The Memoir I Never Wanted to Write
I never thought I would write a memoir. To be honest, I quite pointedly did not want to write a memoir. I’m not particularly fond of them. With a memoir, all of the characters are shaped through the perceptions of the narrator/author. The supposition seems to be that this author’s life has been extraordinarily exceptional in some way. But the only thing about the author’s life that typically stands out as truly exceptional is the narrator’s positioning of themselves as the hero of their own story; painting themselves as the truly outstanding person in a sea of scoundrels, or as the lone sane person in families of madwomen, or as the spiritually superior being unfortunately entangled in social groups of the tragically unhip and un-“woke.” The narrator’s own motivations are incomparably pure, their sacrifices worthy of sainthood, their bravery unwaveringly awe-inspiring, and in short, it bores me.
When it comes to literature, I very much prefer writing and reading fiction. With novels and short stories, I get a chance to step outside of myself and to provide the audience with fully-formed characters, each viewing one another through their own subjective lenses. The subjective interactions of the characters then provide the audience with a more objective, albeit stylized understanding of the characters moving the story along. My characters are often wrong in their assumptions and understanding of other’s motivations. Likewise, character’s motivations are complicated. Most people are neither completely malevolent nor completely altruistic, but are compelled by some combination of these driving forces. My fiction has been praised specifically for lacking of any clear heroes or villains.
So, imagine my surprise when I found myself, just two years ago now, pressing my fingers to the keyboard to begin furiously pounding out what would soon become my fourth book and first full-length work of nonfiction, 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism).
What compelled me to embark upon this project, seemed to me to be the exact opposite motivation behind the writing of most memoirs. I decided to put these stories to the page not because my life has been exceptional. I felt it was incumbent upon me to tell the stories exactly because, when it comes to sexism, my life is not exceptional at all.
I first began this project as a journal, nine years ago. I was twenty-seven years old. I was living in Brooklyn, during an unbearably hot summer. The level of sexual harassment I was experiencing daily was making me come undone on a deep, emotional level; it began significantly impacting my mental health. I was being harassed several times an hour as soon as I stepped out of my apartment. It happened when I was walking down the sidewalk, in my own apartment building hallway, on the subway, and then, some days, when I reached the “safety” of my office, where an older male co-worker would take his twice-weekly five minute break to knock on my door, step into my office, and sexually harass me.
To deal with the street harassment, which sometimes included grabbing and sexual groping from strangers, I wrote and printed up pamphlets, similar to the kind that Christians might hand out to passersby. Mine had a riot-girl punky aesthetic, and included Feminist 101 messages like: “When you say sexual things to me on the street, it doesn’t make me feel complimented. It makes me feel uncomfortable and afraid.” I kept dozens of these in my pockets, but repeatedly, when I was verbally harassed or groped by men on the street, I lost my gumption, and failed ever even to give out as much as one pamphlet. I was too afraid to confront these men in person, especially since just ignoring them so often resulted in them lobbing sexist and homophobic slurs, and even threats at me.
This book was not pleasant to write. It was not healing. It was re-traumatizing. I would not suggest that anyone do this as a therapeutic exercise.
I then began what I now know is a common mindfulness technique. I decided, at the end of every day, that I would write each incident of sexist harassment down in my journal. I would just write down, as clearly and as efficiently as possible, what had happened to me each day. I wouldn’t spend time analyzing the man’s motivations or even my own feelings about it. I would just write, quite coldly, exactly what happened. This would take less time, and ensure that I would be able to carve out a few minutes and log these incidents every day.
After a few weeks of doing this, I thought, I would be able to look at these events objectively. I would be able to see them plainly and clearly, and get a better understanding of how often this was actually happening, and how severe the harassment really was. Perhaps I would see that it wasn’t happening as often as I felt it was. Perhaps the fact that these interactions were intensely emotional and frightening in the moment were causing me to “spin out” and over-react, and obsessively analyze my life as a woman, and view my gender as condemning me to an unendurable existence. Perhaps this would give me new eyes, a fresh perspective. Or, perhaps, it would be exactly as I thought it was, and then at least, I would be able to know, once and for all, that I was not over-reacting, but that my response was simply the logical reaction of a person who refuses to pretend things are fine when they are not.
This is the log from one day of the journal I kept for several weeks, but soon after this day, I stopped keeping a log:
July 16th, 2010: Went to the park on a date. Sat in the park on the grass lawn with my lover. Man came up and sat behind us and pulled his penis out and began masturbating. We responded by yelling at him and leaving.
July 16th, 2010: Two hours later, at a different place in the park, where we’d moved to get away from the masturbator, a man with a light strapped to his head, approached me and my lover in a very strange way, saying he was going to sit with us, in the secluded area we had retreated to, nearer the road. I told him to leave us alone. He said he was a cop. He was definitely not a cop.
As he continued toward us, I approached him, trying to be protective of my girlfriend and attempted to kick him in the balls, which is harder than it seems. He kept jumping away from me, holding his hands out, then repeatedly tried to grab me by the ankles when I kicked. We finally started shouting, hoping to draw the attention of people on a nearby sidewalk, and walked/jogged, quickly away. We cut the date short.
July 16th 2010: Going into my apartment in the early evening, a man jogged over as I was walking to my building, stood in front of me blocked my door and asked me, “Are you looking to get pregnant tonight?” I told him, “No, I’m looking to walk down the street with some amount of dignity. Do you have a problem with that?” Man responded that “Obama is president.” (He was black and I am white.) I lost it on him. I started screaming. I started screaming, ranting at him about rape and harassment, telling him to go fuck himself, and I think I even nonsensically referenced waiting for the day Michelle Obama became president. The man responded, “I wasn’t trying to start a rap-off, I was giving you a compliment.” His friends stood nearby laughing at me. He stepped away and allowed me to enter my building.
Now, nine years later, I have written a book, documenting one hundred instances of sexual harassment, assault, rape, and sexist discrimination I have personally experienced and witnessed, beginning at age five, through the present day. This book was not pleasant to write. It was not healing. It was re-traumatizing. I would not suggest that anyone do this as a therapeutic exercise.
At points, I thought about stopping. But I didn’t, because I believe in the power of narrative, and also, because I no longer know what else to do. I feel like I have to try to influence change in whatever way I can, and I am a storyteller. I can tell my story clearly. I wrote this book because most women I know have endured many of the same things I have. I wrote this because I know that sexism shapes our lives from the moment we are identified as female. My story is not exceptional. There is a story behind the story that may be somewhat unique to my individual circumstances. Not all women have had my exact experiences, of course. I am a queer woman. I was raised in a small, conservative farm-town. I became a punk as a teenager, and lived in an anarchist collective in Saint Louis, and then moved to New York City at a young age, where at first, I lived in Manhattan for free in exchange for work in a very avant-garde arts space, before becoming a published literary author. So, my experiences with sexism do look, in some ways, different than a woman who has lived a different type of life. And yet, also, they are, in so many ways, the same.
In conversations with women from all class backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities—transgender and nonbinary and cis women alike—I have repeatedly found that moving through the world as a woman means learning to navigate a constant disparity in the way we are treated, based on our gender. This disparity is unacceptable. I wrote this book to say loudly and unequivocally this is exactly what it looks like, plainly, and clearly, just the facts; a sometimes surgical narration of exactly what happened. Not why these things happened. Not what the men’s motivations might have been. Not whether or not I responded correctly, or if I was brave enough, or if I wasn’t brave enough, or if the man was otherwise a good man, or if he wasn’t otherwise a good man. I did not write this book because I am exceptionally good. I am not. There are no heroes in my book, and on the flip-side, all the men are not villains. Some of the men are serial sexual predators, and some are rabid sexists, and some are just regular men, and a few, are pretty good people whom I’m still friends with.
I believe that sometimes stories have the power to accelerate empathetic understanding. And after finishing this, I have to admit, I have a newfound respect for memoirs. I am viewing them with new eyes. Inspiring empathetic understanding is what the best memoirs I’ve read have been aiming at. It is what I’m aiming at. I do not know if I’ve succeeded, and I now feel exposed in a way I never have by the publication of a short story or novel. I have new respect for those who have dared to clearly show us some kernel of what they believe to be an important truth of their lives.
One my favorite writers, Harry Crews, famously said, “The writer’s job is to get naked. To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or ashamed of it. Strip it down and let’s get down to where the blood is, the bone is, instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!” And that is what I’ve done, to the best of my ability.
And now also, I am very happy that I’m about to press my fingers to my keyboard, and finish the new short story I’m working on. It’s about a little girl who sees things that other people don’t think are real. She’s completely out of her mind. Everyone is acting erratically and it seems like something astronomically horrible could happen at any moment. It’s fiction.
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Chavisa Woods’ 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism is out now from Seven Stories Press.
