“I have the right to write about my life.” — Marie Calloway
Lately, a confusing debate has erupted over the validity of what is being called “confessional writing,” the kind that places its author and its author’s intimate experiences at the centre of the narrative. The modern confessional exists in transparent opposition to objective writing, where the writer is removed and reports narrative facts largely without opinion, and definitely without feeling. The proliferation of online sites that facilitate impromptu personal writing has cultivated a belief among the status quo that serious writers shouldn’t share an “excess” of personal details or opinions, lest they risk a public shaming. It’s certainly not uncommon in the Internet age to see a personal piece met with a clumsy, trolling comment chorus of “Keep that to yourself,” “TMI” or “Why should I care about your life?”
Additional indictments hurled at confessional writing are that it’s boring or embarrassing, although for whom is not entirely clear. Some critics have concluded that it is without exception bad writing, unworthy of publication, blanketing the form with disdain in hopes it will be forced back into the writer’s private documents folder. By even referring to it as a confession suggests that the author has done something wrong, that there is a central sin they should be repenting; at times, it seems the sin is merely in the act of telling: “How dare they?”
Exactly what differentiates the loathed confession from the lauded personal essay is difficult to name. But it’s impossible to ignore that a majority of these controversial and oft-dismissed confessions are being written by women — primarily young, under-published outsiders accused of lacking the self-awareness that presumably comes with age. The complaints suffered are often of the gendered variety, suggesting a naïveté on the part of the authors to be proud of documenting and distributing their experiences, much like web cam self-portraits posted on Facebook. The suggestion is that they are boring, reprehensible, or invalid in some way, and should never see the light of day.
A recent glaring example is twenty-one-year-old Marie Calloway, a pseudonymous online sensation who self-published on her personal blog an unfettered account of her sexual liaison with an older “famous” male writer. Initially she named the man and various other identifying details, and included a photo of herself that claimed to show the writer in question’s semen on her face — actions she later identified as “really horrible and irresponsible thing[s] to do.” A few days later she deleted the piece, and later her blog entirely, claiming to “dislike being ‘watched.’”
The controversial piece reappeared, altered and comically titled “Adrien Brody” for new discretion, via Tao Lin’s Muumuu House website, and is now what Calloway calls “basically a fictionalized version of a true story.” It chronicles her email request for sex (“i would love to sleep w/ you. probably you’re not into that sort of thing but thought i would say anyway zz via nothing to lose”), her decision to meet the writer in New York City, and the subsequent tryst that followed in all it’s messy, ugly, awkward glory:
“He went down on me for a few minutes, and I faked moaned, pretending to enjoy it.
‘Can you like, finger me while you do that?’
So he did, and then I started to enjoy it.”
Calloway, pretty, young, and unashamed, has become a lightning rod for discussions on fame-whoring and over-sharing in the age of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and Squarespace; she’s painted as a cautionary tale of young literary women gone awry. Some commenters have unpacked moral implications, while others have spoken with sadness and sympathy: “What a dangerous profession, to be dying for attention. Now we have the Internet to make us, undo us. I thought about your father. If he read ‘Adrien Brody.’” The focus has sharpened on Calloway and her life choices, and not the validity of the writing itself.
Despite the fact that this woman had consciously and unapologetically chosen to reveal and explore her sexual experiences (additionally in pieces on losing her virginity and doing sex work via Thought Catalog), she has been unduly stripped of her agency and painted as a victim of her culture: a fucked-up girl who needed to act out and be shocking in order to garner any literary attention. Some said her frankness was reductive to female literary progress, or even unethical, ignoring the fact that the writer had given his blessing when Calloway told him she was planning to write about him. Calloway herself, in an interview with The Rumpus, commented, “It seems unfortunate the ‘attention whore’ slur is used as discouragement from women (especially young ones) writing honestly about their life, if that’s what they want to do.”
The patronizing note that’s been hammered away at is that Calloway should be and will be ashamed of herself one day, and how dare she be so brazen about her misguided sexual and literary choices? She’s been dismissed because of her youth, her beauty, her perversion, her need for attention. It’s been suggested that she, and women like her, shouldn’t be “allowed” to document their exploits in such an explicit, public way. Lost in the cacophony of hurled insults was the actual quality of the writing, which it seems is irrelevant when overshadowed by hot young girl writes 15,000 words on fucking an older dude. (In fact, the dialogue on Calloway is so fraught with larger issues it may be impossible to presently discern her literary merit.)
The most fascinating element of the conversation is that it appears to be more sinful to speak of indiscretion that to actually participate in it — by all means be sexual, but please don’t tell us about it. There’s something uncomfortably regressive and puritanical about the whole discussion, something that Emily Gould (a previous victim of the wrath against literary women who share too much) summed up well in a New York Observer article on the subject:
“Why do women who aren’t afraid to humiliate themselves appall us so much, and why do we rush to find superficial reasons to dismiss them (‘she’s crazy[,]’ ‘she’s a narcissist[,]’ ‘she’s young[,]’ ‘she’s a famewhore’)? I think in part because they pose a threat to the social order, which relies on women’s embarrassment to keep them either silent or writing in socially accepted modes.”
No women’s studies degree is necessary to conclude that writers like Calloway bring discomfort because they’re subverting both the traditional male gaze and literary form in general. It is regrettably still considered “groundbreaking” to access female lust through female eyes — we are riveted when a woman’s desires become the subject of the story and not the object, when she is not performing in the narrative but rather dictating it.
So why is it that while we quest for and applaud authenticity, we have developed such a distaste and repulsion for “sharing,” as if it is a filthy word spat at writers who lack experience or craft? It has become a tireless cultural project to tear down each “notable” young female who endeavours to fearlessly write about the minutiae of her own life. Via Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan:
“There is nothing inherently noble, or brave, or feminist about relentlessly focusing on one’s own sex life to the exclusion of other topics. We all like sex. Most of us like reading about sex. But it does no favors to young female writers to convince them that they are courageous voices in the wilderness for dedicating their talents to writing stories that are received as lurid, not literary.”
Unregulated honesty is painted as juvenile tendency, as if with age comes the gift of selective concealment — to succeed in any serious literary endeavour, one must develop a cold distance even from the most intimate events of our lives. This necessity to step back from experience mirrors a valued coldness in human interactions; feel little, remain private, do not speak openly of the ugliness in one’s life. The fact is that a woman who publishes an in-depth study of her sex life is no more in need of attention than a man who publishes an in-depth study of twentieth-century literary criticism; it is a cultural dictation of value that defaults to her “neediness” and his “genius.”
Perhaps it is true that the “over share” is a product of youth, but it is the element of youth that should be most valued, a time before so many of us develop the cynicism and mistrust that distances us from other human beings and makes us fear their disdain. While it is true that time and the labour it brings are essential to learning how to successfully tell a story, we shouldn’t be learning to eliminate our most personal experiences from the well of subject matter. Then, what are we truly learning other than how to be embarrassed? It is entirely possible that for each high-volume condemnation of a writer’s confessional frankness, there is a silent, thankful chorus of readers appreciating the liberating sincerity of it all.
“(T)here are people who prefer to read books and stories where the author isn’t present. If you have a preference for a type of literature it’s tempting to think the literature you prefer is a better literature, a higher form,” writes Stephen Elliott, editor-in-chief of The Rumpus. “From that perch you can look down and say people who use their own lives in their writing are creating work of less value, of no value. They’re narcissists, confession junkies.”
There is an element of absurdity to discouraging a writer from being too honest when the warning of judgment and the condemnation of content are coming from the very same source. “You will regret this when you’re older” is not a valid literary criticism, nor does age imply a wisdom or talent that by default allows one to dismiss a young woman’s chronicle of sex with a man who’s old enough to be her father. In fact, saying you dislike “confessional writing” in general limits your literary experience to elitism, and frankly, boring tedium. This conclusion that literature is bad because the author has failed to remove herself from the narrative is reductive — the form is not indicative of quality; the quality is.
This notion that an author like Calloway will “be embarrassed she wrote that one day” is one conveniently created by those that cultivate the very shame that will provoke that embarrassment. Perhaps we refer to women’s documentation of their experiences as confessionals because they’ve been previously relegated to private, hushed whispers, secrets confessed outside of what we deem to be “serious literature.” Put simply, when one does not own the mainstream narrative, one is forced to either infiltrate it or create a new one, and when young women are shamed out of the agency to write their own stories, we are creating a gap in the narrative that is a loss for all of us.
Say what you want about Marie Calloway, but one thing is certain. She does have a right to write about — even confess to — her life.
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Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
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