The Six: Grappling with Readers Who Give Me the Quease

"I didn’t want my CNF to expose her or invade her privacy..."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

Maybe they show up in my dreams. Maybe I hear about them through others. In most cases, I haven’t seen them in years. These are the half-dozen people at the nucleus of the cringe I inevitably have when celebrating my latest published essay or story; the people who’d never say “Hmm, I remember that event differently” but proceed directly to “Liar!”

One writer at an AWP panel had an angry reader who made a mission to heckle him at every live reading and haunt the comment section of every online publication. Another panelist described a family member as a Reader’s Digest subscriber who’d never read a lit mag, but actually did so and accused him of stealing a family story. In my own worst imaginings, a reader files a lawsuit; I’d be innocent (because scrupulous), but still have to defend myself. Sometimes, an imagined reader just waterfalls wounded tears.

Occasionally, for an essay or story, I dread just one or two of these unideal readers; more often, I picture them as The Six.

I once wrote about a neighbor who revealed personal information to me when she was in a vulnerable state, locked out of her apartment and off her medications for bipolar disorder. The encounter humbled me and challenged my misperceptions of her: Usually guarded and perfunctory, she was now warm, sparkling, breathlessly chatty, and indiscriminately revealing in a way that my subsequent research would suggest was a manic episode. We’ve since returned to saying hello on the street and commenting on the weather every week or two, and have never once referred to that morning. She never returned the tea mug she borrowed and I never requested it.

I didn’t want my CNF to expose her or invade her privacy or remind her of a profound vulnerability. Still, I was struck by the verve she’d lost to the medication that kept her functional and somewhat muted. I was struck as well by the assumptions I had made and could now amend. My ideal readers were not The Six neighbors who might recognize her. Rather, my ideal readers were strangers who might recognize themselves or their loved ones; readers inspired to be curious and empathetic.

I’ve also written about two of my father’s friends who sexually aggressed on me when I was sixteen. One was my godparent who groped me once and immediately apologized. The other was a threatening brute who owed my father money, and while I did tell my sweet father about the latter one a few years later, I wished I hadn’t. Confiding in him only presented a harm he could not undo; it did not, as I had hoped, bring us closer.

Decades later, at a ninetieth-birthday luncheon I’d arranged for my father, I looked at The Six (my father, my late godfather’s two family members and the former office crew who’d kept in touch), all who knew one or both of the men I’d written about. How would I feel if my CNF (then under consideration) had just been published? I was content with the piece and hoped to reach readers in a meaningful way; I was also content with The Six not being aware of it just yet. Or perhaps, ever. Did I need them to validate my experience? No. Might my story seem like a betrayal or at least complicate their good memory of someone they’d cared about? Yes. Might strangers feel less alone, their own experiences validated by the sharing of mine? Hopefully.

I’m elated to have seen those two CNF pieces published in journals I admire. There, is, however, a different piece I don’t quite regret, but don’t quite celebrate, even fifteen years later. Through a refugee welcome program, I’d met a middle-aged couple who had left behind not only religious persecution, but family, friends, personal histories, and treasured familiarities, including a native language, a native landscape, and a longtime community of neighbors and co-workers—even a beloved pet. I was moved by their experiences and their own pervasive question of whether the sacrifices had been worth the gains.

In an attempt to tell this important story while also honoring the confidentiality I had pledged, I wrote a short fiction about a couple modeled on them—loosely in some features (names absent, locations altered); closely in others (some dialogue verbatim). I was mindful that they had spoken freely to me in hard-earned English, never expecting their words to appear in print. In equal thirds, The Six were comprised of the couple, two other people we knew in common, and my dueling thoughts.

Fictionalizing allowed me to answer a submission call, develop a metaphor, and protect the couple’s privacy. It did not, however, protect me from the quiet quease of having written intimately about people from my current life. Still, I hoped the piece would move readers or at least raise awareness about the complexities of a displacement that might seem altogether voluntary.

Closer to home, I was at a family meal in my twenties, when a cousin mentioned having read my personal essay on my teenage yearning to find my birthmother. I’d not told my parents about this piece. By the time it was published, however, I had found my birthmother years prior, with help from my mother. Still, the piece (and my silence about it) probably hurt and embarrassed my two parents who raised me—each multiplied by three for impact because they certainly felt like The Six.

Allegedly, good adoptees of a certain era were supposed to be only mildly curious, if at all, about their origins. Adoptions were closed and “basic facts” were widely expected to quench any thirst for knowledge. Identity was not yet a buzzword and DNA testing for ancestry would not be commercially available for another decade. My continuing interest in my roots was painful to my parents and I, in my twenties, was no doubt clumsy with their delicate feelings.

Yet, the piece was a craft leap for me. It grew me as a writer, won an award, brought me future magazine assignments, put me in touch with other adoptees, and added a voice to a community that had been widely shamed into silence. Further, I cannot imagine a life without the birth relatives I’ve now cherished since then, any more than I could imagine not writing—however briefly—about finding them.

---

How then to grapple with The Six? No answer completely eradicates the quease for me, but I hope the following considerations bring some peace.

1. Omission: I obscure identifying factors—name, occupation, nationality, location. I sometimes do this by employing nicknames. In the essay about being sixteen, my father’s friends were Captain Godparent and Mr. Molesto.

2. Literary Lifespan: My neighbor essay was published three years after the encounter, while decades had passed since the events with my father’s friends. The story about the refugee couple appeared only eighteen months after I’d last seen them. Most of my works have a long stretch from conception to publication. More time = less quease.

3. My Ideal Reader: Writing early drafts, I banish The Six from my thoughts about publication, to keep them from stifling the story; during revision, I invite The Six to an (imagined) lunch for their (imagined) comments. Though I try to portray people at least in part the way I think they would see themselves, my ideal readers are not those people. My ideal readers are complete strangers.

4. Form: When my late elderly father had been financially exploited by people near and dear to him, I had to write about it. In that case, a story morphed into a flash metaphor that allowed me to get closer to the emotional truth without identifying potentially litigious perpetrators. In my experience, nonfiction brings a unique charge to the work and should reveal less about others and more about myself, mostly about the impact of my relationships and the ways they’ve helped shape me. Hopefully, my work, whether fiction or nonfiction, reflects a quote from Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

5. Time: At the risk of sounding glib, I’ve outlived some of the people I’ve written about.

6. Probability: The Six are never my writing colleagues. Rather, they are from other areas of my life and highly unlikely to search for my work or stumble upon it. I realize that assumption didn’t work for either of the AWP panelists mentioned above. And yet, so far, my own truth is in the tally. Number of personal essays published: 42. Instances in which one of The Six has actually confronted me about my writing: 0.

If you have a Six in your own life, or even a Seven, and have found additional ways to work in spite of them, I’d love to hear about it.

---