My twenty-month-old son sleeps in a twin bed on the floor of his bedroom, wedged into a corner so he doesn’t tumble out, the corner stuffed with pillows so that he doesn’t bonk his head during bouts of violent toddler sleep. I think there is something wrong with the corner; bad feng shui, or perhaps a terrible energy, has snagged there. In the haunted punk rock flophouse I spent my twenties in, my bandmate Cheryl once told me that black balls of energy were roosting in the corners of my kitchen “like bats.” Cheryl was clean and sober and Native American and a mystic; when she got in fights with people she prayed for them, which baffled and infuriated her enemies. I believe there were bad-energy bats flapping through that house because of the nightmares I’d had, the prickly sensations, the creaking floorboards, and the shadows moving room to room. Classic haunted-house bullshit. The transient roommate population tended toward the alcoholic and the pill-addled, smokers of crystal meth and injectors of ecstasy. People with badly compromised psychic immune systems. None of us would have felt the sting of the bad-energy bats as they sank their fangs into our auras and sucked out all the pretty colors.
Lying in my son’s bed, as I do nearly every night, I wonder if the bad-energy bats are with us, tucked into the spiderwebby corner of his pale-blue bedroom. He’s been sleeping worse than usual, tossing and turning, crying tears through dreaming eyes. What do babies dream? Lying beside him one night, I too began to cry. At forty-five I seemed to have just realized I would never again be sixteen years old. I would never again feel what it feels like to be high on that particular mixture of youth and hormones, my still pillowy brain not yet hardened to risk, everything possible, probable, permissible. When I think of being sixteen I think of wearing a very short black velvet dress, the torn hem dangling thread. My hair was home-bobbed, choppy and chunky, a harsh burnt-orange color, the result of a failed effort to bleach my hair from a chemical black. I’m drunk, of course. Did I land on sixteen because drinking never felt as good as it did that summer, drunk in the Boston Common, making out with boys, riding in the trunk of my best friend’s car all the way to Worcester to see The Cure? The ghost of this girl hovered just above my son’s bed, flapping her black wings, and I wept. Later I texted my sister: “I’m sobbing because I’ll never be sixteen again.” She texted back: “I’m sorry you will never be sixteen again. That’s a hard truth. And I’m sorry you have PMS.”
It was not bad-energy bats, of course. Later I lay on the couch and tearfully live-tweeted my period: “Amidst feelings of intense greasy zit bloat absurd horniness gross.”
But then weeks later I lie in the same spot, and on the verge of falling asleep, I have the startling revelation that there is no god. I get that feeling, like stumbling from a curb; I jolt awake and quickly there are tears. My son, exhausted from kicking me repeatedly in the abdomen, sleeps through my jerk and sob. The despair is intense, the disappointment. This is all there is, a sprawling dark flash cracked like lightning the length of my universe. What will I pray to? I think dumbly. Oh, no more prayer. I realize that I actually love praying. Something I began skeptically on recommendation became a more habitual way to harness my mind, became something that brings me real joy. I love sending love out to the world with my son each night as he falls asleep, even though he actually refuses love to most everyone.
“We send love from our hearts to Uncle Bear?”
“No.”
“We send love from our hearts to cousin Chloe and cousin Jude?”
“No.”
“Yes, we do,” I insist, annoyed.
And he responds, “No, no, no, no, no.” Even a child can tell you there are no webs of magical energy strung between the hearts of those who love each other. I’m a fool. Everything fun about life seems gone. I cry myself to sleep.
The next day I take a smoldering bundle of sage and walk it around the house, spending extra time in the corners above my son’s bed. I tell my wife we’ve got to move it to a different part of the room, it’s got bad feng shui. I tell her about my crying jags. “What the fuck do I care about never being sixteen again?” I rant. “I hate nostalgia.” Same for god or no god. I pray regardless, because it makes me feel good and even science has acknowledged it changes your brain. Changing my brain is my favorite high. I pop three Celexa a day with the intention of sinking new grooves into that busted record. “Have you been taking your meds?” she asks. “Yup.” This has to be a magical problem.
It’s hard to know where to put my son’s bed. The room is small and cluttered with toys, with dressers and shelves. I lie down with him again, stretched out beneath the flap of the bad-energy bats. Drowsy, I think about how in my last book I called an ex-boyfriend “Cruise Dude.” Because he took me on a cruise, a bad cruise, the most miserable two weeks of my life, as is the point of the story. Cruise Dude. I cringe. Why did I call him that? I feel utterly humiliated. We will never, ever be friends again; how could such a moniker ever be forgiven? Dude, a shade less grotesque than bro. Named after a two-week getaway, no identity outside of the bad feelings he gave me, barely a mention of the decades of friendship that preceded our doomed affair. I vaguely remembered a fuck it feeling as I wrestled with what to call him. Cruise Dude was a placeholder that stuck; mostly I didn’t want to care too much about it. There is a certain stance you must take to write a memoir, a spell you cast upon yourself at the keyboard. You must not remember that your characters are actual people, people you once loved or maybe still do. Cruise Dude was brought into my memoir to illuminate a point, that I had dated people I shouldn’t have, and thusly have learned hard romantic lessons. Still, why didn’t I call him, like, Charles, or something? Shutting the laptop on that passage, I had smirked internally. Look, he didn’t even warrant a name in the book of my life. That’s what you get, Cruise Dude! If you don’t like it—goes the memoirist’s familiar refrain—you shoulda acted right! It felt good enough at the time. Now, in bed beneath the bad-energy bats, a low-level shame pervaded my body. How petty. I always told students not to write for revenge, just tell the story, but when your story is “I’ve been done wrong,” how can you help but steal a morsel of pleasure from the inherent vengeance of tattling? How can you, the wounded author, be trusted?
“If I understood the desire to confess, it would have saved me a great deal of unhappiness.” That is neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty in her book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. “Neurologists have found that changes in a specific area of the brain can produce hypergrafia—the medical term for an overpowering desire to write.” Flaherty herself became hypergrafic in the storm of a postpartum depression that followed the late-term miscarriage of twins. She had always been wordy, but now her pen flew off the margins. Her brain had been changed. When she became happily pregnant a second time, her brain was changed again and the writing mania came back. “Mental illness is not completely separable from sanity,” she writes. “There is a sense in which mental illness is awfully like sanity—only much, much more so.”
I have always written. In second grade I started a class newspaper, the Schoolyard Gazette, of which I was the editor, publisher, and sole staff writer. “Chicken Pox Is Sweeping the Second Grade” rang my first, sensationalist headline. I did the comics page, inking a crude heart coming at another heart with an ax. “Don’t go breaking my heart!” the caption quipped. When I too fell victim to chicken pox I decided to use the time to pen my first novel. Using a paperback as a model, I removed the scratchproof socks I had on my hands and got to it. Beginning at the beginning, I drew my cover. With a glance at the back, I wrote some blurbs boasting of the story’s special genius. Then I had to write the actual book. I was stumped. I returned to an earlier project, a humorous rewriting of the dictionary, where abundance, for example, was a social mixer for pastries.
In fourth grade I took inspiration from the headlines of the garish Boston Herald American, the lowbrow alternative to the Globe and what my grandfather read at the dinner table. When a young girl was finally killed by a mother who had long abused her, I wrote a fictionalized version and dedicated it to her memory. After scanning a piece about the unfair treatment endured by developmentally disabled individuals I penned a short story called The Retard’s Sister. In it, a girl makes a wish that her sister die so that the horrible kids at her school will stop teasing her. And her sister does die, and the guilt is such that she will never again have a happy day for the rest of her punishingly long life. In fifth grade I wrote scripts for The Facts of Life, in particular one wherein Jo inveigles the Go-Go’s to perform at a dance at Eastland Prep. In sixth grade I tried to adapt Judy Blume’s Blubber into a play. In seventh grade I mainly wrote and rewrote Billy Idol lyrics in Lisa Frank notebooks.
Then, when I was twenty-one, powerful things happened. I realized I could have sex with girls, and my life exploded. I realized all of society and culture was a misogynist conspiracy to oppress women, and that this web of oppression tangled with other oppressions, racism, say, or how people liked to beat up homeless people, or go fag bashing; it linked up with anti-Semitism, fascism. The connection between a police officer in Provincetown who would not allow me to sunbathe topless on the beach and the obliteration of generations at Buchenwald was so clear to me it stung my brain. When I called that cop a Nazi, I meant it. The way agriculture is produced, with chemicals, harvested by brown people sleeping in tents and pissing in the hot sun, was linked directly to slaughterhouses which were linked directly to American slavery. I stopped eating. My stepfather admitted he had been spying on me and my sister, for many years, through holes he’d carved into our walls. This was no different than my mother phoning our old landlord, a friend she had had a falling out with, to warn them that a Haitian family was coming to view the apartment. None of this was any different than the dumping of nuclear waste into third-world dumps. My brain was thoroughly changed.
I moved to San Francisco, and began writing. In earnest. I remember being inside a nightclub, sitting up on top of a jukebox, scribbling in my notebook by the light that escaped it. All around me the darkness writhed with throngs of females, their bodies striped and pierced, as shaved and ornamented as any tribe anywhere, clad in animal skins, hurling themselves into one another with love. What feeling it filled me with. An alcoholic, an addict, I know what it is to crave, and the need to take this story into my body was consuming. For years I sat alone at tables, drunk, writing the story of everything I had ever known or seen. Hypergrafia manifests primarily as personal narratives, memoir. My brain did this to me.
In workshops I always tell students to read The Midnight Disease so that they can understand their affliction. We are not unlike alcoholics, and it does seem like so many writers are alcoholics, doesn’t it? Writing is a mental illness, I tell them. Sometimes it helps me understand everything; through this lens I make a perfect sense to myself, much the way accepting my alcoholism contextualized so much of my temperament, my actions. Or how a thorough astrological reading can relieve you of guilt you hadn’t known you were carrying. I was born this way. But I am sober, now. I know it’s not my “fault” I inherited my particular genetic hash; so many alcoholics, Polish and Irish, I never had a chance. I did what alcoholics do, betray and lie and play the victim, be grandiose, grandly delusional, humiliate myself, shit my pants, and so on. It is so very blameless, an animal being its specific type of animal, but people get sober and they stop. If I truly see memoir as a compulsion on par with alcoholism—and so similar does it feel, an ecstasy of communion with yourself that facilitates the transcendence of your self; typing this, right now, I’m hardly even here—if I am powerless over this desire, and if, on occasion, it has rendered my life unmanageable, am I not required to abstain? What would it mean to get sober from writing memoir? What would a memoir bottom be? Lying in my son’s bed thinking, Cruise Dude, ugh, what a loser I am. Or, my mother nervously making dinner as I stammer my intention to write a book about how her husband hurt me, how she stood by his side. “But why do you have to publish it?” Is part of hypergrafia the need to have these writings witnessed by the world? I am sure I would never write if it were never to be seen by another.
The first time I shared my writing it was a poem about an ex-girlfriend who had done me wrong. I was at an open mic in a dive bar in San Francisco. I knew it was possible my poem was bad, but I reasoned that people all around me enjoyed things I found atrocious. There was, I believed, an audience for everything. If only one person on earth would like my poem, then I would read it for her. But, even as I knew it was possible that my poem was bad, I knew also it possibly was good. I had felt an exhilaration while writing it, and now, anticipating my reading, I felt similarly exhilarated. Probably this was a sort of mania. “While my hypergrafia felt like a disease,” writes Flaherty, “it also felt like one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It still does.”
Personal narrative is a mental illness, but you don’t want to be well. This is not unusual. Many mentally ill people don’t want to take their meds. Every so often I fantasize about the gorgeous mania that could fill me up if I just stopped eating my three Celexa. The one time I abstained, a cartoon cloud, gunmetal gray, drifted into my house and settled itself over my head. Oh, that. Of course I only remember the euphoric highs, not the daily gloom. I gobbled my pills. When I was an alcoholic I didn’t want to get sober. I couldn’t imagine who I would be without alcohol. I realize how sad that sounds, like, literally pathetic. But it is true. Alcohol gave me everything. It was 100 percent the fuel that fired me. It made me move, made me write, fuck, fight, love, motivate.
I don’t want to get sober from writing. I can’t imagine who I would be without writing. This I can embrace, it does not feel pathetic. Even though the list of people who have been hurt by it grows. You can’t really make amends when you’re still drunk. I can’t really do anything while I’m still writing. I can’t email my ex and say, “Sorry I called you Cruise Dude. I feel bad about it.” Plus, I already betrayed him in a totally different piece I’d written for Nerve about fifteen years ago, in the wake of our first dumb affair, and I had already apologized for that, and of course this feels bad. I’m a repeat offender. Another ex furiously pleaded with me not to write about him, and so I wrote a book about not writing about him. But before that book came a different book where I also wrote about him. For two weeks he would not speak to me. “You used me as your foil,” he accused. But he was my foil. I said I was sorry. I was sorry that I made fun of him for watching The Real World. My television habits have worsened since our breakup and now I too watch all kinds of terrible television, things far worse than The Real World. I could apologize for that, but that is all. “I thought we were family,” he said, as if he hadn’t watched me betray my family in writing a thousand times. “We are,” I said. “But if I can’t be honest about what our relationship was like for me, then it’s just not going to work.” I think we are friends. He keeps a certain distance. I do not think we are family anymore.
When I was in pain from my breakup with this person, I doubled down on Buddhism. I had always wanted to study it more deeply, and now I was lonely and hurting with tons of free time, what could be better. In fact, most white people come to Buddhism after a trauma. The temple I attended was full of divorcees and bulimics, alcoholics, people dealing with deaths, their imminent own or someone else’s. It had a somber vibe. But everything I ever heard struck me as the truth. I bought a lot of Pema Chödrön books. My nightstand was Pema Chödrön, Al-Anon literature, and a Hitachi Magic Wand. A particular still life.
It soon became apparent that writing memoir is the least Buddhist thing you can do, worse even than physical violence, as there is a tradition within Buddhism of whacking acolytes with a stick if they seem to need it. Chödrön’s whole message is drop the story line:
The story line is associated with certainty and comfort. It bolsters your very limited, static sense of self and holds out the promise of safety and happiness. But the promise is a false one; any happiness it brings is only temporary. The more you practice not escaping into the fantasy world of your thoughts and instead contacting the felt sense of groundlessness, the more accustomed you’ll become to experiencing emotions as simply sensation—free of concept, free of story line, free of fixed ideas of bad and good.
Memoir is the story line. Again and again I repeat to myself what has happened to me and what it has meant. This begins in my head and becomes material on the page and I repeat it forever as I read aloud from my work, perpetuating an idea about myself when, as Buddhism insists, there is no “self.” This understanding provokes despair. Will I be compelled to give this up too? By “too” I mean in addition to drugs and alcohol, compulsive sex benders, gossip, and sugar. In one of my tarot decks, the card for the Tower is illustrated as an eye opening in the heavens, the tower crumbling beneath it. It’s about the irrevocability of revelation. When you see so clearly that something is wrong, you are required to change. Or are you? I saw once, so clearly, that eating animals is wrong, and still I believe it probably is and still I eat animals. Does turning against your highest knowledge do something bad to some very good part of you? I refuse to drop my story line.
Though something did happen in the temple, during a class I was taking. It was a basic Buddhism class that went deep into early texts and mythologies, and it got me feeling mystical. There was much talk about there being no self. Or, a self behind the self, a hidden self somehow more real, your Buddha nature maybe, I don’t want to act like I grasped it because I didn’t, but something happened and I realized I was not Michelle Tea. I was some other thing that was wearing Michelle Tea like a robe. I was riding Michelle Tea’s life like a ride at Six Flags. It gave me a good feeling. It still does. I think, quite often, I am not Michelle Tea. Or, I am not Michelle Lippman, my married name. I am not Michelle Swankowski, my birth name. I am not Michelle Tomasik, my legal maiden name. Who is this girl, why did she have so many names? She was a memoirist. Michelle Tea was a memoirist. I think of it like this, and it satisfies me.
But still. Says Maggie Nelson, our stories “trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it.” Once I was reading at the Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, upstairs in a low-ceilinged, black room that felt like a firetrap. The event was part of a series, Seven Deadly Sins. I was assigned envy. I didn’t want to write anything new. My book Valencia is filled with envy, I read from that, no matter that it was many years old, the time documented is older still. This is from my book Valencia. It’s about this bitch who stole my girlfriend. I had been introducing that chapter as such for a very long time. The “girlfriend” hadn’t been my girlfriend for over a decade. Currently I had a boyfriend, had had one for years. It was a serious commitment; we’d even gotten fake married by a witch who had charged us nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents for her services and provided a Safeway carrot cake as a wedding cake. We wore wedding rings bought for cheap at a joyería on Mission Street. But I opened the piece like it had all just happened, my girlfriend, stolen, some bitch out there with my heart in her claws.
After the reading an acquaintance came up to shake my hand. He liked the piece. He was laughing at the outlandishness of it. “I can’t believe that was Sara,” he said, knowing the real name of the home-wrecker bitch I called Emma. “And I was sitting right there with her!” I paled. Sara was here? “Yeah, we were sitting right behind you.” A flood of shame hit me. I flashed on my performance, truly a performance, acting out this old, tired outrage, a hurt I hadn’t actually felt in years. Someone had done me wrong and I’d etched it in stone and become its keeper, its caretaker. Times change and people change, perspectives shift and new information comes to light, and forever in the pages of that book Sara is the destroyer of my young lesbian romance. I am forever done wrong.
I went downstairs and found her sprawled morosely in a booth. “Hello,” she said. Years ago, when she was with my ex and the two of them would show up at readings, I would scan the crowd to make sure she wasn’t there before reading something terrible about her. Then this one time I didn’t care. I was reading with Eileen Myles and I wanted to perform the piece I liked most and the piece I liked most right then was very “you did me wrong” and predicted that our mutual girlfriend would eventually leave Sara/Emma the same way she had left me. I read it. And Sara/Emma was there. And the ex had left her earlier that day. Sara/Emma walked out of the reading and kicked the glass of a Muni bus stop. She broke her foot, and walked around with a crutch for a while.
“I am so sorry,” I said to Sara at the Edinburgh Castle. The bar has a red feel to it, a subterranean feel, and it smells like every beer ever downed beneath its roof. “It’s okay,” she said wearily. She’d been dealing with this for so long. And plus, she was a poet.
If I were to write Valencia right now it would be a totally different book. Because everything is totally different. Doesn’t wine retain the flavor of the weather the grapes were grown in? The particularities of the soil, the storms that came or didn’t? Memoir is like that. It picks up the essence of the moment you wrote it, where you were sitting, the quality of the sun, amount of car exhaust or freshness in the air, the quality of your heart, it being open or not, how close its most recent breakage, how you are regarding your family of origin, is it a “they did the best they could” week or a “your best was not fucking good enough” week? All of this will color your story. What you have or haven’t eaten, how hungover or not you may be, your various levels—emotional or physical—perhaps you have a toothache, perhaps you took a lovely walk, or else your shoulder is pained from hunching over a deeply nonergonomic flea-market desk. You just read something inspiring or have the theme to a children’s song calliopeing through your head. You fear your best friend hates you. You just made up with your partner and are swelled with love and gratitude for them. You will never be in this precise state ever again. Its marks lie all over the version of your story you are telling today.
I guess it’s enough to just know this. I guess it’s enough to simply be aware because I don’t want to get better, sober, or whatever. Wrote Eileen Myles, “I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.”
First published in the Normal School in 2017.