Fearless Women and Bravery and Memoir: Some Thoughts

My memoir is out. It dropped Election Day, and let me say this: That sucked. It dropped election day during a pandemic, for double suckage, and I have been robbed of so much, of bookstore tours and in person signings and accepting big congratulatory hugs from my friends. But it’s out and it’s on an established New York press and the early reviews have been great. It’s all good, given, you know, All This. I am now a Published Author, please send Oprah and a balloon drop and okay, there were many flowers at my house and they were beautiful, and an actual sash, and thank you.

Spoiler alert, there is an abusive boyfriend in the book. Or maybe that should be presented as a trigger warning, perhaps both. Anyway, there’s an abusive boyfriend. The book isn’t full of graphic violence because no, but there are bruises because that’s what happened.

I sat on this story for a long time, but when I started writing it as a whole there was no doubt in my mind that it would be a book that I wanted to publish, and that it was a worthy story.

(You, reading this, working on your own project, I would counsel you to believe that your story is worthy above all else. That belief will be your North Star as you cross the Sea of Rejection, the Desert of Silent No, that place where literary agents tell you how grand your work is but it will not sell, or that other place where they tell you nothing at all. Also, I *still* don’t have an agent, so that’s confusing and another story.)

Reviews and feedback arrive via my Twitter feed and Facebook messages and my inbox. There are Amazon reviews and Goodreads reviews and they’re mostly great, save for that one person who was all, “Don’t bother.” Hey, you might not want to bother! That’s fine! Not every book has to be for every person! (Also, if you are the kind of person who writes reviews, would you please? It matters, apparently?)

There’s a theme appearing as more feedback comes my way. You’ve heard the term before: Brave. This book is so brave. Women, well, maybe everyone who is not a straight white guy, we get called brave when we tell the truth. When we present ourselves unvarnished for the world. How brave are those no makeup selfies. How brave are the women who testify against their attackers. How brave we are when we say we have been mistreated, when we call out misogyny, or racism, or fat shaming or whatever system we look at and say it isn’t okay. When everyone already knows it’s not okay.

Each time I hear of my bravery, the dragon slaying I have undertaken by simply telling the truth about what happened to me, I feel grateful, flattered for a moment, and then, as it marinates, I get angry.

I didn’t write this story as an act of heroism. It’s some shit that happened and I was tired of carrying it around. Tragically, the shit that happened in this book is common as house flies. “According to the CDC, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men will experience physical violence by their intimate partner at some point during their lifetimes.” (Source, NIH) That’s way too common, for starters, and way too frequent for speaking up to be considered “bravery.”

Look, I get that there are a billion things in place to discourage people from speaking up about whatever injustice they’re living through or fighting against. I think about how anti-racism protesters are literally in mortal danger when they step into the street carrying a Black Lives Matter sign. Pro-racism assholes have driven their cars into crowds of peaceful protesters. The engendering of fear, the silencing, the movement to shut up shut up shut up anyone who speaks out against injustice is, frankly, terrifying. Often the call comes from inside the house too, that desire to protect the status quo by not calling out your racist relative or white supremacy normalizing colleague or just don’t rock the boat, don’t do it, stop asking so many questions, who are you to criticize, you’re not perfect, why are you so uptight?

Through the course of my book, I travel fearlessly to off the grid places for which I am not prepared. I am rarely in danger. There are some hassles, some bad actors, but in general, it is not the good people I encounter on the road who cause problems. It’s the people I know, those who are not strangers, who make things worse.

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We are, so many of us, raised to stay silent, and if we weren’t raised that way, there’s a whole world designed to teach us that speaking up is bad. We reinforce this by suggesting that telling the truth is brave. Why isn’t it normal to tell the truth, to tell your truth? Why can’t it be normal when we speak up against injustice, or to save our own skin, or to just tell what happened to us?

These are hypothetical questions and I know the answer to many of them. The patriarchy. Capitalism. White supremacy. This is how the man keeps us down. This sounds flip, and I’m being reductive here, but I also believe these answers to be true. So many voices silenced because we’re not allowed to be angry, or scared, or sad, or to have any feelings at all if we expect to be taken seriously.

What if it was normal to tell a story about some bad shit that happened to you and to work through how you were affected by it? What if instead of carrying that stuff around for literally forty years, you could just put it down? What if instead of an act of bravery, it was because we were just so fucking tired of being expected bear it all in silence?

I want to reject the accolades of bravery. I know they’re meant well, but they aggrandize the act of telling the story, and that’s peripheral to the story itself. We are, I hope, coming to the end of this era of lies. And I hope that as we look forward – a thing I am doing with optimism for the first time since November 2016 – we decide to act as though telling the truth is common, unexceptional behavior, the absolute least we can do.

Telling your story, speaking your truth should not be brave, it should just be human.