‘Let the narrative bend where it wants to’ – memoirist Joseph Lezza @lezzdoothis

Joseph Lezza’s first published book is a grief memoir, surrounding the death of his father from pancreatic cancer and the years that followed. It began as an MFA assignment to write a lyric essay, and once he’d finished he found he needed to write another and another, until he had a whole book, full of unexpected turns, resolutions and reconciliations – I’m Never Fine: Scenes And Spasms on Loss.

Why that title?

It was a happy accident. In the years after my father’s passing, my best friend and I shared hundreds of phone conversations in which she, the eternal optimist, would talk me down from some fit or frenzy. One day she said ‘You’ll be fine’. I blurted out ‘I’m never fine!’

I got to thinking about that word, fine. Victims of grief and loss are often quick to adopt it when talking to others because it’s easier than explaining how we’re really feeling to people who, despite their best intentions, cannot begin to understand. We grow tired of the uncomfortable nods and pitiful shrugs, so we tell friends and loved ones that we’re ‘fine’, because, really, we want to change the subject.

Underneath all these ‘fines’, though, are a thousand emotions from manic to depressed, enraged to despondent. ‘Fine’ becomes the rug under which they’re all swept. But we further isolate ourselves and calcify these emotions that need to be dealt with.

I’m not advocating that people openly discuss something they’re not ready to, but I hope that by refusing to be ‘fine’ in this book, I might show someone how to feel less alone. And others might pay more attention to the folks in their lives who seem to be throwing it around too generously.

How did you come to write it?

 I wrote the first piece in grad school while taking a course on the lyric essay. Up until that point, I was a neophyte when it came to writing about my own life. But I was exposed to Maggie Nelson, John D’Agata, Joan Didion, and Lia Purpura; writers who found astounding ways to bend poetic and journalistic and fictive elements to create nonfictional work that read as something completely other. When it came time for a lyric essay of my own, I decided to write about this period of my life.

As my program stretched on, I began to notice that a great deal of what I was writing was informed by that window of my life. I had to write my way through it before I could write anything else.

How did you get perspective – and breathing space – to write the book?

I was about six years past my father’s death, which provided enough of a distance to re-examine events from a vantage that wasn’t clouded by acute trauma.

With each re-examination, I was able to make peace with someone or something I’d been hanging on to for years. It was a communion of sorts, between me and the page; one in which I could finish conversations, uncover answers to questions, and experience a sort of therapy.

With memoir, we often don’t know how deep to go until a reader or editor asks us to.

I’m not sure digging deeper was ever the issue as much as directness. One thing you learn early in any writing programme is never to enter a piece with a particular message for the reader. That stifles the story because, each time the narrative bends in another direction, you course-correct and prevent the piece from becoming what it’s meant to be.

What was the hardest event to write?

One thing we tend to do, while grieving, is judge. We judge others for how they act and things they say that are largely in reaction to the trauma we’re sharing in. When their reaction doesn’t mirror our own, or strikes us as inappropriate or ignorant or even negligent, we’re very good at character assassination. I am and was incredibly guilty of this.

I swore in this book that I wouldn’t make a villain of anyone. While it’s important for accuracy to document my feelings and emotions as I experienced them, this could not be purely an exercise in telling tales out of school. So, every time I would approach a moment where I could rake someone across the coals, I detailed my initial observations, then attempted to empathise, or discern some rationale or motivation. This allowed me to catch things I’d never noticed in the moment, to reframe events from the POV of someone else who’d been there, someone I’d perhaps judged too hardly because I was too busy suffering from main character syndrome.

And I took as strong a hand with myself as I took with anyone else. Grief is good at tearing down the firewall between us and our irrational impulses. We walk willingly into embarrassing and dangerous places. So to leave out my own mistakes and misdeeds and portray myself as a happy warrior would be a fabrication and disservice to a reader who may be looking for validation. So I put it all in. All the difficult, dirty, damning things. As punishing as they may have been to revisit and write, if I can help someone feel less alone, I will have done something worthwhile.

How did you get a blurb line from Russell T Davies? (Wow!)

I came to know of Russell, like most gays, through Queer as Folk. The US version lived during the entirety of my high school and early college years, the years where content and pop culture is massively impactful because it’s a window into a wider world.

At that time, there wasn’t much LGBTQ content in the mainstream, at least content that wasn’t sanitized. By contrast, QAF was provocative and alternative and confronted a lot of issues that I believe helped a lot of young queer people feel seen. In the years since I came to appreciate Russell for the creative genius he is, in works like It’s a Sin and A Very English Scandal. He’s a writer and creative that I greatly admire.

While I wish I could say we are friends, but he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. That anonymity made me brave. I sent a message that I never expected to be answered; but was met with sincerity, openness and unfathomable generosity. Russell turned out to be just as superlative a person as he is an artist.

So much of the book creation process involves taking long shots and submitting yourself for consideration…and often rejection. I often have to remind myself that that endorsement actually happened.  

What else do you write?

I have published a mix of essays, fiction, and poetry. I’m Never Fine is my first full-length book, but my work has appeared in Santa Fe Writers Project, Variant Literature, Still, Occulum Journal, West Trade Review and presses like Messy Misfits Club and Unfortunately. Seven pieces from the book have seen individual publication.

It never gets any less astounding when a press, which has likely never heard of you and has zero stake in your success, gives time and resources to amplify your art. I try to do whatever I can to support them in kind.

In the outside world you’re also a marketer. Marketer of what?

Integrated marketing – we develop ways to embed brands into TV programmes.

It’s an interesting world because consumers are getting smarter. We can smell an ad a mile away and tune it out. But if we’re watching something that fits authentically in the worlds we escape to, we’re more likely to pay attention and engage.

What other jobs have you done, from major to minor?

Growing up I did everything from run games at the local amusement park to renting chairs and inner tubes at the beach to managing an ice cream and candy store. Most of my years in college I spent waiting tables at brunch places and Italian restaurants. My first job post-college was an internship at Walt Disney World where I was a skipper on the World Famous Jungle Cruise at the Magic Kingdom. I also worked as a game driver on Kilimanjaro Safaris, a concierge at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and a guest relations host at the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom parks. 

How did they shape you?

I learned to adapt and communicate with folks from diverse walks of life. I made friends, met antagonists, fell in love a bunch, got my heart broken a bunch more. All of the people and places, the nicks and dings, the hills the valleys, the vistas, the shadows; they made me who I am. I don’t think you can write successfully from a place of safety. You’ve gotta have fun and maybe get beaten up a bit. But that’s okay. Just fill your pen with ink from the bruises.

How did you end up as a writer?

I am an only child and spent a good deal of time entertaining myself. I built worlds and told stories with toys and action figures. I memorised my favourite books word for word before I could even read them. When my TV shows were done for the day, I’d construct new narrative offshoots and build myself in as an original character.

Was anyone else in your family creative?

Both my parents. My mother made dresses from a the moment she could thread a needle. She cultivates beautiful gardens that are always in bloom. She reads, she crafts, she bakes, she knits.

My father was very creative. While he found himself in a ‘sensible’ career to provide for his family, he found countless ways to express himself. He was a master craftsman and a fantastic wood worker. With him, I built rocket kits and model cars. We’d make pine box roadsters for the yearly cub scout derby. In the holidays, we’d clear out the furniture, lay down green carpet and train tracks, and turn the living room into a snowy winter hamlet with working trolleys, locomotives, and cable cars, trees, skating rinks, burger stands, theatres, hotels, and hundreds of residents. Each year he’d add a new building, a recreation of his father’s barber shop or a toy store with shelves of miniature gifts. His creativity was boundless.

What did you gain from the MFA?

Countless things. Exposure to books and professors and students, each with their own unique perspective. I was forced to write outside my comfort zone and in various genres, from which I learned practices and tactics. I learned to workshop, to see feedback not as a criticism but a way to make my work better.

Just as importantly, I learned to give feedback and help fellow writers build up their own work. Because it was an online program, I shared classes with students from the US, South America, Asia, Europe and elsewhere. I shared classes with writers of all ages, all of whom brought invaluable life experience to the discussion. Most of all, I gained a clearer idea of who I am as a writer. 

What are you working on at the moment? 

I’m outlining another collection. But before I begin in earnest, I plan to abscond to a cabin in the woods, touch some trees, get my boots dirty, and turn my brain off.

Some quick-fire questions:

What five books would you save if your house was on fire?

The White Album, Joan Didion

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman

The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

What scares you?

Growing up, I was timid. Yet I was fascinated by the things that scared me. I think my father’s passing taught me about unrealized potential and how little control we have over our time on earth. We plan things. We put them off for a better day. But that better day might not come.

You can use that as an impulse to seize the moments when you’re in them, to take a leap. When I wanted to travel somewhere but didn’t have a partner who shared an interest in that location, I went myself. I threw myself in the middle of strange places and strange people and made my way. I’ve grabbed every opportunity to do that since.

 After college, when I decided to move to a different state, because it was scary and exciting. I remember that drive down the east coast on I-95, increasingly nervous and thrilled with each state I passed because it was just me, my car and whatever I could fit into the tiny backseat hurtling toward an absolute mystery.

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Find Joseph on his website, Twitter @lezzdoothis and Facebook. Find I’m Never Fine here.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Dear me: how fiction authors adapt to writing memoir

If you’ve been following me on Facebook or on my newsletter you’ll have seen I’m taking a creative interlude to work on a collection of travel memoir pieces. It’s a new kind of book for me and it’s raising some interesting challenges, particularly as I’m used to the freedoms of fiction.

So I thought I’d gather together a few other fictioneers who’ve crossed into memoir to discuss the differences.

Let’s meet our novelists-turned-memoirists.

Jean Gill

Jean Gill @writerjeangill has published in a wide variety of genres – historical fiction, fiction in translation, teen novels and a goat cheese cookbook. Her memoir, How Blue Is My Valley, is an as-it-happens account of her first year living in Provence.

Joni Rodgers

Joni Rodgers, who you might recognise from The Undercover Soundtrack and this post about ghostwriters and their soul projects,  had two novels published by small literary publishers, and then a big bestseller with her cancer memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair, which kicked off a career as a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs. She has continued to write fiction, and her second memoir is an account of her hybrid publishing adventures: First You Write: The Worst Way to Become an Almost Famous Author and the Best Advice I Got While Doing It.

Jessica Bell

Jessica Bell @msbessiebell will also be familiar from The Undercover Soundtrack. She’s a musician, writing coach, graphic designer and publisher, has released seven books of fiction and verse. Her memoir is GO: A Memoir about Binge-drinking, Self-Hatred and Finding Happiness about her dysfunctional childhood, teen years and music career.

Real events

The most obvious difference between novels and memoir is, of course, real events. And this creates an artistic problem. Real life is messy; it lacks the structures that do much of a novel’s work. Personally I’m enjoying it; the need to stay within boundaries is a challenge. I asked my authors about the main challenges they faced with their material.

 

Joni: ‘The least interesting thing in a cancer memoir is the cancer. I had to distil the complex medical aspects of the story in a way that did justice to my experience while maintaining a compelling pace for the reader. I won’t even pretend I did that on autopilot. I had a terrific editor with an unsparing eye.’

Jean faced an additional challenge with her book because she was writing without a predetermined shape. It was a day-to-day diary of events as they unfolded. ‘Authors with any sense write memoirs looking back, so they can find patterns and resolutions. Instead, I was writing the book ‘live’ as workmen destroyed the house around me and I had no idea what was going to happen next. I haven’t kept a diary since the ones I gave up as a teenager with cryptic codewords.’

Jean says her approach paid off, though. ‘Fans have told me this is part of the book’s charm. The immediacy of all those first impressions, of being in love with Provence, is not filtered by artistic shaping. Moving to another country is always about what you take with you: physically, mentally and emotionally. I came to understand that from writing my memoir.’

How we come across

One of the hardest things to judge with such a personal book is how we’re coming across. As the writer, we know everything and the reader knows nothing, and I know I’m going to be relying on beta readers more heavily than usual. Joni and Jessica say they couldn’t have done it without editorial support.

Joni: ‘Beta readers and a good editor are crucial. I’ve had the good fortune to be edited and mentored by amazing professionals at Big Five publishers and prestigious small presses, so maybe I’m spoiled, but candidly, I was disappointed in the editor I hired to do First You Write. Even more disappointed in the copy editor. Fortunately, my beta readers were top drawer. The Midwives, my critique group at the time, was an amazing posse of well-read, widely published authors, including Barbara Taylor Sissel and Colleen Thompson. That crit group was one of the best things that ever happened to me professionally and personally.’

Jessica says she also could not have done without a professional editor. She began by writing her book as vignettes, then attempted to fill the gaps. But I knew deep down that they were not satisfactory. When I invested in a professional editor, I discovered that many details were lacking. Because I knew my life so well, I didn’t have the same need, or instinct, to explore every fine detail like I do when writing fiction. When writing fiction, I am completely immersed in the details, and also creating those details for myself. When writing memoir, those details already exist. It’s so easy to not realize they aren’t apparent to your reader. The effort it took to dig them out was my biggest hurdle. I felt like I was constantly repeating myself, when in fact, I wasn’t at all. It’s really interesting how unreliable we are as writers of our own lives. I now know that I will still need that editor with my second, third, and fourth memoir.’

(Modest shuffling of feet: Jessica’s first editor was me. To slip into that role for a moment, I’ve worked on many memoirs and each time it’s a special privilege to be invited to help shape such personal material. I also happen to know that Jessica’s editor for the second version was Dan Holloway, so – a shout-out to him.)

Jean had an unexpected source of feedback when her memoir was being made into an audiobook: ‘If you want to know how you come across, nothing beats having to listen to the narration and having to explain to a top voice actor just how funny you thought that sentence was. Even now, the thought makes me hot with embarrassment.’

Real people

Inevitably some people in our memoir will be recognisable. What do we do about that?

Jean says: ‘I changed the names of all but immediate family and I let my sisters read it beforehand, so they could raise any objections. They didn’t.’

I’ve also been contacting people who are recognisable and letting them read the relevant excerpts. And Jean brings up another principle that I’m following: ‘I considered every word I wrote from the viewpoint of that person reading about themselves. Ask me again in a year’s time as the book is being translated into French, so all the villagers will be able to read it. My hairdresser has promised to let me know if we need to sell up and leave the village.’

Jessica says she asked permission from family and close friends to reveal their true identities. And that was nerve-wracking – I remember having a conversation with her behind the scenes on Facebook as she gathered the courage to show the manuscript to her mother.

‘I’m very lucky they gave permission,’ she says. ‘For those I don’t have contact with (or don’t wish to contact) I’ve changed physical attributes, names, and certain characteristics. Sometimes three people have been merged into one character. People who know me and the people in my memoir will most likely be able to work out who is who; I don’t think there is any way to avoid this. The only thing we can do is change our characters enough so that they can’t be recognised by random readers.’

Joni had to write about her family in close detail during traumatic events, especially her husband, Gary. I asked whether that was awkward.  ‘I did struggle with this invasion of Gary’s privacy. He was supportive in a very unexpected way: he didn’t read the book. He said he wanted me to tell the story I needed to tell without feeling like he was looking over my shoulder. To this day, he hasn’t read it. The one concession he asked was that I decline an option on film rights, even though we desperately needed the money. Chemo left us bankrupt. Thanks, American healthcare system! When the film option came up, our children were still small, and I wasn’t in remission. Gary and I agreed that if I died, a movie could be confusing and unhealthy for our kids in later years.’

With that in mind, I think we need a brief feelgood interlude. Here’s a very soppy picture of Joni and Gary.

 

The difficult memories

Jessica had to steel herself to revisit some of the events in her book and was tempted to leave them out. ‘I had a really hard time writing about them. But my editor convinced me to bite the bullet.’ (Just call me Rozweiler.)

Joni also had to grapple with difficult memories. ‘My desire to help other women with cancer far outweighed any awkwardness. Cancer destroyed me physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually, and financially, and while I was in that crucible, I craved honest conversation about taboo topics like money and sex. To leave out the awkward and even humiliating moments in that story would have been a disservice to readers with cancer, and it would have felt dishonest to me.’

What to leave out?

And not everything belongs in your memoir. Joni says: If life is a sprawling country garden, a memoir is a cut flower arrangement. Choices have to be made, and some are difficult. Here again, I have to sing the praises of my editor, the late, great Marjorie Braman at HarperCollins. Throughout the process, Marjorie focused a single beam of light—the book’s reason for being—on every anecdote, character, sentence, syllable. Much of what I know and practise as an editor now, I learned from Marjorie as we worked through Bald in the Land of Big Hair and my subsequent novel, The Secret Sisters. She never told me what to do, but she always asked the right questions.’

That pruning process might not be straightforward. Jean says that at the time of writing, one of her children was very depressed, and she found her own feelings of helplessness overwhelming. ‘This memoir wasn’t about trauma or therapy so the details of my private life were irrelevant. But I felt silly writing happy little thoughts without acknowledging that pain. This is how I dealt with it. I acknowledged it for the only person who mattered to understand:

‘Happiness is an utterly selfish emotion. How can you be happy when someone close to you, isn’t? How can you be happy in the face of war, starvation, poverty… And yet. How does your misery change others’ lives for the better? Who is helped by your depression? Isn’t it from some kind of secure self that you can reach out a helping hand?’

We are made of many memoirs

But Jessica says each of us might have many memoirs in us. ‘Just because something has happened in your life, that doesn’t mean it has a place in the memoir. For example, to the disappointment of those who have gotten to know me online, this memoir doesn’t talk much about my writing career. That’s an entirely different story, unrelated to my child- and teen-hood, and love life and music. And then there’s my humorous and devastating story of running a café-bar in Ithaca, Greece. I realised these didn’t belong in GO. They are not related to my psychological struggle. They are related to the side of my personality that is confident and ambitious. And they need their own book.’

So let’s sum up. Here’s the gathered wisdom on writing a memoir:

• Beta readers and a good editor are crucial for helping us understand how we come across.
• Seek permission from real people who will be recognisable, and if possible let them read the relevant sections. Change the details of others so they can’t be identified. Consider every word you write about another person as though they were reading it.
• If your memoir is about difficult experiences, dig deep and remember that these details are part of the honest journey.
• Not every experience will fit in one memoir. As with fiction, check that everything serves the story you’re telling. If it doesn’t, consider keeping it for another book.

Thank you to my panel. Here’s where you find them

Jean’s blog is here and she’s on Twitter as @writerjeangill.  Jessica’s website is here and she’s @msbessiebell. Joni says she’ll be hosting a memoir writing retreat this autumn, her website is here or you can follow her on Facebook.

And if you’re curious about the book I’m currently working on, here’s my newsletter.

Bonus! Here’s an episode of my radio show, So You Want To Be A Writer, where bookseller Peter Snell and I discuss the memoirist’s art.

Any insights to share about writing memoir? Or questions? Fire away.

Science fiction – have we forgotten what it should be?

What makes a story science fiction? Is it an otherworldly location, the science, the time in which it is set?

I’m thinking about this because of a review I saw this week of a novel billed in The Times as science fiction, which sounded rather disappointing – and it’s put me on a bit of a mission.

I haven’t read the book so it would be wrong of me to name it, but it concerned a new planet populated by humanlike aliens. The main threads are the bringing of God to the indigenous people, and the exploitation of its resources by mining companies.

It seemed this story could have been set anywhere. The human challenges were no different from those in a historical novel. The other-world setting didn’t add anything fresh, except maybe to save the writer some research. (I see a lot of science fiction – and fantasy – novels that are written for this reason. If you invent the world, you can’t be accused of getting it wrong.)

But shouldn’t we be doing something better with science fiction (and fantasy)?

Bob Shaw says, in How To Write Science Fiction, that science fiction’s defining quality is that it deals with ‘otherness’. Whether it’s in the future, the present or the past, it’s about realities we don’t have at the moment.

He also says that the central idea in a science-fiction story is so important it should have the status of a major character. It needs to be developed and explored. It changes what people can do, creates new situations that illuminate the human condition. It adds a new quality of strangeness. And Shaw also says if that concept is taken away, the story should fall apart.

One of Shaw’s own short stories illustrates this. Light of Other Days sprang from an idea about an invention called ‘slow glass’, which allows you to see an event or a setting that happened years earlier. And so a man whose wife and child died in an accident can still see them, every day, in the windows of his house.

Take, by contrast, Andy Weir’s The Martian. An astronaut is trapped on Mars and has to make enough air, food and water to survive. It’s genuinely an addictive read and I loved it, but it could just as easily be happening in Antarctica or on a deserted island. The science provides the particular challenges and the possibilities, but it does not change the human essence of the story.

We’re used to thinking that any story outside the Earth’s atmosphere is science fiction, but they’re not. They’re survival stories. But take the slow glass out of Light of Other Days and you’d have no story at all. That’s science fiction.

The Martian is a great read. The other novel may be too. But it’s a pity if the critical press and the literary community are presenting them as examples of good science fiction.

Science fiction should be a literature of the imagination. I think it’s a shame if we forget this. The same goes for fantasy – Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book is a deeply invented world, and very different from The Jungle Book, which inspired it.

We only have to look at our own, real past to see how science fiction and fantasy should grapple with the idea of transformation. Every invention in the history of humanity shows us this. Think of electric light – we can change society and the very fabric of life with an idea like that. With phones – and particularly mobiles – we are reinventing the way society works, saving lives and creating new types of crime. With scientific narrative non-fiction like Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks we also have a model for writing great science fiction. We can examine the impact of a scientific discovery and the quantum changes it brought, in individual lives and for global corporations.

Science fiction works on this same continuum, the scale of human change. A great science fiction idea should allow us to send humanity to startling new places with new advantages, cruelties and injustices. And those are places in our souls, not just other planets.

So – rant over. I’m hoping this isn’t too abstruse or marginalising for some of the regulars here, but you do know how I love the strange   … Do you write science fiction or fantasy? What are the ideas you’re grappling with? How do you refine them or test if they will be bold enough? Would they pass the Bob Shaw test?

POSTSCRIPT How could I have forgotten one of my favourite things about science fiction? It took Dan Holloway to remind me of it in a comment – the reason these ideas prove so beguiling is that they are metaphorically resonant. They enable us to see aspects of humanity that aren’t yet visible. Do read Dan’s full comment below.