on self-disclosure
A few months ago, the New York Times’ team of book critics published their ranking of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years. Before I had even seen the list itself, I listened to an episode of the Time’s Book Review podcast discussing it, a conversation which introduced an idea I’ve thought about a lot since then: the most moving memoirs are ones that cross boundaries, that go someplace where no one is really comfortable following them.
That can mean breaking cultural taboos, critic Parul Sehgal notes in the podcast, “saying that this too can be written about seriously and ought to be read about.” But it’s not just about expanding social norms, Sehgal’s colleague Jennifer Szalai elaborates: it’s also about “how somebody is willing to go into an experience that he or she might not otherwise want to do…something that might seem taboo specifically to them — I mean it might not be a cultural taboo – but you know that it’s an experience that they haven’t fully assimilated or processed before they started working on their memoir.”
Szalai connects the books’ personal boundary-pushing to their literary qualities, suggesting that at least part of what makes these books great art is their probing honesty in the face of resistance. In a different conversation about the list, Sehgal makes a similar point: “The best [memoirs] have a ruthlessness, a willingness to get to the marrow of oneself, without preening and dissembling. I’m with Orwell: ‘A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.’”
We’re living right now in a world in which disclosing information about yourself to as many people as possible has never been easier or more encouraged, in which improbably large numbers of people make their living, or substantial parts of it, on little more than staging their normal, daily lives for cameras. I’m engaged in the practice right now, kind of. The internet and social media have given us all more technological tools for constructing public images of ourselves, and more economic reasons why we might need to do so.
But as the internet has increased the number of available channels for self-expression, it has not, it seems to me, in turn significantly expanded how people share their experiences in ways I would consider insightful and artful, in the way the Times critics define it. Hateful people can find greater reach for their hatefulness in ways that have made the world more chaotic and violent. Beautiful, popular people can find more ways to capitalize on their beauty and popularity, which — as it has always been, even before the internet — is usually based on artifice disguised as aspirational authenticity. Normal people can brag about the accomplishments of their children, share their cooking and crafts that they’re rightfully proud of. But there are still always boundaries that dictate what is acceptable, what can be shared. We still live in small towns or in high schools; there are just a larger number of people fulfilling all of the small town or high school cultural roles at any given moment.
In the online spaces I encounter most often, for example, a premium seems placed on both expressing outrage at contemporary politics — on shouting where you stand — while also expressing positivity and some conception of love or uplift. You’re allowed to be angry, but rarely at anyone you actually know or interact with, because that’s divisive (see also: this week’s furor over Ellen DeGeneres and her pal, former president George W. Bush). Much of the protest I see is abstract; blame is pinned on a vague group of strangers. Self-reflection most often seems to be about learning how to accept oneself, as opposed to considering one’s role in and accountability for our world. These rules help keep everyone comfortable. When people do confront one another, it’s rarely productive, and gets branded as “uncivil.”
There’s recently been backlash to the perfectly-curated online persona, and people who spend lots of time performing their lives for the internet are, more and more, posting content that supposedly reveals the “real” them, the person behind the curation. But those “dropping the curtain” posts turn out to more or less have a unified aesthetic, also — people rebel against a certain particular aesthetic for depicting their lives by adopting another particular aesthetic for depicting their lives. Things continue to conform to rules. “‘Getting real,’ it turned out, was not a corrective,” Carrie Battan writes in the New Yorker. “It was another ruse, designed to appeal to an audience, and used to brush aside the mess.”
There are, of course, merits in keeping people comfortable, in creating safe, inclusive spaces for people, especially for those who’ve long been denied that safety. And certainly, obviously, every human deserves respect. But I often wonder whether a culture that encourages diffuse, uplifting self-disclosure (or disclosure that only shares the most socially-acceptable struggles) can blur values and morals, or can at least dilute the lessons we learn from what we share with one another. Safe space can make everyone feel comfortable enough to venture out of their foxholes, but I rarely see, to borrow Sehgal’s metaphor, any cutting to the marrow, at least among the people who are already comfortable (who also seem to be the most concerned with ensuring that spaces continue to be comfortable).
And the marrow, unfortunately, is maybe the only thing I am interested in. I want the ruthless examination of self. What would it be like, for example, if instead of blandly lecturing everyone to be kind to everyone else, DeGeneres used her monologue to acknowledge that perhaps she doesn’t find Bush personally threatening because her wealth and fame insulated her from the worst effects of his presidency? Or to describe whether or why not she’s ever talked to him about his opposition to same-sex marriage? Or to try to make a case for why she believes her “be kind” philosophy should extend even to former presidents who are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? That would be interesting.
While I’ve been thinking about this tension over the past few months, I’ve also passed hours and hours of travel time reading a bunch of memoirs or memoir-ish essay collections and re-watching the show “Fleabag,” Amazon’s tragedy/comedy about the misadventures of a grieving, sex-addicted owner of a guinea-pig-themed cafe. All are concerned with self-examination and self-disclosure: memoirs are concerned with the self by definition, and “Fleabag” takes confession as its form. The most interesting ones directly confront the power and value of crossing personal and cultural taboos, and how those boundary-crossings change the relationship between the person doing the disclosing and the audience listening.
The coolest thing about “Fleabag” — which deserved every one of the Emmys it won a few weeks ago and probably a few more — is how its dismissal of the fourth wall evolved over time. Fleabag narrates her thoughts to the camera, and only you, the viewer, can hear those thoughts. Most of the time, those thoughts are confessions: of socially-unacceptable thoughts, of her self-delusions. And over the course of the two seasons, your relationship with Fleabag deepens. In the second season, it becomes clear that the relationship with the viewer is real to Fleabag, in a way that another character notices and is perplexed by. And slowly, as people in her “real” life begin to pay more genuine attention to her, her relationship with you, the viewer, gradually dissolves.
Self-disclosure isn’t the same thing as self-understanding. To disclose, you need an audience. And if you’re talking or writing about yourself to someone else, or to a group of people, you have a reason: at core, for whatever reason, you want someone to pay attention to you. Fleabag the character, and “Fleabag” the show, gets that.
“I am obsessed with audiences,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator and star of “Fleabag,” writes in the introduction to the script of the original play that the television show is based on. “How to win them, why some things alienate them, how to draw them in and surprise them, what divides them. It’s a theatrical sport for me — and I’m hooked.”
Waller-Bridge writes that in the original theatrical productions, the main focus was on how Fleabag tries to play with the audience, seducing them and manipulating them and, finally, shocking them with her honesty. When she adapted the script for television, Waller-Bridge says, that relationship intensified.
“I was determined for the audience of the TV series to feel like they were having a personal relationship with Fleabag — hence the audience address — and the absolute ideal situation was that at the beginning you should feel she wants you there and by the end, that she wishes she hadn’t let you in,” Waller-Bridge writes. “A feeling I imagine lots of people have felt after spilling it all out to a stranger.”
In an essay about the show in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Anastasia Berg quotes Tolstoy’s Totsky in “The Idiot:” Confession is “a special form of bragging.” Fleabag isn’t bragging about her bad judgment or her politically incorrect and occasionally mean thoughts, exactly, but by sharing she is clearly trying to court the audience — by laughing with her, we’re perhaps absolving her. It’s interesting, then, that the one thing that Fleabag is most ashamed of — her role in the death of her best friend, which has proved to her that everything she touches turns to shit — she never shares with the audience directly. She also never tells her priest-friend-who’s-more-than-a-friend in the second season, even when he commands her to confess her sins. Fleabag does not want us to absolve her for that particular sin.
“For all her admission and performance of failure to our delight, for all the remarkable honesty and nakedness of the show, and precisely because of them, it is fitting that at its heart is a refusal to hand her guilt over,” Berg notes. “Perhaps this refusal to confess marks not a failure to assume responsibility but the only genuine form of doing so.”
Fleabag does in fact admit her responsibility and guilt to one person in the show — a banker who has already turned her down for a loan. “I fucked [the cafe] into liquidation, and I fucked up my family, and I fucked my friend by fucking her boyfriend,” she tells him. She’s not telling him because she wants anything — he’s already rejected her loan application — she’s just telling him. It makes him uncomfortable, and at first he walks away from her. But then he comes back, and restarts her loan interview.
“People make mistakes,” he tells her. It’s only when she confesses, asking for nothing in return, that she can be fully acknowledged and move on.
Maybe it’s strange that I thought so much about “Fleabag” when I read “Know My Name,” Chanel Miller’s account of her assault by Brock Turner on the campus of Stanford, and the subsequent trial and national media and political circus that followed.
We never learn Fleabag’s name because she doesn’t want us to know it, because her guilt has made her believe that a fleabag is all she is. “Know My Name” is exactly the opposite: Miller is announcing that she isn’t just Emily Doe, that she has a name and a life that have nothing to do with what happened to her one night at Stanford. “I am a victim, I have no qualms with this word, only with the idea that it is all that I am,” she writes in the book’s introduction. Miller spent years watching other people tell stories about her, grappling with how Turner’s defense attorneys and the media reduced her to stereotypes. Her memoir takes back control, to tell the story she wants to tell.
But, I would argue, a core emotional goal of the projects is the same: “This is an attempt to transform the hurt inside myself, to confront a past, and find a way to live with and incorporate these memories,” Miller writes. That transformation is also what Fleabag struggles to do, and her success at that project is why the show does not need a third season.
I by no means want to equate Fleabag’s fictional struggles with grief, guilt, and responsibility with Miller’s lived experience of assault and its traumatic aftermath, of reconciling who she was before with the roles she’s now been assigned against her will. But I’m interested that both of their progressions needed an audience — either an imagined one or the most public audience possible — and that they served those audiences in unexpected ways.
Miller never wanted this kind of audience; she opens the book with an account of how shy she is. “When I was little I wanted to grow up and become a mascot, so I’d have the freedom to dance without being seen,” she writes. Miller’s self-exposure is also political; she’s writing to correct the record and to expose and condemn a broken system that protects abusers (as long as they’re wealthy) over victims. She’s writing to fight a system that prompted media outlets — and the judge in the case — to focus on her assaulter’s swimming times, his potential, and to focus on her intoxication. “I wondered if, in their eyes, the victim remained stagnant, living forever in that twenty-minute time frame,” she writes. “She remained frozen, while Brock grew more and more multifaceted, his stories unfolding a spectrum of life and memories opening up around him.”
But her book is more expansive than politics, at least in the sense most people think about politics; it’s about learning to live in this system that values uplift over honesty.
One of the most moving elements of Miller’s memoir are the many, many passages in which she describes keeping her pain and anger inside so as not to hurt her loved ones, to avoid making anyone else uncomfortable. That tension comes to a head a year after Turner’s release, when Miller is in discussions with Stanford over a garden the school built on the site where she was assaulted. A Stanford official asks Miller for a quotation to be printed on a plaque at the site. Miller sends a quote from her victim’s statement, which had gone viral after being published in Buzzfeed: “You made me a victim…I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am…I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.” The school rejects that statement. The next one she submits — “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, even my own voice, until today” — is similarly rejected. A Stanford official explains to her that these quotes are too “triggering or upsetting” and that they’d rather something more “uplifting and affirming,” and that they’d rather not single out any individual (in other words, Miller should not address her assaulter).
Stanford suggests instead: “I’m right here, I’m okay, everything is okay, I’m right here” — what Miller told her sister when she was picked up from the hospital, when she was very much not okay — or “On nights when you feel alone, I am with you.”
This is the moment in the book when Miller seems to reject any responsibility she has felt to make other people comfortable with what happened to her, to reject the idea that, as she writes, as victims “our purpose is to be an inspiring story.” In the end, she declines to provide a statement for the garden.
“There have been numerous times I have not brought up my case because I do not want to upset anybody or spoil the mood. Because I want to preserve your comfort,” she writes. “You will find society asking you for the happy ending, saying come back when you’re better, when what you say can make us feel good, when you have something more uplifting, affirming. This ugliness was something I never asked for, it was dropped on me, and for a long time I worried it made me ugly too. It made me into a sad, unwelcome story that nobody wanted to hear.”
When Buzzfeed published Miller’s statement, though, she found out the world didn’t need her to be uplifting or affirming. “The world did not plug up its ears, it opened itself to me,” she writes. “I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identify more with pain than with platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living.” The sad, ugly truth is more helpful than any vague positivity.
Miller’s book reminded me of “Fleabag” in one other way — in their conceptions of responsibility.
When the judge in Miller’s case sentences Turner to only six months in county jail — a decision the judge eventually lost his job over — he says in court that it’s a problem that Miller has not accepted Turner’s expression of remorse.
“Chanel has stated that he hasn’t really taken responsibility for his conduct,” the judge says. “And so you have Mr. Turner expressing remorse, which I think, subjectively, is genuine, and Chanel not seeing that as a genuine expression of remorse because he never says, ‘I did this. I knew how drunk you were. I knew how out of it you were, and I did it anyway. And that — I don’t think that bridge will, probably, ever be crossed.”
I was angry when the judge announced this sentence, but I was even more angry when I read those words. And Miller, obviously, was angry too: “If [Turner] says he’s sorry, but maintains he’s not guilty, doesn’t that resemble manipulation more than reconciliation?” she writes.
That’s one of the lessons of “Fleabag,” too — a confession of remorse is not the same thing as a confession of responsibility. Saying “sorry” is easy, and using charm and privilege to manipulate people into sympathy for your bad behavior is easy — Fleabag knows this very well — but taking responsibility and changing is messier, and less comfortable.
“The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness,” the writer Rachel Cusk argues in her memoir-ish essay collection “Coventry,” which I read just after I finished “Know My Name.” “When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release from pretense that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth.”
Cusk knows the risks of self-exposure: her memoir “A Life’s Work” drew a tremendous amount of vitriol, often from other women, for her ambivalence about being a mother.
“These days I have a better understanding of the intolerance to which, for a while, I fell victim,” Cusk writes in The Guardian about the response to her memoir of motherhood. “I see that, like all intolerance, it arose from dependence on an ideal. I see that cruelty and rudeness and viciousness are its harbingers, as they have always been.”
When you disclose yourself and your thoughts and feelings and experiences in an honest way to other people, you throw yourself against their ideals about how you and other people should be. Chanel Miller found that people wanted her to be uplifting and inspiring, but that was not how she felt, so she refused to be. Cusk had tremendously mixed feelings about the culture of motherhood that she felt demanded that she sacrifice herself, and that culture pushed back, demanded that she be happier. Both of these women’s prickly honesty have been treated as threats to the social order — the judge in Miller’s case essentially told her that her refusal to accept Turner’s remorse as legitimate was rude of her. Even the wildly popular “Fleabag,” as Sonia Soraiya notes in Vanity Fair, only turned into a true phenomenon during the second season, when Fleabag becomes a notably more pleasant, less messy person.
But I think we lose a lot when we insist that everyone be positive, or, in Soraiya’s words, when we let ourselves believe that because “Fleabag’s hot and cool now, so don’t worry about the parts of her that were once broken.” We should still worry about the parts of her that are broken, and when we the audience, who have such power, can fully see the broken parts, the bravery of these disclosures, we’ll live in a more honest world.
Tell me what to read
This week I’m just asking everyone to read Chanel Miller’s book. I haven’t yet read “She Said” by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey or Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill” — both about their investigations into Harvey Weinstein’s abuses and their subsequent coverup (Farrow’s book is out this week) — but I’m planning on catching up with them and would encourage everyone else to do so also. As Anne Helen Petersen noted today in her own newsletter, the revelations that are coming out now about the Weinstein reporting — along with the sexist and ridiculous faux outrage this week over Elizabeth Warren’s account of leaving her job while pregnant and the price of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s haircut — provide a collection of unusually concentrated concrete examples of the way patriarchy works in practice. I would add Chanel Miller’s account to that list.
Also, in keeping with this week’s theme, if you haven’t read The Cut’s package on what happened to women who spoke out about their abuse after they came forward, you should do that. It’s another example of the dangers of a culture that values people’s comfort over honesty.
Thank you for reading. As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, for the rambling first-draftiness of it, and also for forgiving all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor. And also as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.