What is it about female folksingers??? I have a friend who routinely refers to the affliction of being “folksinger-fat” and what’s worse, intuitively everyone seems to know exactly what he means.

Seriously, great post. Thanks for the read.
P.S Female folk singers scare the crap out of me and I don’t even know why.

my guess is we both have a sense of humor about this ugly business.

i appreciate the kind words.

Many people map with great specificity exactly where they go and more or less paint-by-number the material. Also many people are guided somewhere with the work and edit and craft it into something very consciously packaged and targeted. You leave out where the dreamlike stops and the marketing begins. Both components are important.

We both know Kerouac advocated “spontaneous writing” when his work, the final product, was anything of the kind. He mapped out the chapters beforehand and vigorously edited them after he’d completed them. Compare that scroll to the first published copy. Look at all he left out and it’s very obvious in most cases *why*. But from a marketing perspective, saying that first thought was best thought and this was real and other writing by implication was phony, was brilliant.

Did it come to haunt him integrity or morality wise? Probably. Leaving out fooling around with guys and tossing in some choice homophobic remarks to throw off the trail (just so Freud could drool) and his mother or Jesus wouldn’t be offended by his transgressions against his upbringing and faith is noteworthy. There was a reward and a price to pay for the choices.

My intention was calling out myself in the story, but sure, I’m interested in how writers operate in this regard to. I read up on the back story and get off on the literary autopsies.

I read the reviews on A Moveable Feast and how it’s so terribly honest and I read up on the facts cited in other books and am amused to find out while Hemingway’s claiming he’s starving in Paris he’s in fact living on his wife’s trust fund very comfortably before dumping her to marry his 2nd wife who was loaded also. But he didn’t dump her or cheat either according to him, “the rich” lured him away like “pilot fish”. He’s helpless to resist. And then he’s awful hard on himself too. He’s too much the perfectionist and artist. Too loyal a friend (but Fitz is a drunk and can’t spell and has a small dick). He’s just too damn dedicated and blinded by purity to notice some of these pernicious things he seems to keep pointing out over and over and over again and would’ve been very happy to publish if only there weren’t lies that would’ve gotten him sued to death all over the place.

That book in particular, you can see the beautiful mechanics going on in that the more material he provides about someone during his assassination attempt, the more you know he’s worried. Stein and Fitz get 3 chapters a piece.

It’s a strange book to read because the first time you find it, it DOES feel honest and warm and beautiful. Not too long after when you return to it, it gives the opposite impression. He goes after cripples for folding up their missing arm’s sleeve as an ostentatious gesture. What the fuck does he EXPECT them to do?

I expected you to be lawyerly with my terms, though I wasn’t sure which of them you’d underscore. Yes, I’m as honest as I feel I can be in a given piece of writing, bearing in mind the bigger picture. The word “want” wouldn’t have worked for me in that sentence, since, in the act of writing, I feel I’m being guided to a certain extent by something larger than myself. My own desires are secondary. That, at least, is my sense of it. The writing state is dreamlike, and dreams are slippery and so hard to delineate. Also, I wasn’t referring to volume of detail in disclosure but those emotional details that may or may be pertinent, which I thought was obvious, since how can anyone be accused of mendacity for failing to include the shape of a doorknob or somesuch?

But what, to be less lawyerly than Freudian, do you mean by your “attention” not being to call out anyone other than yourself? Anyway, I did allow that I might be wrong. I’m simply trying to get at the larger meaning of an argument that, I hope, has implications beyond yourself, as your phrasing here indicates it does: “I guess I’m saying that with all writing the writer has a vested stake in how he/she comes off as a result of the exchange that follows with the reader.” I will indeed feel welcome to be implicated in a general statement — “all writing,” etc. — like that one. Elsewhere, you speak of “our” ego and who “we” are trying to protect. And it’s an interesting question, which is why I’ve pursued it, though I’m not sure that we see eye to eye on where it leads. Sometimes, yes, there’s a “reward” for disclosure, but it seems to me that the most successful writers are rewarded for no disclosure at all. And then there are unwitting disclosures of the kind that, in this exchange, you’ve sought to pinpoint, and now I’m doing the same. We all give ourselves away at every turn, which is why I trust less what’s said and more the way it’s said. No amount of image-shaping can stand up under rigorous scrutiny and analysis. But we’re creatures of ego, finally, and the impulse to present ourselves in the best possible light is a constant, even when we think we aren’t doing so. I’m doing it now, in fact, as just occurs to me, otherwise I wouldn’t make an effort to phrase myself as well as I can, even though I’m distracted with a number of pressing matters. And now to pause the debate to attend to them.

The nature of almost anything “confessional” is a slightly ugly sense of being rewarded for the disclosure.

Eggers seemed terrified of this, or at least played off it throughout his book, and I think was rightly criticized for not trusting a feeling he expressed in the entire book. In short, we go up to our brain to deal with our heart. I enjoyed his words, but I was stunned when a reviewer called the book not only heartless but bloodless. The narrative was so smooth I’d missed that side to it completely. I agree with the reviewer, despite enjoying the ride of the story.

Your terms are interesting choices too: you’re as honest as you “can” be instead of “want” to be. You talk about full disclosure being some measure of honesty. I didn’t say that or anything suggesting an encyclopedic take on events. I said, of the meaningful details in a story, which are left out and why are they? Which are left out consciously, which are unconscious? All those cognitive dissonances that abound, what is our ego trying to protect? Who are we trying to convey in each story as a creator?

It wasn’t that I resented Atwood not explaining herself. It’s that I resent her consenting to an interview on television to discuss a book she’s written and not being honest in declining to answer a question pertaining to her book, but positing that a protagonist clearly modeled on herself has nothing whatsoever to do with herself merely because she’s fictionalized them. It strikes me as entirely chickenshit.

I’ve never read Atwood, but writers, and artists generally, are always being asked to explain themselves, so I can understand a reluctance to do so. Too many people want to pin things down like high-school kids dissecting pickled frogs. A novel isn’t a thesis — or at least I don’t think it should be — and a certain vagueness can at times be a symptom of reaching for the indescribable, or in any case the ineffable. I have to admire that kind of courage.