I Write Memoirs Involving Real People. That Can Get A Little Weird
I was about thirty years old when I got the contract to write my memoir, The Big Rewind. That was perhaps a testament to my agent’s cunning rather than anything of my own doing, and even at the time it struck me as strange that someone so young and inexperienced was being afforded an opportunity to tell his story on a big scale.
It almost felt like I was being afforded too much power. I was telling my story but it was, inevitably, a story that also involved a whole lot of other people, even if I was, and remain, something of a fierce introvert. Of all the people in the story of my life, I was the only one who had a voice in my memoir. It was a monologue, not a dialogue, my take on the world more than an objective truth.
When you write about yourself, you have a tendency to think about the people in your life as characters and that can have strange effects on your psyche, because sometimes those characters from your past intrude on your present in disconcerting ways, like when I wrote what I thought was a multi-dimensional and ultimately very affectionate portrait of someone I worked with on an ill-fated TV show and he would angrily email late at night to deride me as the worst kind of Hollywood phony.
I made all sorts of mistakes with The Big Rewind. I haven’t read it in about five years and I suspect that if I were to re-read it, there are huge portions of it that would mortify me, particularly when I wrote about the people in my life in ways that seemed fun and irreverent at the time but that now seem mean and unnecessary. I wrote a chapter about my onscreen nemesis on the move review show that I now deeply regret. It seemed relevant and interesting and incisive at the time. It does not seem any of things now.
When you sign a contract for a memoir around thirty, you all but need to apologize to the universe for thinking your life is important enough to be written about at such length. Yet that somehow did not keep me from writing a second memoir a few years down the road, albeit a memoir that started off as something very different.
I began the book that would become You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me thinking it would be a tongue-in-cheek pop-sociological tome about a wry outsider who explores the crazy world of Insane Clown Posse and Phish fandom from a droll comic distance. Yet as the project proceeded that comic distance evaporated and the book became a deeply personal exploration of how a troubled young man became an unlikely but passionate Phish phan and Juggalo.
My first two memoirs have happy endings that didn’t quite take. The Big Rewind was a pronounced commercial disappointment. I would not be one of the one in ten books that turn a profit. And while merely finishing You Don’t Know Me But You Don’ t Like Me represented a triumph of sorts, given how fraught and uncertain and crazy-making the process of writing the book proved, pretty much everything that I was afraid might happen while writing the book ended up happening shortly afterward. I was fired from my job. I was unable to afford to continue living in my condo and had to move across the country into my in-laws’ basement. Some important, longstanding professional relationships ended bitterly and permanently.
Which brings me to my latest memoir, in this case a sort of literary EP or mix-tape about a surreal weekend I spend attending the Republican National Convention and the Gathering of the Juggalos with my long-lost half brother and his wife called 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane. I hadn’t seen my half-brother in seventeen years before he showed up unexpectedly at my front door about three months ago with an enormous homemade sword he’d made me himself.
He is my brother but he is also a great character, the kind of guy who has been in multiple knife fights and says things like, “That was back when I was in a kick-boxing cult.” Here’s the weird thing about my life writing memoirs in blatant defiance of the public, and my agent’s strong wishes: I never said to my brother that I was going to be writing extensively about him and our relationship, and our tortured relationship with our biological mother. I never told him that I was going to try to be sensitive and measured and thoughtful and write about the totality of his existence, including some of the really dark stuff. I assumed that it was implicit, that we had an unspoken understanding that just about everything we did together would be something that I would write about.
And I hope that my brother trusts me enough to feel that I will do right by him. I don’t want to betray his trust. I don’t want him to be like our biological mother, who he told me apparently thought about suing me for writing in The Big Rewind that my mother was never there for me. She did not seem to grasp the irony of her contemplating suing a child she had abandoned many decades earlier for, um, writing that she left a lot to be desired in the mothering department.
Writing honestly about your life can be tricky business. It’s a little easier writing about public figures, like I do in the Republican National Convention portion of my new book-type-thing. Usually I want to respect people’s fundamental dignity and write about them in ways that do justice both to their complexity and the fundamental complexity of the human condition. But not when it comes to Donald Trump. Man, fuck that guy.
