Earlier this week, Lidia Yuknavitch tweeted Melissa Febos’ essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma As a Subversive Act”, and gave me a reason to focus on the gendered discourse around trauma and memoir. Febos sets a familiar scene:
At a recent writers conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of trauma survival. One of the male editors rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on Oprah’s talk show, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don’t need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.
As if anything could be more gauche than the male writers who compliment female-identifying writers by describing their prose as “muscular” or dropping comparisons to Hemingway. As if we haven’t spent decades parsing the traumatic boredom of the American male novelist, studying its specific cocktails and alcoholisms.
Febos wrote this essay in January 2017, prior to the release of her incredible memoir, Abandon Me (in which she does exactly what she urges female writers to do, namely, tell the story that will kill you if you keep it). As Febos points out:
That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against “personal writing” is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.
Shame is at its most effective when urging silence. And shame comes to mind when I think of George Sand, who adopted the male pseudonym at the suggestion of her younger male lover, Jules Sandeau. George Sand, who dressed as a man in order to see without being seen. To protect herself from the predatory gaze leveraged against females by custom. After her death, Ivan Turgenev said: “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.”
Febos ends her essay by sharpening the pencil and preparing it to speak. Like Dorothy Allison, she offers encouragement as antivenom to silence.
We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.
What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go of. Tell me about your drunk father and your sister who lost her mind. Give them whatever names you want.
Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.
You write it, and I will read it.
I need to hear this. And I’m heartened by this amazing episode of Brian Gesko’s Antibody Reading Series now available online. So we can all hear Lauren Van Den Berg, Melissa Febos, and Tracy O’Neill talk about writing, living—and writing.