Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel

Mon, 6 May 2013 19:39:28 -0400

“I was immersing myself in women’s literature the other day—by that I mean I was reading a cookbook—and that’s when I knew what I should do. I will write the next Great American Woman’s Novel.

It’ll be part romance fiction/journal/doodles/musings/sestina about kittens and friendship/an illuminating treatise about the way we live now/word cloud, and it will cover the typical subject matters women write about: marriage, motherhood, yogurt, dating as a competitive sport, emotional warfare, housework, tampons, rainbows, midwifery, gardening, hysteria, beauty products, weight gain, weight loss, the art of being shrill, divorce, magic, and light bondage.”

Read “FUNNY WOMEN #100: Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel” (a satire based on Amanda Filipacchi’s “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists”) on The Rumpus.

Jezebel kindly republished it here.

Addicted to Netflix: Teen-Soap-Opera Binge As Psychosis

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:33:29 -0500

“Watching television reminded me that living could be more exciting, more interesting than watching television.”

Netflix recommends this essay based on your interests in quirky independent high-school dance dramedies featuring a strong female lead.

Book Recommendations

Fri, 8 Feb 2013 17:21:04 -0500

“Never read Fifty Shades of Grey. Every time someone reads Fifty Shades of Grey, a real book dies.”

How to Write Like a Mother#^@%*&

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:19:32 -0500

“Success is a pile of shit somebody stacked up real high. It means nothing.”

Every so often I publish something that my parents are allowed to read--like my conversation with Cheryl Strayed in Creative Nonfiction magazine about “success,” jealousy, rap, nuns, improv, yoga, writing, discipline, revision, pastries, and more.

Get Out of My Crotch

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:13:06 -0500

“In this collection, twenty-one writers examine reproductive rights, access to health care, violence against women, and the rise of rape apologists in the twenty-first-century United States. Illuminating intersections of gender, class, and race, these stories speak to the challenges women routinely face, the attempts to undermine their rights, and the deliberate, systemic erosion of their agency and existence as equals.
It’s time to revisit what’s at stake, what could still be lost, and why we must continually fight for equality and freedom for all.”

If a woman gave birth to you, consider buying this anthology from Cherry Bomb Books.

The Human Centipede; Or, How to Move to New York

Thu, 1 Nov 2012 14:46:49 -0400

“Suffering is the beginning to another story.”

The phrase “mouth to anus” appears five times in this piece I wrote for The Paris Review Daily.

Author Harold Brodkey Explains Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 02:19:40 -0400

“It’s crazy, she cannot reiterate that enough.”

Read this on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

The Never-to-Be Bride

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:17:33 -0400

“Ours was a love affair that knew its finest hours on a screen.”

Read “The Never-to-Be Bride” in the New York Times Modern Love column.

(Note: the photo of me is photoshopped.)

Welcome to the Girls’ Club

Thu, 8 Mar 2012 22:56:35 -0500

“We’re secretaries fully versed in Derrida, receptionists who have read Proust in French. This is a land of girls. There are always at least ten of ‘us’ for every one of ‘him.’”
– Meghan Daum, “Publishing and Other Near-Death Experiences”

Fuck yeah, Meghan Daum.

I learned about the old boys’ club when I took women’s studies classes in college. These were the places to which men would gravitate, clandestinely (to me, from me), to be men, to do men-like things, such as smoke cigars, play on the back nine, continue the gender polarity, etc.
Then I worked in publishing and saw the boys’ club up close and was so indignant about what I called “The Circle Jerk” and was so hurt to be excluded from it…and all that indignation and hurt got me about as far as nowhere.

Oh, and of course I crapped on the women in my field. Like when Lil’ Kim referred to Nicki Minaj as a stupid ho. Jezebel writer Dodai Stewart commented: “There are so few women in hip-hop. Maybe it’s foolish or naively idealistic, but if these ladies would quit being threatened by each other and develop a sense of sisterhood, it might turn into something amazing.” Fuck yeah, Dodai Stewart. The way women feel about other women is how I assume the 1% feel about the 99%: let the weak fight among themselves.

VIDA’s count–which looks at prominent magazines and identifies the gender breakdown of writers, reviewers, and books reviewed–provides evidence of the problem we’re up against. And we’ll get just about as far as nowhere if we don’t woman-up and help each other.

Last week I received an email from Feministing contributor Maya Dusenbery with a link to GOOD magazine’s article Promote Women: Use Your Network to Solve the Gender Gap.

Maya wrote, “I’m sure you’ve seen this idea from the great Ann Friedman and Rachel Sklar and Amanda Hess. I am trying to do it.”

The idea: “Stop lamenting and start doing.”

The steps:
1) Think of three women in your industry who are underpaid, underemployed, or under-noticed.

1) Think of three powerful people (of any gender) in your industry who you know personally and who are in a position to hire or assign to women.

1) Compose an email to each of those powerful people individually and recommend a specific woman they should meet, hire, or otherwise work with.

1) Email those women and tell them you’ve recommended them.

The takeaway: “Use your network. Endorse women today.” No vagina left behind!

The followup: “Submit your stories to GOOD’s Tumblr, on Twitter with the #promotewomen hashtag . . . We’ll compile your stories and publish them as inspiration. We have the power to end the gender gap. Take five minutes and send three emails to do something about it.”

Fuck yeah, Ann Friedman and Rachel Sklar! You two should pitch a TV show called Networking Women, with the catch-phrase “Let’s build this network!”

**

I found another “girls’ club” type article through VIDA’s Facebook page: Institutional sexism of books world needs new girls’ network by Jennifer Weiner.

She says:

“Instead of hoping that someday the boys’ club will open its doors and let us up into the treehouse, we can form our own clubs, define ‘worthy’ our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration.” Fuck YEAH, Jennifer Weiner!

It’s as if Weiner is speaking directly to GOOD’s project when she calls out that ”important publications have male editors. They fill vacancies by word of mouth instead of advertising openings, and hire people they know. Nothing’s going to change until we change the ratio of the people on top, and the people who know people who can open doors.”

Weiner points to writer Anne Trubek who “made an incredibly generous offer, saying, essentially, here’s where I’ve been published. If you are a woman writer who wants to be published in one of these places, email me, and I’ll tell you whom I pitched and how I did it. And other writers have offered their own lists on Twitter. Blogger Alyssa Rosenberg posted a list of 10 women writers who’d be great fits for some of the VIDA publications.”

(I’m sure this is getting old, but I’m still into it…) FUCK YEAH, ANNE TRUBEK!

If you are a woman writer who wants to be published in the Funny Women column, email me at funnywomen at therumpus dot net.

A few more choice quotations from Weiner:

1) “We are going to have to speak up for ourselves, and help each other, if those abysmal ratios are ever going to change.”

1) “In the end, it’s going to take a New Girls’ (and Boys’) Network to counter the Old Boys Network. Men and women committed to change are going to have to step up and speak out.”

1) “Popular women writers might not get the reviews, or the respect – but we do have the readers. These readers are eager to find the next great essay, or novel, or magazine piece, and they trust us to help them find it. I’m committed to using my voice and talking about women writers who aren’t getting the quality or quantity of attention that their male peers receive. In the past few years, I’ve done blogposts, Q&As and I’ve had a lot of success with giveaways, where I ask readers to purchase a book by a female author . . . and then send them one of my books for free.”

Readers: if you purchase a book by a female author, I will send you an air high-five for free.

**

See also: Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the Living Shit out of Each Other. A few tips within:

1) Get your female friends together “at least once a month for an all-out, anything-goes session of nonjudgmental reassurances . . . with friends sharing excessive amounts of admiration, empathy, and encouragement for one another.”

1) Just go “balls out with the confidence-boosting,” partaking “in seven or eight mutual expressions of positive regard.” Bolster “the shit out of [your friend's] self-esteem.”

1) Keep “telling her how fucking talented and beautiful she [is].”

Fuck yeah!

How to Write Like a Funny Woman

Wed, 8 Feb 2012 17:01:41 -0500

Recently I started taking improv classes at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. During each class exercise, I’d think, “This would help my writing.” I compiled a list of writing lessons I learned from Improv 101:
1. Be in a scene (a place, a time, an action). I used to start scenes with a joke and go from there; one day my teacher, the venerable Chelsea Clarke, stopped me and said, “Be rowing a boat.” I began rowing a fake boat, and suddenly, I was a character in a boat; the audience knew where I was and what I was doing.
It’s similarly knee-jerk to start a chapter discussing the metaphysics of unrequited love or whatever, but that’s disorientating to your reader because it’s like soliloquizing in space. Put your reader in a scene. Make one character be unrequitedly in love with another character rowing her boat.
1a. Relatedly, I wrote a chapter that is 80% me talking about my emotions and blowjobs. After an hour-long conversation with an editor about how to organize/overhaul this chapter, she finally said, “Elissa! Get out of the talky headspace, and present [verb] moments, rather than talk on and on about them. Basically, I need to see the blowjob. Take me into the blowjob room.” Take your readers into the blowjob room.
2. Play to the top of your intelligence. I wish I could explain this one better, but I think I just like the phrase, “Play to the top of your intelligence.” (Here is what Google says: ”If your character is stupid, be smart about how you’re stupid,” which I take to mean, be stupid in a specific way).
2a. I am trying to write a book. The book begins with me as a college student, a nineteen-year-old girl. I did a lot of dumb shit at that age. As the writer/present-day narrator (no longer a college student, no longer a teenager), I have to be smart about showing that young girl doing dumb shit.
3. “Yes, and.” Tina Fey’s Bossypants gets this right: “The Rule of Agreement reminds you to ‘respect what your partner has created’ and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where it takes you. As an improvisor, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no . . . ‘No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.’ What kind of way is that to live? . . . You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own . . . To me, YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.” Do I agree with Tina Fey? YES, AND I want to be her sister.
3a. Once applied to writing, you’ll be saying to yourself, “Yes, I want to write this emotionally traumatic scene, and I want to write the healing scene that comes a few years later.” “Yes, I want to hear your constructive criticism, and I’m going to make this chapter stronger because of it.” “Yes, this character goes down on that character, and then they switch it up.” “Yes, this horrible thing happened to me, and I’m going to write about it and turn it into the most beautiful piece of literature.” “Yes, I’m going to write a book, and I’m going to write another.”
4. Support your scene partners’ success. This is all about not being a jerk. Applaud your team every single time they/he/she get(s) the courage to do something creative/crazy in front of you and your judging eyes.
4a. Here is a rant:
I used to believe that if someone else is really funny, then I’m obviously less funny. If someone else is the best in the scene, then I’m—if not the worst—not the best, because the best is taken. If another woman in the class is getting better, then I’m getting worse. If she’s succeeding, I’m not. Not true in improv (and life)! A few things to consider: A) The better your scene partner is, the better you are, because you’re trapped on a sinking and/or floating ship together. B) If your ship is sinking, it’s fine because you are not alone. C) Sometimes, to make the scene work, it’s in your benefit to be “the straight man” (this isn’t a homophobic term; it means: the one who isn’t the funny scene-stealing star. “Straight men” are important because they make the scene work, and therefore make the show good; it’s not about them—it’s about their team. “Straight men” are also important for sex.)
4b. How this pertains to writing: it may very well be true that another person is succeeding and you are not experiencing success, but one has nothing to do with the other. There’s not a limited amount of success going around. In what world does it make sense that if I am funny, you are not funny? NO WORLD. We need to believe in, encourage, support, and massage each other’s egos. I believe in you. I believe in what you’re doing. Please keep doing it, and maybe do a little of it near me.
(Sidebar rant to The Rant: There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and I think it’s harder for women than for men, because in men, arrogance is sexy. In women, it’s bitchy. I’m making generalizations based on my own generalizations and those of my friends—this may be hard to accept or you want to argue or say I’m not being objective or I’m being reverse sexist. This female community doesn’t exclude men; what I’m emphasizing is that we need to fortify the female community. There is work to be done. How do I know this? Because I know there’s work to be done inside me. [Insert dirty joke here.])
5. Make strong choices. The more specific you are (“I’m in a graveyard, and I’m a vampire slayer who is also a vampire [real scene that happened to me]“), the stronger you are communicating. If you’re a vampire, try biting your scene partner right away (the strong and obvious choice), instead of what I did, which was to stand still and say, “Hey, I’m a vampire slayer who is also a vampire, so I guess I’m suicidal.” And then I staked myself and died. The scene was over before it began.
5a. I can visualize a strong female lead who likes grilled cheese with American cheese and white bread; I do not have a clear picture of a character who eats food.
6. Don’t be precious. This is another way of saying, “kill your darlings.” Move on. Let go of your expectations. Let’s say you’re planning a great joke, but the scene changes/takes a different direction and the joke no longer works—let it go. Be comfortable letting it be gone forever. Know you’re in the next scene with a new joke, a new opportunity. As Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” I also like what Will Eno wrote: “Let’s not be precious. The history of plays and the history of the world is a set of the same conversations being had by different people. We’ve all been through them. ‘You are the only one, forever,’ we swear, having sworn it before.” You are the only one, forever, fantastic first sentence; goodbye.
6a. If you can’t kill your darlings, anesthetize/copy & paste them in a separate Word document.
7. Be present. Yoga also says this. If yoga and improv say this, it must be the truest of truths. Not being present in a scene is the real-life nightmare of showing up to a test for which you haven’t studied (and you are naked and your crush is noticing you for the first time and there is shrinkage). Not being present in a yoga pose means you have probably fallen on your sacrum or your shockra or your perineum.
7a. Writing takeaway: When talking about Elizabeth Bishop one day, my poetry teacher, Jennifer Michael Hecht, said she believed only in work created with a high level of concentration. Install the hilariously-namedFreedom program that turns off the Internet; place your phone in a drawer; put up a sign that says Mining Coal; do whatever you have to do to be present with your writing. Go into the blowjob room if you have to.
There are a lot of other rules, and I’ll update this as I learn them. Namaste, Funny Women (and that includes men and everyone else).

A Writer’s Guide to Using Twitter

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 04:00:16 -0400

#hashtag: this is called a “hashtag”; it’s used to summarize entire planets of feelings and thoughts in one word. #publishingarmageddon.

Unsolicited Writing Advice You Want

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 03:14:30 -0400

- An MFA program will really help you if you have a high self-esteem problem.

- Your writing should amuse you; if it doesn’t, there’s hardly any point to suffering this much or being this vulnerable or getting that addicted to [fill in the thing to which you got really addicted or hope to get addicted because it’ll give you “material”].

- Do you want someone to tell you that your short story sucks and that you should be intellectually and environmentally safe by recycling it? TOO BAD. No one can tell you this. No one gets to tell you what’s trash/recyclable; you decide.

- If someone judges you through your writing, that someone is doing a bad job reading.

- Write every day. If you can’t do that, do this: set an egg timer for 20 minutes; get a pencil and paper and have them touch; don’t lift your pen or pencil off the paper; write “I cannot write every day” on the piece of paper until you have something else to say; do this every day.

- “The moment I stop being a reader is the moment I stop being a writer”--a famous writer said this to me once.

- A conversation between two writers: Writer 1 says, “Blah blah blah,” and Writer 2 says, “Shut up and write.”

- You can’t dismiss an experience because there have been worse experiences.

- “No one who writes good fiction has an Internet
connection”--poorly paraphrased advice from Jonathan Franzen.

- Writing is the opportunity to take the worst things that have happened to you and turn them into the most beautiful.

- If anyone has told you you shouldn’t write or that no one would read your writing if he/she had a choice or that you’re unloveable, please email me at elissa.bassist@gmail.com, and I will tell you that any person who craps on your dream is a tampon popsicle.

Introducing: My Book

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:37:53 -0400

My forthcoming memoir is not unlike the fictional self-help guide Dealbreakers, pictured here.

If You Are My Family

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:26:59 -0400

I’ve become aware that my family has figured out how to access the Internet. With this great power comes great responsibility in maintaining our congenial relationship.

If you are my family, you may not want to read most of what I write. I’ve come up with a rating system to help us maximize our reading enjoyment and minimize our uncomfortableness with each other.

You know in restaurant menus when there is a tiny chili sign to represent a dish as “spicy” or a tiny broccoli head to identify pasta as “vegetarian” or “heart-healthy”? I am going to place this symbol “XXX” to notify you, my potential family member, that a piece is for non-mature audiences only. Because I love and respect you, let’s work together to get you to stop reading my shit.

Notes from the Rumpus Women Road Show

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:53:32 -0500

In August 2010, Julie Greicius, senior literary editor at TheRumpus.net, called me and instead of asking, “How are you?” she asked, “Do you think we can edit and contribute our own writing to a book in three weeks and then publish it?” My answer: “That is crazy. Of course let’s do that.”

All of us at The Rumpus liked the idea of an Internet website becoming a book publisher--reversing the demise of publishing using the vehicle that perpetuated its destruction. Rumpus Women is a combination of these two different forces of publishing, and what we've come away with is a collection of essays that connect, are immediate, and will endure.

If you ever want to test a friendship, make a book together in three weeks. (That’s what she--Julie--said.)

The book--a book recently being mentioned in The Book Bench--began with a list. Julie Greicius and I wrote a list of our favorite women writers. We emailed many of them asking them to contribute a personal essay they had sitting in a drawer or stewing in their brains and hearts and could quickly move to their fingertips--most of them said yes. For the exceptions, we purposefully titled the book "Volume I," as in, this is just the beginning, i.e. keep writing like a motherfucker and don't wait for permission.

At the BookCourt reading in Brooklyn (the East Coast book launch) after Justine Blau, read, I said to the audience as default host, "Justine, the last time I read your piece, it was a Microsoft Word document. Now it's in a book, a book you're reading aloud to an audience in this bookstore. It goes to show how anyone's Microsoft Word documents could be books-in-waiting."

People’s faces changed in an instant—that’s what hope will do—and I’ll never forget those looks. Would it be going too far to call this all "spiritual"? As a non-practicing Jew/social-capitalist, I'd say no. In fact, this event was the closest I've felt to anything transcendent in a very long time.

Nell Boeschenstein was next. Her mother and sister were in the audience, and if you've read Nell's story about her sister's breast cancer or heard her voice as she reveals she carries the same gene--a voice on the page and in front of you that is marked by an indelible tremble of tenderness and bravery--you might cry alone tonight, as I often do.

After Jami Attenberg read, I emoted, “I almost forgot how much I love going to readings. You read one piece that makes you cry, and when the author reads it aloud, it makes you laugh.” The dimension, the aliveness, the human voice to something that's as human as it gets. The night was a symphony of women’s voices. We gave to readers what we all love when we read, write, and talk to each other: connection.

After Diane Spechler read, I told her she's like a giant penis and I would like to date her. I don't know why I said this. But I meant it.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee--I never told her this, but when she read, I wanted her to be my mom.

I hugged Michelle Orange right before she read because that was the first second we met in person.

After being mostly alone for my first four months in New York and cultivating a Woolfian agoraphobia and a social moron's romantic attachment to Internet television, the BookCourt event was my first "not only do I have to talk to people, but also I have to talk to a big group of people" outing. I had been onstage before in my previous life--the one I had only five months ago--and had felt more at home onstage than any place else. Sometimes it's in public, in front of strangers, when our true self emerges. My theory about readings/shows is: if you give yourself over to it, as the Rumpus Women have done, it's the place you become alive and make others feel alive; it's the place where you are out of the mundane, out of the computer screen, and you're here, in person, in all your person, to be entertained and be changed. It's not only reading. It's a life event.

What was also surprising and inspiring was how these women were themselves in the present even as they were summoning their written selves from the past. Being around the contributors is a magical mind meld of wit, intensity, heart, and connection. They are great and graceful and funny, and I felt the audience feel magnetically drawn to each reader like the way people become moths to a flame that burns so brightly. We were all engaged, electrified.

I'm spewing a lot of theory of "show" that may or may not be interesting. Words on a page. I walked away from our first Brooklyn reading feeling wonderful; it was, without a doubt, a great show, one that reflected the energy of each reader/writer/woman. In all of these words, I tried to explain what one moment of being on that stage felt like. One moment.

(As a side note, there was no open wine bar at this event. We pulled off a reading with zero alcohol in either the readers or the audience, as far as I know. I joked at one point, "I know everyone thinks the Internet is real, but tonight is evidence that real life is not only realer, it can be better. This is the first time I've met the contributors sans screen, and I recognize most of you by your Facebook photos. As much as I enjoy the solitude I've carved out of my loneliness that I try to remedy by spending all hours online connecting and disconnecting, tonight reminds me how good it feels to be in front of faces like yours." Writing and performing are linked; sharing work in front of people is as important as the solitary act of writing.)

Who Would You Rather: Lorrie Moore or Tina Fey?

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 22:08:48 -0500

An exhaustive and comprehensive list of links not answering this question:

Notes on Lorrie Moore at The New Yorker Festival

Have I Earned These Clichés?

A Baker's Dozen of My Feelings about David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:57:56 -0500

(“Feelings” originally appeared on TheRumpus.net and was reprinted in Best of the Web 2010 [Dzanc Books])
***
“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.” – Infinite Jest
***
First of all, I didn’t even want to write this because who am I to write this?
***
Second of all, here is a real conversation that happened:
Elissa: What should I do at therumpus.net?

Stephen: Maybe you can write a book review.
Elissa: Okay, but first I need to finish reading Infinite Jest.
Stephen: Why don’t you review that?
Elissa: No, I can’t review that.
Stephen: Why not? We don’t believe in timely reviews.
Elissa: No, it’s not that. I can’t just review that book. I’m not a person who is a good enough person to write about David Foster Wallace. There are other people.
Stephen: Maybe you should write about your own insecurities about why you’re not a person good enough to write about David Foster Wallace.
Elissa: Okay.
***
Instead of writing about my insecurities, I will write about my feelings, which is just as good/the same. Feelings can never be wrong or misinterpreted as legitimate; they can be generally misinterpreted, which is fine, especially if I’m not being smart or funny enough on the surface of things.
Feeling No. 1: Confidence. I will need this book, and only this book, to study for the GREs.
Feeling No. 2: Fear. I took Infinite Jest on a kayaking trip in Colorado. I left it in my car, and when I reached for it afterward, I saw that one-third of the book was soaked in river water. The book is now growing mold on its pages, dark black clouds that keep expanding. I worry that I’m breathing in mold particles when I read (I’m nearsighted, so I have to hold the book very close to my face a.k.a. my nose and mouth). I keep the book at the foot of my bed, so that it’s far enough away from me that I don’t inhale any minute fungal hyphae while I’m sleeping. I can’t buy a new copy because I’ve solidified a relationship with my current water-damaged copy (also, it’s a first edition). Mold is pretty fucking toxic-it even plays a critical part in Infinite Jest, when a germophobic mother backs away in terror from her son who ingested hirsute mold of one color that is growing mold of another color. Some critics (a.k.a. Wikipedia) speculate this is a possible cause of the boy’s final condition, believing the mold somehow synthesized into a hallucinogenic drug. My fear is real.
Feeling No. 3: Idiocy. I remember seeing Infinite Jest for the first time, and judging a book by its cover and length, I thought I’d be clever by noticing it, confronting my ability to read it, and then not read it as a sign of being over being able to read it. It just looked long and pretentious for the sake of being long and pretentious. I suggest you don’t cultivate the same idiot presumption. Life has taught me that books of substantial length usually offer something substantial.
Feelings No. 4-6: Comprehension, identification, and projection. Reading IJ is like forging a spiritual connection with a man who expresses my feelings better than I do. As someone who writes, I’ve often felt that language is so poor an instrument for communication or expression. I find it unyieldingly difficult to write an honest sentence. DFW exhibits otherwise. George Saunders, in his remarks at David Foster Wallace’s memorial service, called Wallace “a wake-up artist.” Yes. DFW’s words, beyond creating solid smart sentences and solid smart stories, reach this part of you that you thought no one could reach, saying everything you’ve been wanting to say and hear, everything you’ve been thinking on your own but haven’t been able to share with anyone else. While the whole world lies to you (the media, the politicians, the [insert your own contaminated culprits here]), Wallace tells you the truth. It’s as if he comes out of his book and shakes you until you’re dizzy, yelling at you all the time, “I GET IT. I GET YOU. YOU ARE NOT ALONE HERE.”
Feelings No. 7 & 8: Exhilaration/exhaustion and physical pain/somatic hi-def experience. This book is an exercise in paying attention. To begin, you need a dictionary, preferably the OED. Since countless characters hijack the narrative without warning, I’d recommend keeping a list of monikers to separate the Canadian wheelchair assassins from the recovering/persisting head-cases from the tennis prodigies. Wrist braces aren’t a bad idea. A working knowledge of mathematics, chemistry, grammar, physical education, video production, waste management, puppetry, media dissemination, the Twelve Steps, and Canada will go a long way. Finally, a Faulkner-Gaddis-Pynchon-like-patience is necessary, as in butt-in-the-seat-time to power through even what you don’t understand, what doesn’t seem like English, and what gives you a physical headache; just read the words, and they’ll invade some part of you that can absorb and translate and assimilate. Have faith. Persevere. DFW will slap you a couple of times to make you pay attention harder, because you’re saying, “I’m laughing too much; I’m crying too much”; you’re now facing the challenge of being too emotional to continue reading the book as you’re distracted and wiping tears away and recovering. You got a bit off track by engaging with the author as if he were your drinking companion, being all vulnerable and shit, and that’s a good thing. You just can’t let it get in the way. This book demands your attention, and if you give it, the rewards are unquantifiable. It is possible, as with anything that demands your attention, to glaze over a passage, but you’ll go back and read it and see you would have missed everything if you missed those few sentences. It’s all essential, and you can’t miss a word or a moment without being unbelievably sorry and sad. So read and reread and read again. Eventually you’ll do anything for him, Jesus, you now just want to be inside him, because your secrets are now his secrets and his wisdom is now your wisdom, and you praise a Higher Power that this man existed to tell you everything you ever needed to know.
Feeling No. 9: Mutability. I had to choose carefully to whom to recommend this book. No one who knew me was allowed to hate it. If they hated it, they hated me. Recently I was in a bookstore, and I picked up the book because I wanted to send it to my ex-boyfriend, to say, “Read this, and then you’ll know what you’re missing by not loving me.” I was with a friend, and she wanted to buy it for herself. I didn’t have the heart to separate her from the book once she had it in her hands. She deserved this book much more than he did. And then she read it, and she finished it before I did, and she told me, “You getting me to read this book is the best thing you’ve ever done.”
Feeling No. 10: Compassion. In IJ, there are no minor characters or incidents. DFW gives every detail respect and every someone a story. He’s nice to people and sort of says, “Oh, you failed in that moment? That’s a common theme in humanity, and no one can really fault you for that.” Not everyone deserves what happens to him/her; we must endure despite other people or circumstance, which is the hardest thing, but the most necessary thing, and actually the only thing, if you think about it, which DFW makes you do, with every word.
Feeling No. 10.5: Admiration. DFW teaches his reader how to be a Student of the Game. The “Game” is tennis, but it’s also “Life.”
Feeling No. 11: Respect. You give it; you get it. With publishing and media the way it is today (and the way Wallace predicts it will devolve), here is an author and a book that respect its reader, that says, “You get on my level, and I’ll get on yours.” The words are multi-syllable-d, the language multifarious and poetic, the content often oblique, the characters complex, the font for the endnotes small, and so on. This book is hard to read; it is heavy in every sense of the word; it’ll rattle your brain and hurt your wrists. And I appreciate that. But not only that. Good writing offers a portal out of the mundane, out of what you already know, and out of your own boring head. Wallace is incomprehensively imaginative and endlessly inventive, and just to give a taste, I’ll mention a few titles listed in the encyclopedic Filmography of James O. Incandenza: “Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge,” “Fun with Teeth,” “Kinds of Pain,” “‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque,’” “The American Century as Seen Through a Brick,” “The Cold Majesty of the Numb,” etc. When you’re holding down a job from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., you want to read this kind of material, like funny dialogue between competitive junior tennis players or highly uncomfortable sexual situations involving Raquel Welch masks. And the darker end of the spectrum is so dark, like really sick disturbing shit of which your rational, sane, traditional mind could never conceive on its own. You start to feel embarrassed and scandalized and unhinged by what you read, and then you feel embarrassed and scandalized and unhinged by the fact you like it, and embarrassed to have ever been unhinged by it. You want more. You’re into it. You are, because even though you’re just reading a book, you feel more alive, vibrant, and vulnerable considering you’ve just confronted what you’d never have imagined; but you’ve gotten to the other side of it, the other side of where you were before you read, and that’s a better place to be, even if–no, especially because–you’re more aware.
Feeling No. 12: Infinite Jest. We’ve entered an era where we’ve forgotten how to entertain ourselves. In a time when attention and perception have become disconnected, Wallace works to connect human beings with their emotions through the medium of reading. I often have to justify entertainment as more than “wasting time” or “momentarily neglecting my lonely existence.” IJ reawakens the art of being a watcher; it’s no longer an evil to be alone with yourself, to reclaim solitude as an important activity, one where you confront your subjective experience and face your memories, your feelings, your passions, all of which are reflected at you while you read. The book is not only to be read, it is to be experienced as a life event. The reader has to participate in this book, and in this way, IJ is the anti-passivity. Every time I pick up the book, I get something out of it that informs who I am as a person, how I think, how I live, how I’d like to perceive the world. What makes the book “infinite” is what the reader takes out of it, how personal it becomes, how instructive. It’s definitive engagement ad infinitum.
Feeling No. 13: Sadness. I feel sad writing this now, knowing my words don’t even capture .20148 of how I actually feel about Infinite Jest.
***
NB: This book is about competitive tennis, addiction, and entertainment. It is set in the not-too-distant future, where time is subsidized (i.e. “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”) and all the problems of today have gotten worse. But in a really funny way.
***
More about David Foster Wallace:
A Reading List as Suggested Posthumously by David Foster Wallace
A Companion Guide to D. T. Max’s “The Unfinished”

I Also Saw The Social Network

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 22:18:10 -0500

(Thoughts and regrets have changed since original publication of this article on TheRumpus.net.)

Cry for Help Now Available as T-Shirt and Coffee Mug

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 15:42:37 -0500

Write Like a Motherfucker coffee mug--because it’s hard to write like a motherfucker without coffee.

Write Like a Motherfucker T-shirt!

The Funny Women Interview with Amy Sedaris

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 03:01:55 -0500

You’ve heard of a bikini wax, but what about a “Tumbleweed”?

Read the Funny Women Interview with Amy Sedaris about the healing power of crafting.

Love Letter to the Movie The Descent

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:18:45 -0400

Nicholas Rombes wrote an original review of The Descent on The Rumpus, and I became so overwhelmed with emotion that I wrote a love letter to the movie in the comments section of the piece. I reprint it here now because I so appreciated Nicholas writing this way about horror movies. I care about them very much–they offer a fantastic release from the shitstorm of life.

“Love each day.” (For those of you who know, you know.)

***

Dear The Descent,
Thank you for this cinematic presentation of FEMINISM. Chicks kicking ASS is both inspiring and arousing. Because of you, I’m two things I thought I’d never be: athletic and 27% gay [ed. note: this percentage has climbed since initial publication].
You begin with three hot babes (two brunettes and a freckled blonde; two have accents) whitewater rafting, and then you kill off the only male character in a super awesome way. I love when we learn later that he deserved to die.
Then you do the whole “one year later” thing, and you feature SIX lady foxes having a pillow fight in a secluded cabin, preparing for another adventure. The pillow fight didn’t happen, but it could have. You leave it open like that.
The important thing here is that you are about six hardcore chicks about to combat the elements and themselves with only spelunking gear, intuition, and boobs.
You terrified me in many ways, more than just challenging my sexuality. You made me scream twice. Layers, you have layers. Life is not just about one enemy, but many, some of them your slut friends, some of them human-rat hybrids. Women need to be prepared to fight a whole bunch of shit at once. Life, like spelunking in a bloody carcass disposal pool, demands dynamism, versatility, and cardio fitness.
You knew I like it rough. You knew I could handle it. You’re a giver.
I can’t stop thinking about you. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about something you did, something new you showed me, how fragile life is and how I shouldn’t waste a moment of it not on an extreme outdoor adventure with my lady friends.
Nature laughs lasts, laughs hardest and best, deep into the night, at us. But, think of it all. What a paradise. What a surprise to have a body. You taught me that I can be a badass girl. The next time I find myself in nature, I’m confident all my yoga training and suppressed aggression can be the difference between life and death, love and loss, heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Love, Elissa

Write Like a Motherfucker

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:15:32 -0400

(Reprinted without asking permission from TheRumpus.net but thinking it’s okay anyway. Original article here).

Dear Sugar,
I write like a girl. I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor. And that’s when I can write, which doesn’t happen to be true anymore.
Right now, I am a pathetic and confused young woman of 26, a writer who can’t write. I am up late asking you a question, really questioning myself. I’ve sat here, at my desk, for hours, mentally immobile. I look up people I used to love and wonder why they never loved me. I lie facedown on my bed and feel scared. I get up, go to the computer, feel worse.
David Foster Wallace called himself a failed writer at 28. Several months ago, when depression hooked its teeth into me, I complained to my then-boyfriend about how I’ll never be as good as Wallace; he screamed at me on Guerrero Street in San Francisco, “STOP IT. HE KILLED HIMSELF, ELISSA. I HOPE TO GOD YOU ARE NEVER LIKE HIM.”
I understand women like me are hurting and dealing with self-trivialization, contempt for other more successful people, and misplaced compassion, addiction, and depression, whether they are writers or not. Think of the canon of women writers: a unifying theme is many of their careers ended in suicide. I often explain to my mother my phobia that to be a writer/a woman/a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this.” She pleads with me: can’t it be different?
Can it? I want to jump out the window for what I’ve boiled down to is one reason: I can’t write a book. But it’s not that I want to die so much as have an entirely different life. I start to think that I should choose another profession—as Lorrie Moore suggests, “movie star/astronaut, a movie star missionary, a movie star/kindergarten teacher.” I want to throw off everything I’ve accumulated and begin as someone new, someone better.
I don’t have a bad life. I didn’t have a painful childhood. I know I’m not the first depressed writer. “Depressed writer”—because the latter is less accurate, the former is more acute. I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression.”
That said, I’m high-functioning—a high-functioning head-case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness. And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked.
How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?
Sincerely,
Elissa Bassist
Dear Elissa Bassist,
When I was 29 I had a chalkboard in my living room. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote, “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor and on the other side I wrote, “She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty.
The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was a book I read again and again and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. I sat like that too. Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book. My book. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling. My debut.
That I hadn’t written the book by the time I was 29 was a sad shock to me. Of myself, I’d expected greater things. I was a bit like you then, Elissa Bassist. Without a book, but not entirely without literary acclaim. I’d won a few grants and awards, published a couple of stories and essays. These minor successes stoked the grandiose ideas I had about what I would achieve and by what age I would achieve it. I read voraciously. I practically memorized the work of writers I loved. I recorded my life copiously and artfully in my journals. I wrote stories in feverish, intermittent bursts, believing they’d miraculously form a novel without my having to suffer too much over it.
But I was wrong. The second heart inside me beat ever stronger, but nothing miraculously became a book. As my 30th birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.
At the time, I believed that I’d wasted my twenties by not having come out of them with a finished book and I bitterly lambasted myself for that. I thought a lot of the same things about myself that you do, Elissa Bassist. That I was lazy and lame. That even though I had the story in me, I didn’t have it in me to see it to fruition, to actually get it out of my body and onto the page, to write, as you say, with “intelligence and heart and lengthiness.” But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked. And so at last, I got to serious work on the book.
When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up. In short, I had to gain the self-knowledge that Flannery O’Connor mentions in that quote I wrote on my chalkboard. And once I got there I had to make a hard stop at self-knowledge’s first product: humility.
Do you know what that is, sweet pea? To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went when I wrote the last word of my first book. Straight onto the cool tile floor to weep. I sobbed and I wailed and I laughed through my tears. I didn’t get up for half an hour. I was too happy and grateful to stand. I had turned 35 a few weeks before. I was two months pregnant with my first child. I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had.
I’d finally been able to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing—so talented! so young! I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.
I hope you’ll think hard about that, honey bun. If you had a two-sided chalkboard in your living room I’d write humility on one side and surrender on the other for you. That’s what I think you need to find and do to get yourself out of the funk you’re in. The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you shouldbe successful at 26, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.

We get the work done on the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some ways inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are 26. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.
That you struggle with major depressive disorder certainly adds a layer to your difficulties. I’ve not focused on it in my answer because I believe—and it seems you believe—that it’s only a layer. It goes without saying that your life is more important than your writing and that you should consult your doctor about how your depression may contribute to the despair you’re feeling about your work. I’m not a doctor, so I cannot advise you about that. But I can tell you that you’re not alone in your insecurities and fears; they’re typical of writers, even those who don’t have depression. Artists of all stripes reading this will understand your struggles. Including me.
Another layer of your anxiety seems rooted in your concern that as a woman your writing, which features “unfiltered emotion, unrequited love,” and discussion of your “vagina as metaphor” will be taken less seriously than that of men. Yes, sweet pea, it probably will. Our culture has made significant progress when it comes to sexism and racism and homophobia, but we’re not all the way there. It’s still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant. There are things you can do to shed light on and challenge those biases and bullshit moves. Organizations like http://vidaweb.org/index.shtml exist in order to connect women writers to do just that.
But the best possible thing you can do is get your ass down onto the floor. Write so blazingly good that you can’t be framed. Nobody is going to give you permission to write about your vagina, hon. Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.
That’s what women writers throughout time have done and it’s what we’ll continue to do. It’s not true that to be “a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this,’” nor is it true that a “unifying theme is many of their careers ended in suicide” and I strongly encourage you to let go of these beliefs. They are inaccurate and melodramatic and they do not serve you. People of all professions suffer and kill themselves. In spite of various mythologies regarding artists and how psychologically fragile we are, the fact is that occupation is not a top predictor for suicide. Yes, we can rattle off a list of women writers who’ve killed themselves and yes, we may conjecture that their status as women in the societies in which they lived contributed to the depressive and desperate state that caused them to do so. But it isn’t the unifying theme.
You know what is?
How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this” and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simplydig.
You need to do the same, dear sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug. That you’re so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you’re here to do. And when people are here to do that they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.
So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.
Yours, Sugar
***
You can follow Sugar on Twitter here.
Or join her Facebook fan page here.
And don’t forget the Dear Sugar Google Group.
***
Got a problem? Hit the Sugar spot: sugar@therumpus.net.

How to Move to New York

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:51:03 -0400

Don’t.

Literary icons/celebrities I made out with onstage

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:05:34 -0400

At the beginning of each Literary Death Match, I ask the judges a question onstage to get to know them better.

Question: “Susie Bright, I am a feminist. You are a sex-positive feminist. How do I become one of those?”

Answer:

The Exit Interview

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:35:36 -0400

I interviewed my ex-boyfriend. I asked why he never loved me. And why he showered with my best friend.

We talk about the difference between “your” and “you’re” here.

The Funny Women Interview with Sarah Haskins

Mon, 7 Jun 2010 13:48:48 -0400

“I just worked on stuff I loved with people I loved and respected. And all that work makes you better. As I mentioned above, the gender politics are there, but you, as a lady, are also there to be a comedian. So, hone your voice, whatever that is, and keep performing it in different places. Don’t let one set of people be your audience – that can be limiting.” --Sarah Haskins.

“I know [Colin Firth] kinda, but only in that ‘I’ve masturbated to you’ way.” --Elissa Bassist

Read our interview about vampires here on TheRumpus.net.