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DOMESTIC
DISTURBANCE:
Living Out Loud
I feel a
little sorry for Ayelet
Waldman, the newest columnist at Salon.com. I wonder if she knew what she was getting herself into when
she traded her blog for a biweekly gig at the online magazine. Salon's
readers haven't exactly greeted her with open arms; after each of her
columns, Salon's been inundated with hate mail accusing Waldman of every
sin from writing trivial and banal prose to exploiting her children for
her own narcissistic glory.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Waldman writes with the kind of
provocative and blunt honesty that seems to either engage or repel
readers. Other writers who use that same confessional, soul-baring
style have been similarly decried: Anne Lamott's articles and columns in
Salon regularly generate pages of self-righteous letters questioning her
parenting; in a scathing Amazon.com review of Marion Winik's First
Comes Love, the reviewer asks, "Did she ever stop for a moment and
think of the effect on [her sons] of reading about her incredibly
dysfunctional life?" And one friend of mine was so disgusted by Vicki
and Dennis Covington's co-written Cleaving
(a memoir of the ups and
downs in their marriage) that she threw it across the room, declaring,
"Vicki Covington is a slut!"
Whether or not the writer intends to expose herself, the act of writing
is inevitably revealing. Even in fiction, readers often strain to see
what they can infer about a writer from the characters he's created.
Personal essays and memoirs trade on the idea that the writer is giving
the reader a little window into her life; the more confessional sort of
writing opens the window and invites the reader to sit down at the
kitchen table and dish. "Have another cup of coffee," the
writer says.
"Have I told you about my abortion?"
This metaphorical coffee klatch eschews journalistic distance for
up-close and personal truth- telling, focused on family life and
relationships. It's the original kind of gossip -- not tabloid
speculation about Nick and Jessica's marriage, but the words that get
whispered from one woman to the next, over the phone, over the door to
the bathroom stall, over the third glass of chardonnay. But these
writers aren't whispering anymore; they're airing their families' dirty
laundry on the front porch, for all the world to see. And judging from
the response to Waldman's columns, that's the problem. How dare she
tell everyone about the time her son wore a pink peignoir -- she's going
to scar him for life!
(continued at right)
This style seems to be particularly popular with women writers, but
there are some men who are mining their family stories for public
entertainment. However, I've never heard anyone castigate David Sedaris
for humiliating his parents, or suggest that Dave Barry should write his
syndicated column under a pseudonym so that his children's classmates
won't mock them. Perhaps the difference is that women, and especially
mothers, are expected to be secret keepers and to save face at all costs.
Waldman addresses this very issue in her first
column, in which she
wonders about the ethics of writing about her children in her blog and
column, and concludes, "I can't promise not to invade their privacy, but
I can promise to do it more thoughtfully, and, I hope, to more
meaningful an end." She does exactly that in her second
column,
using
her son's explorations of his gender and sexual identity to talk about
tolerance and stereotypes and the changing way we view homosexuality in
our culture. Not surprisingly, that column was just as controversial as
the first.
Perhaps the real concern isn't the secrets that are revealed, but the
ways in which those revelations are manipulated and used for the
writer's purposes. To tell a story is to control it and shape its
meaning. The author includes and omits details, chooses words that
subtly shade interpretation, adds a pat moral to tie it all up into a
neat little bow, and then disseminates her version of the event, writing
over whatever meaning the other participants might have given it. By
controlling the narrative of her child's life, does the writer invoke
the stereotype of the overbearing mother who refuses to allow her
children their own lives?
The boundaries between private life and public spectacle are becoming
increasingly blurred with the popularity of blogging. My husband has
been blogging for several years, and he and I have spent a lot of time
hashing out what's off limits in our writing. Adam readily shares
everything with his readers, from embarrassing incidents from his
childhood to the gory details of his vasectomy, and I have to admit I've
winced a time or two at the picture of our lives I see in his blog.
My own blogging dropped off when traffic to my blog increased. It was
one thing to let it all hang out for a few of my closest friends, but
when I stopped recognizing all the addresses on the site counter, it
began to feel too performative. And the prospect of Google caching
every entry didn't exactly reassure me. Not only did I not know who was
reading now, I didn't know who would be reading in the future. Will my
son's teacher object to me complaining about a book she's assigned?
Would a potential employer shy away from hiring someone with such
liberal politics? And I began to wonder what obligations I might have,
not only to my family and friends, but to all the people on the
peripheries of my life -- people who may or may not be particularly
flattered by the way they're depicted in my posts. I don't want to view
my friends and family as "material" and any events in their lives
as
fair game.
Keeping all this in mind, I'm warily dipping my toes back in the blogosphere. If my kids are embarrassed by some of the things I write
about them, at least they'll be in good company. So many moms are
blogging now, the New York Times saw fit to explore the phenomenon in a
feature article. And maybe the popularity of blogging will save our
kids from teasing and ridicule. If all their childhoods are documented
in excruciating detail on the web, who'll throw the first stone?
____________
About the Author:
Melissa Lipscomb lives in Austin with her children Drew, Franny, Alec and
husband Adam. Some days she feels like she's figuring out, and others she's
just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Visit her blog.
