Discovery (Fear and Desire) 1

"So, when do all of the people you are writing about find out about this blog and charge you with libel?"

My husband asked me this question last night, after I finished my first blog post.

"No one will ever read this," I answered, dodging the question, but articulating both my deepest hope and fear about this blog.

Like many people, I have long been fascinated by blogs, bloggers, the whole culture of internet storytelling. Last year, an old college friend came to give a paper at a conference at the university where I teach. He told me about his blog. I typed in the address about ten minutes after he gave it to me, and spent a full day riveted by his life as it unfolded on the screen. I will include his blog address here, as soon as I figure out how to do stuff like that.

In the last few years, I've taken to writing personal essays. I love the thrill of confession, the surprise that is a part of every line, once you get to that kernel of heretofore undiscovered, unfaced truth. I love the process, and I've been proud of some of the results. And yet, I cringe with embarassment when people let me know that they've read my writing, even when they like it. It's crazy, I know, and yet this is my consistent reaction, particularly when it comes to people I know. "I write for strangers and myself," Gertrude Stein said. I like this sentiment, and use it to guide me in my writing. And, in fact, I feel something besides embarassment only when I hear from strangers about something I've written. Then, I feel that deeply satisfying feeling of having made a connection through language across time, space, and other, more material, boundaries. I wrote an essay once that caused a stranger--a white man thirty years my senior-- to write me a letter that read, "When I read your words, it felt as if you were writing just to me." I put down that letter and thought, Now, I can die. I don't plan to die anytime soon, but maybe you can understand what I mean.

But to write about your own life is necessarily to write about the lives of others, as well. Where does my story end and the stories of others begin? To me, writing memoir is exciting precisely because it provides a portal onto these questions, which I find endlessly interesting. I write what I write because I am ambivalent about privacy. One on hand, I am intensely private. On the other, I never feel like my experiences are real unless I articulate them somehow, turn them into some kind of narrative. Writing is the way I make sense of the things I see, hear, and feel. So far, I have been relatively lucky in that the people who turn up in my essays have been tolerant, even empathetic, about this ambivalence. But, sooner or later, there will be people who will feel no such muddiness around their own sense of privacy. What happens then?

I have a friend who wrote a memoir about his family. He took pains to portray them warmly, generously, and everyone in the story seemed happy that he was writing about them. When the book came out, however, it was a different story. He described a family gathering where relatives literally turned their backs when he entered the room. The fact that he had had no prior warning that he might be greeted with such coldness made his experience seem all the worse. But when I asked him if, in the end, the book was worth it, he didn't miss a beat. "Absolutely," he said.

I didn't start this blog out of meanness. I didn't start this blog to expose other people. But my personal story leans over into other personal stories, including those of my daughters. When they get older, they will surely feel that I made public some of the stories they would rather have remained private. What happens then?

Yet these questions aren't enough to stop me. I feel, in the end, that I must continue, if only because I believe that it is only through the writing itself that questions like these can be answered.