I recently wrote (what I thought was) a humorous essay on language pet peeves. Lately, I’ve been enjoying writing longform as opposed to poetry so, last month, I indulged in a cheeky, hyperbolic piece outlining common phrases I dislike. I posted it to Substack.
Most of my readers got the joke, playfully roasting themselves and other people. But not everyone. A few folks shared excerpts online (often without context) labeling me as judgemental, a hater, (and I quote) a thief of other people’s joy. When I told my friend, Chelsea, she sent me this:
I was baffled by some of the responses. I started replying to critical comments explaining that the piece was obviously humorous, but eventually I stopped. To have to defend hyperbole, I fear, spoils the joke.
About a week after I published the essay, I received a lengthy email from a disappointed reader detailing how he perceived I was different—and not for the better. I’ll spare you the entire email, but it was long. Distilled, it read:
I used to be your biggest fan. Then you changed.
His grievances were multi-fold. From his perspective, I’d become more reserved online, had put up a paywall where my previous work was free, and my writing was becoming judgemental (he cited several jokes from the essay as evidence). This, he argued, felt incongruent to the poems in my book about love.
Just above the signoff, Sad Fan Man wrote: This is not the writing of the Joy I know and love.
I read his email in the coffee shop. My coffee got cold. I walked home and crawled into bed. I considered emailing back: You’ve misunderstood! Of course, I don’t actually care when my friends use the word “sush” when ordering a california roll. I’m not actually mad when someone calls their bacon and eggs “brekkie.” It’s humor! It’s edgy! Claire, it’s French!
I wanted to tell him that I’ve written so many sad poems in my career, I now desperately need to write not-sad things. I wanted to tell him that I’m a multi-dimensional, complicated, loving, often depressed, occasionally funny, sometimes shitty person. I needed him to know that I was good and mortifyingly, I wanted him to still love me.
In the digital age, however, it seemed my essay had committed the one unredeemable sin—to go off brand, to deviate from a perceived concept, to off-road on someone else’s highway. This is a tough pill to swallow. I used to work for a branding agency, after all. Furthermore, I’m a big-time people pleaser and also a youngest child. As a kid, Mother May I was my favorite game because I never lost. I love approval. I live for that tiny gasp at the end of reading a poem aloud to a hushed room—the moment where everyone feels a little more devastated or euphoric than when I first began.
Now, when I write, I sometimes imagine Sad Fan Man reading every sentence. Is he disappointed? Does he doubt my goodness? Is he laughing, even a little, yet?
I have other voices in my head too—the woman who emailed me outraged because I once used the word tit. The Goodreads reviewer who said my poems were obnoxious. I’m pretty sure the grad school professor who told me to stop preening on the page is still knocking about up there too.
They're all talking to each other. Shit, now they’re getting drunk. They’ve started fighting.
Every morning, I have to sit down to the page, slap myself across the face, shoot a shot of imaginary whiskey and ask myself: Hey, are you an artist or a copywriter? Are you a woman or a good girl? Are you free or are you owned?
Then I have a little cry (as a treat) and tell myself: Don’t be a puppet. Be a goddamn poet.
As the visual artist, composer, poet, Laurie Anderson, recently said in an interview:
I’m an artist because I want to be free. That’s my whole goal. I hate it when people tell me what to do. The branding thing is something to really avoid, the Facebook stamping of who you are—resist that pressure.
As an author staring down her second book, I know Laurie is right. I recognize that my greatest responsibility is to take risks, to be free. To outgrow what previously made me popular and lovable and predictable. In order to endure as an artist, you must commit to being misunderstood, even though no one warns you how painful that is. Evolution is the only way to survive, if any of us can survive at all.
I think early in our artistic careers, we all tell ourselves a version of the same lie: if you and your art are accessible, nice, cute, palatable etc. enough, you’ll be spared. But the truth is—none of us are spared. Interesting art will always piss someone off. And if you write to pacify a Sad Fan Man, you lose. There are many boring things in life—don’t let your art, by your own assessment, be one of them.
Lately, I’ve been watching the absolutely flabbergasting I Love Dick as well as reading Miranda July’s All Fours and even though the experiences described aren’t all that similar to my own, the recognition is the same:
These women no longer care about being palatable. They’re the ones doing the chewing.
I feel as if I’m now witnessing a small miracle of being a woman and an artist in my mid-thirties. Something magnificent has begun to happen:
You get hungry. You go a little mad. You begin to make the art you most crave.
What has served me most greatly as an artist is a tremendous appetite. A furious compulsion to improve my craft. An insatiable desire to say the thing I need to say purely—to speak the truth in its most authentic form. To taste it. Forget the peach. Swallow the pit.
In my writing community, Sustenance, I tell writers:
You’re here because you’re hungry. The best way to cure that hunger is to feed it. You must develop an appetite, not for the love and devotion of your readers, but for the bravest version of your own work.
Painful as it might be, the only way I know to survive is to honor that mischievous, relentless instinct inside you. That craving beyond the craving that follows no heartbeat but its own. It is from that untameable place that you must make your most ferocious art.
September’s On Assignment Prompt for Paid Subscribers
Join me for September’s On Assignment writing challenge! As a paid subscriber, you have access to an exclusive Substack thread at the end of the month to share your writing. I absolutely loved reading your responses to August’s assignment. Paid subscribers will also be receiving a writing workshop with me (more details on that soon).
See details for September’s prompt below.