Monday, August 23, 2010

For Sale: One Life, Slightly Used

We humans like to feast on brains.

Memoir. Essays. Creative nonfiction. Call it what you want.

It's still brains. And hearts. The fresher the better.

I ought to know. I am both host and parasite. (That's writer to you.)

Read. Live. Gorge. Write. Then Go To the Bank. It's actually pretty gross. 

So when Elizabeth Gilbert, who just sold her Gut Soul Heart to Hollywood, went along with the product tie-ins that now adorn the aisles of a major retail player, and permitted a tour company to market her soul-searching itinerary to eager pilgrims, I wanted to run screaming into the zombie-ridden night.

Ethical concerns? Sure, that's part of it. Telling personal stories for profit is an iffy enough business, without all the marketing swag. I worry that the essential stuff at the heart of Eat Pray Love's apparent fluff--the hard-won struggle to be free--has been lost in the shuffle off to Hollywood.

But there's something else, not so pretty. Caitlin Kelly's recent post on Open Salon brought it to the surface. Although she was expressing dismay about women readers who condemned Gilbert's choice to flee her marriage, Kelly has also caused me to examine my high-minded outrage about Gilbert's economic choices since.

Ten years ago, when I was a fiction writer with modest success, my life was derailed by death. Many deaths, in fact, all crystallized by the one that looms largest now: the death of my husband.

Like Anne LaMott, I went looking for the book I needed, and it just wasn't there. I was going to have to write it, if I wanted it to exist.

I needed someone--even if it was only me--to articulate what it felt like to ask the local widows' support group if they provided babysitting. To drive around with my husband's ashes in a laundry hamper because I didn't know where else to put them on a car trip. To boycott taking the trash to the curb until my brother-in-law came to do it because it just wasn't my job.

It took ten years, but I am writing that book now.

I initially resisted, and then finally read (and really liked) Eat Pray Love last year, but I fear Elizabeth Gilbert. I fear her the way the scantily clad girl in Reel 1 fears the killer, and for the same reasons: She embodies my desire and my guilt, all in one.

How much do I tell? How much do I sell?

Don't get me wrong here. I am still reading Caitlin Kelly, and I don't envision any funeral home tie-ins or  tours of U.S cancer centers.

But still. As any zombie flick will tell you, when fresh meat walks into the marketplace, anything can happen.

Write. Publish. Pray.

[image by Merit Badger via Shawn Zender Lea]
Posted by at 4:30 AM
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4 comments:

  1. I vote this way: Write the book. Don't hold back. You were very brave and never gave up. A lot of us (me included) need that example and message -- with or without the dislocation and disruption of death.
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  2. As I know you know, at its best, writing, either fiction or non-fiction, lets us experience that which we haven't experienced directly, lets us, as Kenneth Burke argues, achieve identification through consubstantiation. In that way, open, honest, sincere personal writing is so powerful, so transformative, and so important.

    On the other hand, it is *your* life, your *private* life, being pealed back and exposed. That's why fiction is safer than non-fiction. It's why the stories-as-knowledge in oral cultures begin with a "once upon a time." When the audience is present rather than an anonymous, the personal always has the potential to be dangerous.

    Okay, I'm about to move into a McLuhanesque reading of electronic culture returning us to something akin to a village while at the same time pushing us into playing roles as media beings—that is, a reading of the commercialization of *Eat, Pray, Love* you discuss above.

    No answers here, Lisa, and I'm sure I haven't said anything you don't already know. Just an attempt at Burkean identifcation, an acknowledgment that there are no easy answers. So let me get teacherly and just say "write." As Anne LaMott has herself argued, the beauty of first drafts is that they are first drafts. Write and let boundaries between personal revelation and personal privacy work itself out in the process. The final, *revised* product is what gets shared with the public at large.
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  3. Good title--Write. Published. Pray. I might run with that.

    I wrote about my mother's death in small pieces--and it took almost 20 years to do that. You may be driving with ashes in the car, but you're on the road. Moving.

    The marketing I saw for E.P.L (spoofed on The Daily Show), dismayed me. But I saw Gilbert on a TED Talk video. She seems nice, gracious, open. I can't not wish her well. And who is to say what pressures are in her life...there are worse crimes than selling out.
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  4. well said, mapelba, and diplomatic as always. if we are not for ourselves, who are we for? i don't have to agree with Gilbert's marketing choices or be her bff to acknowledge that she wrote a damn funny book and let her have her well-earned success. thanks for taking the high road too.
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