I’m a huge fan of Electric Literature, and I’m really excited to share that I have an essay out there today.
It’s about kink, obviously. It’s also about much more: dominance and anger, emotional inheritance, Aries energy (where my astrology queers at?!), and my collapsing relationship with my dad.
The essays that are always the most interesting for me to write are not the ones where I already understand what’s happened am simply relaying the information. It’s the ones where I’m still trying to figure it out for myself. The ones where I’m exploring questions that are haunting me, digging in the messy muck of what is unanswerable, following what pulses with emotion and begs to be explored.
This essay is one of those for me.
It’s also been extremely challenging for me.
I’ve been anxious, all week, as the publication date has loomed closer. I’ve been talking to friends, asking - am I allowed to talk about this? Am I allowed to tell these stories?
It feels pretty easy to talk about kink, sex, my love with my love. Those things feel like mine, and when I write about Quinn, it’s always collaborative. I share with them what I’ve written before I send it out anywhere. They’re always supportive and excited for me, happy to be an open book for my writing. I’m lucky in that way and a million others.
In writing this piece, I did not ask my father for permission. I did not ask him to read a draft, to tell me his thoughts. For a few reasons, mostly which boil down to: any relationship we have is a facsimile of a real one, and that’s not how I want it to be but it is how it is. It’s unspoken but I have a feeling that I am supposed to protect my dad and my family by keeping everything private and in the dark. I’m tempted by that impulse: I want to protect him, too. Maybe if I am just good enough, and don’t do any more “bad” things, he’ll want to be my dad again.
But in the end, this was real and it happened and it shaped me and I am a writer. I need to write like I need to breathe. I wrote my dad with as much generosity and humanity as I could, while still telling the complicated truth. My version of the truth, anyway, as I remember it and feel it.
Other writers, tell me your thoughts and feelings about this topic in the comments, please! And let me know what you think when you read the piece? It’s linked here.
With care,
Eryn
Eryn, wow! I just read the essay and am literally in tears in my office right now. It's a beautiful piece of writing and I can recognize it as a piece of writing that had to come out (like breathing, as you say). As someone who also writes about sex and real life people, I very much relate to these fears and questions! If I'm being entirely honest, part of writing (in general, but especially in memoir) is practicing some dissociation. Like...I can't let my brain fully grasp that people will read these details. With that tool, combined with my sexuality studies background and general sex-positivity, the sex writing feels easy at this point. Writing about family and knowing that it can hurt people is the much harder thing to navigate. My approach with my memoir: I have *almost* everyone the chance to read the sections they were in and give me feedback. My mom chose not to, and though she is happy for me, she still feels hurt by what she assumes is the portrayal of her in the book (based on snippets she's read and summaries she's seen). It's been painful, but we're still close and on good terms. I did not offer the pages to anyone in my dad's family because I do not feel any sense of trust with them. I'm still wrestling with the ethics of that, but I stand in my decision for now. We have to make decisions aligned with our values, and sometimes that will mean making our art and not sharing it with people who have not showed us that they can be in right relationship to it.
Sending you love and strength and admiration!
It's a particularly complex form of sharing when our life stories and discoveries include other people: we should be free to share the truth as we experienced it, but that doesn't make it any less difficult to do.
One of the many things I love about your writing is that the center of each piece feels like a river moving the reader through your experience. Although it may pass through lakes, over rapids, have tributaries feed into it, there's always a steady current in the center, pulling in the same direction from start to finish. I think you told the story you needed to tell to create that sense of movement.
We've all arrived where we are by passing through where we've been, and especially in reference to our childhood, how we react to the way we're taught is often more about the people teaching us than it is about our underdeveloped sense of personhood. We only form who we are in response to the forces the world exerts on us, and I think you conveyed that with so much compassion and grace.
I know you're doing the right thing for yourself and likely opening a door for others who don't have your skill with words. In the end, there was a story to be written and you wrote it, and it's not your fault if your experience of the truth is uncomfortable for anyone.