also beautiful story which was published posthumously after the author’s suicide. Even that story doesn’t kill off the protagonist, and though it was published with the meta-text of the implied suicide of the narrator after the book ends, the unnamed narrator does at least survive to the end of the book.
When I was using heroin and speed, a lot of my friends and acquaintances had a history of childhood sexual assault or physical violence. A know a number of people who did sex work when they were younger than 18. And those are just the people who felt comfortable confiding in me.
It felt very personal to me, that Yanagihara was misrepresenting my friends and then torturing and killing them. It also felt politically dangerous. I’ve spent a number of years involved with harm reduction and at the fringes of sex worker activism, an arena where fictional stories about trafficking and abuse have a real impact on policy and enforcement decisions. And so stories that are so far outside the norm of childhood sexual exploitation feel manipulative in their own way. A melodrama of suffering.
I realize these are all arguments that are leveled against fanfic in the purity wars. But somehow it bothers me much more with prestige (i.e. literary) fiction than with fanfic. Fanfic is amateur and crowdsourced — there is no mechanism of selection, censorship, and gatekeeping for what is posted on AO3. So yeah there’s a lot of fanfic about drug use, sex works, and trauma really frustrates me. But it just seems much lower stakes. I can test out dozens of fics and find the ones that ring true to me. Which are usually the ones where it feels like the author has a deep understanding of the subject matter, either because they are mining details from their own life or because it is coming out of an obsessive interest.
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It is a beautifully written book, prose-wise, and I think that is what a lot of people are responding to. (And also the answer I get when I ask friends why they weren’t super frustrated by the book.)
And I also don’t want to say that only survivors of childhood sexual abuse can write about childhood sexual abuse. But my intuition that Yanagihara did very little research is borne out:
"It’s useful to know on opening Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life – currently, a month before the winner is announced, the 3/1 favourite to win the Man Booker Prize – just how much research she did into the experiences and psychological background of Jude St Francis, the book’s central character: ‘No,’ she told an interviewer, ‘I didn’t do any research; Jude came to me fully formed.’"
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n18/christian-lorentzen/sessions-with-a-poker
It’s not exactly that the characters seem thinly drawn, as it is a problem with the situation. It has the quality of a parable, especially since Yanagihara decided to make the four friends become fabulously wealthy. I think so that the thing keeping Jude out of therapy wouldn’t be money. (As an aside, Jude does towards the end of the book actually engage with therapy, but there is no indication that it is actual therapy for PTSD, which he is certainly wealthy and connected enough to track down. For large sections of the book, I found myself comparing it unfavorably to all the Winter Soldier fanfic where the protagonist actually gets some friggin treatment.)
There’s a way in which the book is about how nothing (friends, romantic love, familial love, money) can ever be enough to help Jude. And I think that I just fundamentally don’t believe that.
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I think it's just that that conversation didn't filter through to the places where I was hearing about the book (which honestly were just Elizabeth Minkel raving about it on Fansplaining plus one queer friend whose taste I trust and who adored the book). Which left me wondering why I was having such a bad reaction to it. Especially since, in the fanfiction sphere, I would be on the other side of the argument of what authors are "allowed" to write about.
Stopping to read the Wikipedia page and seeing what the critical reaction had been at the time was very salutary.
I think I just have bad luck with literary fiction. The last big (non-genre, non-memoir, non-indie) doorstopper I read was Freedom, which was also incredibly frustrating.
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Well, no idea if you're interested in recommendations, but this year I found both Rabih Alameddine's The Angel of History and Sarah Schulman's Maggie Terry to be literary fiction novels that deal with tough subjects (AIDS, gentrification, slow recovery from addiction) in voices that felt authentically queer and based in lived experience. (I suppose you could argue that Maggie Terry is genre, but any detective novel that opens with a dedication to Thelma Wood lives in a liminal zone, IMO, and it's really less about the crime and more about Maggie's psychology.)
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