There are a few women on my radar who are spearheading a reinvention of the way we talk about personal narrative and memoir—and Sari Botton is one of them. She is a seasoned editor and the author of the memoir And You May Find Yourself... Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.
In our conversation below, we discuss everything from the ethics of memoir and how to navigate writing about other people to how different editors define what an essay is. She raises some revolutionary points about owning our stories and the kind of language we permit ourselves to use in describing them.
SARI BOTTON is the author of the memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is a contributing editor and columnist at Catapult, the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and a former columnist for the Rumpus, where she interviewed established and new writers from Cheryl Strayed to Samantha Irby.
Sari edited the New York Times-bestselling Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Village Voice, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, More, and the Rumpus.
In addition to teaching creative nonfiction at Bay Path University and Catapult, Sari is the publisher and editor of three Substack publications: Oldster Magazine, Adventures in Journalism, and Memoir Monday
KARIN GUTMAN: You’ve written about how you’ve navigated writing about other people, as well as interviewing authors about this thorny topic in your Rumpus column Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me.
How did you handle this issue with your memoir And You May Find Yourself?
SARI BOTTON: When it came time to actually write my book, I realized I needed to first write a vomit draft, what I call a ‘warts and all’ vomit draft with everything in it. All the bad stuff. And then once it was out of my body, out of my head on the page, only then could I blur, subtract and edit.
I did it. I handed in the book. That book was edited.
And then I went back to my editor, and I said, You know what? I have to do that again. I’ve got to do another level of extraction. I said, I'm not going to get to publish my book in 2021. It's going to be 2022. And she said, Fine. So, I went back and scrubbed it of any unnecessary, inflammatory details. I further blurred people.
KARIN: Do you feel like these changes diluted the story at all?
SARI: It's still to me all true. I changed so many identifying characteristics. I really did my best to make it so that if one of these awful people who I dated read it, they'd know it was them but nobody else would know unless they already knew the story. I tended to only change your name if you were a jerk. I showed the people I care about the pieces they were in, and said, Is this okay with you? How do you want me to refer to you? Do you want me to change your name?
KARIN: The ethics of memoir are deeply personal. Given how challenging these lines are for you, did you ever consider fictionalizing your story?
SARI: You should write fiction because you're interested in fiction and the art and mechanics of it, not because you're trying to avoid getting in trouble for writing about your life. People will see right through that. I have an idea for a novel and a list of ideas for short stories. But I want to do those things because I want to play God with characters who do interesting things, not because I want to write a story about my relationship with people in my life in a way that they will not recognize themselves, because that's impossible.
KARIN: What about a pseudonym?
SARI: I created a pseudonym for myself. She has a Gmail and a Twitter account. There were a few reasons I didn't publish under that name. One is that I would be really pissed off; I have spent more than 30 years building my platform. For me to then have to hide behind a pseudonym and build that pseudonym’s platform… I wasn't up for that. There’s just something about needing to own my personal story.
KARIN: Can you give an example of how you handled some of the more incendiary material?
SARI: There's a piece in the book about my struggle with body image and weight and eating disorders. In the ‘warts and all’ vomit draft version, a relative makes a comment on my butt when I'm seven, and it completely traumatizes me.
I revised that chapter to say that “the adults around me” were really to blame. I realized that my babysitters were on diets. My teachers were on diets and made comments about their bodies and other kids’ bodies. My aunts, my uncles. My grandparents were on the Pritikin Diet, and we all knew about it. It really was the culture.
So, I pulled back on my book to the point where I could make the stories, especially the most difficult ones, about cultural phenomena. Yeah, that relative was a big part of it, but it wasn't necessary for this particular story.
KARIN: In the introduction you write that the purpose of this book is to say simply, “I was here, I lived.” I found that refreshing.
You also refer to the series of essays as “confessional” which I find can be used to describe memoir in a derogatory way. What does that word mean to you?
SARI: A lot of the rules of memoir, and of all writing, were written by straight white men.
I just read one of Annie Ernaux’s books, and it was 60 pages. She calls herself an “Ethnographer of the Self.” I love that she won the Nobel Prize for that work, and I am all for ethnography of the self.
I think we need to be rewriting all the rules of all writing, including memoir and essays. I reject the idea that you can't be a victim. Roxane Gay has written about this in her memoir, Hunger: “It took a long time, but I prefer 'victim' to 'survivor' now. I don't want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don't want to pretend I'm on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don't want to pretend that everything is okay. I'm living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred.”
I just had an argument the other day with a writer whom I love. She says, “There are no victims in essay and memoir.” I was like, “Yeah, we're rewriting those rules. I mean, there are victims.”
I was in a writing group with some people and I stopped being in the writing group, because I wrote a story about something that happened to me when I was seven. And someone said, “You sound like a victim.” And then someone else was like, “Yeah, you don't want to sound like a victim.” I said, “I was seven. I was a victim.” Bullies have made all the rules. Bullies don't want to read victimization stories, but other victims do.
When I was at Longreads, I wrote a blog post about how Elizabeth Wurtzel made it okay to write ‘Ouch’. I feel very strongly that when you've been hurt, it's okay to write ‘Ouch’. I hate false bravado.
I also like confessions. The reason I chose to call these confessions instead of essays is because some of the pieces in the book don't really rise to the standards of an essay collection. This is a memoir in episodes, in vignettes. I'm confessing to things that I haven't been allowed to say, that I've wanted to say, that aren't all flattering. And so, I call them confessions.
KARIN: You have devoted your career to personal narrative, both as a writer and as an editor.
SARI: It's absolutely true. I've been involved in this since 1991.
KARIN: You’ve been witness to the whole trajectory since the memoir boom of the 90s. Where do you think things are headed?
SARI: Early on, there was Prozac Nation. There was The Liar's Club. There was Angela's Ashes. There was The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison's memoir about her affair with her father. That was the beginning of the 90s memoir boom.
It's been a boom bust, boom bust kind of thing.
Where it's headed is more previously marginalized voices are being shared. I've noticed a lot of memoirs that are written in fragments. Maggie Smith has one coming out. She's a poet. Abigail Thomas writes in fragments. It feels like she's always been writing in fragments from her first memoir, Safekeeping.
I tend to think unless your memoir is about a very specific turn of events, a straight narrative can be really boring because the connective tissue in between the important points in your life can make it blah.
I'm just finishing this memoir, which I absolutely love by Kimberly Harrington, But You Seemed So Happy. It's about the dissolution of her marriage. She alternates personal essays with humor essays, like she would have in McSweeney's or Shouts and Murmurs in the New Yorker. It's all about her marriage, but it's broken up. I've been more drawn toward episodic memoirs.
KARIN: More like a memoir-in-essays?
SARI: Yes. The ‘essay’ term is very broad. I have a larger understanding of what a personal essay is, but there are people who are sticklers.
KARIN: What does it mean to fit the standards of an essay?
SARI: I've worked with colleagues who feel very strongly that a personal essay needs to have a real argument in it.
KARIN: What does that mean exactly?
SARI: You're making a point with the essay, you're not just telling a story. I like to let the reader figure out what the point is. A lot of publications require an essay to have at its center an argument that you then back up with data and sources, even if it's just a very personal story.
I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about when I got hit by a car. I was so stunned that people in New York were so helpful to me. The editors wanted me to bring in another instance in which somebody was hit by a car and not treated the same way as me. Also, to bring in statistics. Now that's an op-ed which is a different kind of essay, but there are editors at a lot of publications that want you to do that. With a personal essay, they want you to use your anecdote to illustrate a point. By my standards, the pieces in my book are personal essays, but again, I have a much broader definition than some editors.
KARIN: What about Modern Love?
SARI: I think they look for the Modern Love piece to really have a point at the center of it, even if it's not spelled out. Whereas some of mine are more like light anecdotes.
KARIN: But I imagine that you, as an editor of essays, would want to know Why are you telling me this?
SARI: That has to be inherent, but it doesn't have to be spelled out.
KARIN: What is the difference between a long-form essay and a shorter form essay? Other than the length?
SARI: My second Modern Love is 1,500 or 1,600 words, but there's a 5,000-word version of it in the book. I first wrote the 5,000-word version long before I had a book deal. I struggled to sell it and then I thought, I’ll try and do a Modern Love version. I did, and I sold it.
Some of it has to do with where you want to publish it. A great exercise is to have different versions of your piece that can go in different places and also amplify different aspects of the same story.
It's harder to publish long-form right now. There are fewer and fewer venues. These days, Longreads is primarily a curation site with occasional long-form personal essays; where I used to publish three a week, they're now publishing maybe one a month. And Catapult just folded. It's hard to publish a 5,000-word essay, unless it's in your book. So, it might be worth your while to come up with a 1,200-word version for the Washington Post or the Huffington Post—a shorter version that could maybe even help you get a book deal, and then you put the longer version in the book.
KARIN: What is your advice to writers who have a story they’re feeling reluctant to tell?
SARI: I encourage you to write the version that you can't publish first. There's something valuable in getting it out of your head and out of your body. Something happens when it's a secret in your body, you don't have any perspective on it. And you can't until you get it out of your body and onto the page where you can see it.
Then once it’s out of your body, take a break from it. Give yourself a couple of weeks, then come back to it. Let yourself have the experience of having it out of your body. There's something that happens in that early draft, some kind of neurological thing that permits you to gain perspective, that you can't have when it's just this thing you're not allowed to tell.
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To learn more about Sari Botton visit her site.
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Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.
Adventures in Journalism features the highlights and lowlights* (*mostly lowlights) from one Gen X lady writer's rather circuitous career path.
Looking for a quick route toward success as a writer? Allow Sari Botton to demonstrate what not to do, over the course of 30-plus hilarity-(in hindsight)-filled years.
Each week, the editors of certain literary publications select their very favorite new personal essay or memoir piece, and you can find them all collected in the Memoir Monday newsletter—along with details about upcoming readings.
Inside features: First Person Singular features original published essays, and The Lit Lab offers perspectives on craft, publishing, publicity, and more.
