Inspired by a true story

In my last year of college, I enrolled in a creative writing class with much the same zeal as the one-legged man signing up for the ass-kicking contest. I write astoundingly terrible fiction. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. My dialogue and characterizations aren't too bad, but I have the damnedest time coming up with good stories. And seeing as making up stories is generally the crux of writing fiction, I knew I was in for a long semester. I wasn't usually in the habit of academic masochism, but the class I'd really wanted to take - Memoir: The Art of Writing Life - was full.

I went to my first creative writing class, not feeling very creative, and sized up the 10 or so people who were no doubt majoring in basket-weaving or psychic healing. What I failed to realize when I registered was that the class was offered through the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the segment of NYU reserved exclusively for the dippy, the navel-gazing, and those who were independently wealthy enough not to need Real Jobs. I liked to joke that I went to barely-college in the film program, but this was a whole other populous of people who were required to do nothing but convince a panel of advisers that doing yoga and taking pictures of clouds entitled them to a degree. At least I had to do my time taking classes with -ology attached to them.

"You're going to be working on one cohesive piece this semester," the professor explained to us. "You're not limited by genre, but I want you think in the long term about creating a complete work." Oh, well, thanks for those parameters. I work much better with boundaries.

Right around this time, I was in the middle of the singular most destructive relationship I've had the misfortune of perpetuating. Thus far anyway. I'm sure there's worse out there somewhere and that I'll no doubt stumble into it eventually since, according to certain medical professionals, I have a lot of issues. But at the time I was spending a lot of time hanging out in the deepest, darkest hole I could have imagined. I wrote about it meticulously in my journals because that was my reflexive outlet and because my friends were fucking tired of hearing about it. I recorded entire conversations, every phone call I didn't have to beg for, the time I was so hysterical on my kitchen floor that I literally couldn't breathe. I wrote it all down in cold, unflinching detail. Part of my self-punishment was to rub my own nose in it.

When I got home after my writing class, I pulled out my journals from the preceding two years and went over the documentation of my bad choices. It was actually pretty compelling reading, if you don't mind the occasional indulgent tangent of self-pity and lots of use of the phrase "fucking asshole." Despite the fact that I wasn't really concerned with clever turns of phrase or witty juxtaposition at the time I was writing, I'd managed to capture a story. It just happened to be true. I was sort of the reverse James Frey without even knowing it. I guess I could have embellished things with a police chase or a healthy heroin habit, but that seemed a little excessive.

"We can just pretend it's fictional," I said to my professor, when I told her I was going to transcribe my journals rather than conjure up some bullshit. She was skeptical. "Look," I explained, "I really wanted to take the memoir class. Cut me some slack. You don't want to read my fiction, I promise you." She finally relented and told me that it had better be good.

"Why did you decide to use the diary structure?" someone asked when I read my initial synopsis out loud to the class.

"These are actually my journal entries," I replied off-handedly. Everyone stared at me. "Everything really happened. Is happening. Anyway, yeah, let's just pretend it's not real."

Initially this idea was born out of sheer pragmatism. I often tried to make one piece of writing serve two purposes when I could, like when I managed to knock out my term papers for Avant Garde Literature and Studies In Feminism by deconstructing the portrayal of female characters in Brecht's Mother Courage & Her Children. Less work for me in the long run, and given that I was regularly afflicted with bouts of procrastination when it came to assignments, I figured that I would be keeping up with my journals anyway so why not kill two birds with one harrowing tale of angst?

Once a week, we'd have a roundtable reading. When it was my turn, I read several entries, including the ordeal of crying on the kitchen floor. Everyone was supposed to receive a constructive critique from the rest of the class after sharing their work. Normally I do about as well with criticism as with shooting guns, which is to say not very well at all. But for some reason, in this class filled with directionless intellectuals who were judging my capacity to deal with a horribly dysfunctional relationship, I managed to take everyone's comments in stride.

Writing things down makes it seem a little more like someone else's life. It makes it easier to separate myself, to remember that there wasn't much I can do to control events that were already in motion. If I could write it all down, more or less the way it happened, the record could stand on its own. Maybe I could learn a lesson, the way you see someone else trip on a curb and say to yourself, "Oh, I'll watch out for that." It might as well have been happening to someone else. I often tell myself that situations such as these have very little to do with me in the end. I'm not a variable or at all necessary in the equation. There is never a choice that I need to make - things are never offered to me, simply awaiting my signal. Things are often taken away, though, quite without my realizing it.

Maybe that's a cop out. I like to pretend that I exist in a glass box, pounding on the walls and shouting soundlessly when I feel like I'm not getting my way. So I convince myself that I exist in a void - nothing I say or do impacts anyone. No one takes anything to heart. I'm not a blip on anyone's radar unless I crash in a spectacular display of flames and wreckage on their doorstep. At which point they politely sweep up the remains, put it in a box and mutter, "Ugh, what a mess."

"Um, first of all, I'd like to say I think it's really brave that you're doing this," said one girl who was writing an overwrought epic about vampires in medieval France. "But, um, I think you need to focus more on explaining why you - um, the narrator - was upset enough to have that kind of reaction, to be so out of control? It seems a overly dramatic in the context."

I looked at her blankly over the top of my manuscript. "Duly noted. I'll work on it." Why had I been so upset that day? I thought. How can I better dramatize the reasoning behind the closest I ever hope to get to a nervous breakdown?

While it was strange to essentially have my real life and my documentation of such come under literary scrutiny, it became less surreal as the class wore on. Every week I would show up, describe how I felt in my darkest moments to a roomful of strangers, and listen to feedback about how I could make my personal drama more palatable for an audience. By the time the semester ended, I can't say that I handed in a cohesive, complete work. It could only be documented up to a point. I had my manuscript bound cheaply at Kinko's and turned it in. To be completely honest, I can't remember what grade I got. At least I passed. Everything passes.

I've found myself writing more recently - in several capacities - than I have in a long time. Yet again I've started to compulsively write down events, conversations, what someone told me I said because I wasn't so much there when it was happening. Johnnie Walker practices a highly effectively memory wipe more often than not. Things fall apart, people leave (sometimes before they're really gone), I say things I regret, and every night I write it all down. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So maybe I can just pretend, when needs be, that this is not my life. This is some melodrama that I am simply watching. This is someone else's heart that's breaking. After all, there's nothing special about that. But sometimes it's a good story.