No Guts, No Glory

Pyrotechnics: Blowing Up Your Life on the Page

I’D PRACTICED MY STORY in the car, making key details anonymous. I called my city “a Michigan college town.” I changed everyone’s name. And I figured that even if the audience despised me, it wasn’t like I lived in Chicago; I’d never have to see them again. But standing at the mic, ready to tell my story for The Moth, I suddenly remembered Tyler, the stage manager, sitting onstage next to the emcee, waiting to signal the five-minute mark.

Tyler, my former student.

Who knew me at the same time my story took place. Who might think I was a bad person if I told this story.

But I was here, in front of almost a thousand people, with a story I needed to tell. I took a deep breath.

“You’re going to have to trust me that prostitution really seemed like the best option at the time.”

I glanced at Tyler. His mouth opened gently.

I TELL WRITERS in workshops: Be willing to be the villain of your own story. Set your own actions out there for the reader to judge, without excusing or justifying your behavior. That thing you’re ashamed and afraid of? Send it up like fireworks. Let the reader decide whether or not to like you.

Guarded memoirs are damp squibs on the page. Readers can tell when something’s missing, when an author is holding back, but blowing up our own privacy by sharing the thing we swore we’d never share reaches an audience more viscerally than carefully dispensing the truth. Some of the most powerful, best-selling memoirs lay open the narrator’s addiction, grief, compulsions, or terrible childhood. Mary Karr’s memoirs about her volatile family and her drinking could be seen as incredibly embarrassing, but I watched readers line up at the 2016 HippoCamp nonfiction conference to tell Karr how her books had given them the bravery to tell their own dark stories.

If you’re venturing into blogging and personal essays, or doing social media for your writing life, it’s hard to know how much to share. Where’s the line of privacy? How do you get past the shame of sharing dark secrets? How can we write fearless, personal, potentially mortifying pieces that create beautiful explosions and enlighten everyone watching?

Here’s what I know after twenty years of getting naked on the page:

Focus on why telling your story is important.

Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess and author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, opened her blog in 2007 with the post:

Cursing makes everything funnier.

My dog just died.

My fucking dog just died.

See.

Almost five years later and much less glibly, she posted about her debilitating depression. A long postscript included why she’d chosen to write about such a shame-laden subject:

Judge me or not, I am the same person I was before. And so are you. And chances are that many of your friends, family, and coworkers are dealing with