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I wanted to post something a little out of the usual—about how it feels to write a memoir about a problem. In my case, a memoir about being a clutterbug.
Memoirs of personal troubles are much in vogue these days. We live in a culture that encourages confession, that packages and sells it. Memoirs are a kind of literary do-it-yourself reality TV—an expanded selfie, you might say. Just one more of the narcissistic gestures and enterprises our American culture (other cultures too) rewards.
But it's not easy. Speaking for myself, I'm a fiction writer usually, of very confessional things, but always presented from behind a surreal comic mask. Like other writers and artists and performers, the mask liberates me, or allows me to put it all out there--my shame, my vulnerabilities, my unloveable guilts—at a protective remove. I could go naked, but hidden.
Now I'd be writing without benefit of mask.It was a very discomforting, genuinely scary prospect. So I hit on the idea of now and then interspersing my non-fiction text with little confessional fictions of the sort I usually write: brief stories that would chart how I felt about the experience, heavy on anxiety, of doing the memoir as I went along.
Ultimately I decided against this. Book marketing likes things to be one thing or another. Non-fiction or fiction. A blend makes for confusion and uneasiness, supposedly.
But I did write one of these little fictions, though, just as a trial. It didn't go into the book, as I say. But here it is. It represents, as you'll see, a glimpse how one writer felt about inviting readers into the world behind his messy door.
PRIVATE TOUR
I arrange to lead an invasive tour of a psychologically troubled person’s disorderly private space.
“Wait, so who actually lives or works in there?” asks a tour signee all at once, suspiciously. He has the aggressive and overweight presence of a business type.
“Well, in fact,” I tell him, “I do.”
“Wait a minute now,” says the guy. He takes step back showily. “What kind of weirdness is going on here? This place is yours?”
“Nothing ‘weird,’” I tell him, coloring. “Why not ‘unusual’ or ‘distinctive’? Even perhaps a little ‘desperate’?”
“Cause it’s weird,” he says. “Hey everybody!” he cries to the group. “Guess whose place it is we’re going to? His.”
The others all turn around, staring at me like cows being approached by a naked farmer. There’s slow-witted confusion and bewilderment.
“Now see here,” I tell him, badly flustered. “Nobody’s forcing you to come along, okay? If you have a problem, I’m sure they’ll refund your money. Okay?” The prospective loss of income though is a bitter blow to my parlous budget.
“You bet they will,” he informs me. “Hey, everybody!” he cries (he obviously was a town crier in a previous life). “Get your money back, this is some sort of scam. Or at least it’s very very weird.”
“Excuse me, what are you doing?” I snarl at him.
“Heck, if it’s weird—it’s cool!” says a tall gangly guy with long drab hair on which sits a sweat-faded baseball hat. He grins goofily, in would-be trickster approval. “Count me in,” he says. “Me too,” chips in a middle-aged lady in a sunhat with fuzzy little balls on its brim. Others add their dittos.
“You’re all a bunch of ignoramuses,” the troublemaker declares.
“Just go and get your money back and clear off,” I tell him.
“Just look alive, everybody!” warns an elderly voice from the back of the group. “These troubled types can have a lot of rage going on when anybody else handles their stuff.”
“He’s right,” I advise them grimly. “Like I said earlier. No touching anything.”
“There’s even the threat of suicide or the like!” the voice adds.
Many faces with half-opened mouths stare at me. I grit my teeth.
“All right, if you’ve paid up, then let’s go!” I announce.
And in this manner our tour commences.
