$330

-A man behind me on the train spent the entire, I mean entire trip on his phone to various parties, loudly complaining that a business deal he's involved in that he thought was confidential was in fact known by some other party. The gist of his grievance was that someone apparently couldn't keep things quiet. The irony of all of this was apparently lost on dude, but it at least gave me something to contemplate while transferring info from footnotes to the bibliography.

-Last night I had the ultimate Cheapness Studies anxiety dream. In it, I was in Lululemon, trying on shorts. I was in the store, in the dream, because, in this dream, I was an employee at a store (as if they'd hire me, given my yoga-skepticism), and therefore had some kind of discount. In any case, in the dream, I somehow accidentally ended up purchasing some shorts, even though they didn't fit right (just ill-fitting - not too big or too small; my subconscious's body image is apparently not the problem), and lo and behold, somehow after buying them, I learned that they were not returnable and had cost $330. Yes, it was an exact amount. That was the amount. For shorts! Would you believe it? I mean, you shouldn't believe it, because I just looked this up and shorts at that store are in the $40-$50 range. Not cheap, but not $330, either. But I was so upset that I had just spent that much on shorts I wouldn't even be able to wear, which was indeed foolish, or would have been, had I done so.

-There is - how had I not seen this? - a YouTube channel that is a Japanese cooking show "narrated" by a little gray poodle. Basically, it's as if Bisou had a cooking show. Which was how I got hooked. But the show itself is also kind of great, even after you get past the how-is-that-poodle-not-charging-at-that-salmon angle. (But how? Editing? Lots of salmon being treated off-camera?) It's on the one hand from-scratch, but on the other, completely unpretentious. It's not about getting the finest ingredients. It's largely about blotting every ingredient off with a paper towel, dusting everything off in potato starch, and having dashi stock ready at all times. There's even advice in one video to coat salmon fillets with sake in order to get rid of the fishy smell. Thereby acknowledging the reality of... ingredients, I suppose. The ones one might actually get at the supermarket. Well, the Asian supermarket. H-Mart, here I come.

Why fiction is better, Part II UPDATED

If you're going to end a confessional essay with the question, "Am I totally insane?," you probably do relinquish your right to object that you have indeed been called "insane."

That aside, it is an interesting question, why people do stupid things. (I would say, why smart people do stupid things - the author refers to herself as "a smart, progressive feminist woman" - but eh.) While we may not all do things quite that stupid, let alone do them and write about it, we do all do things that rationally we understand are unwise. In this self-censored self-presentation age, where everyone is constantly checking their public persona for anything that could ever be a liability, a function of hyper-confessional writing can be to shed some light on the less-photogenic aspects of our lives.

But then the question is, if the author of such a piece doesn't want her choices validated, doesn't want to serve as an example, but also doesn't want to be "shamed," well, what does she want? Or rather: what is the purpose of this sort of writing?

The purpose, I'd think, is to examine human nature in all its ambiguities. A purpose to which fiction is better-suited than the personal essay. An exploration of why a woman not looking to get pregnant is sexually active with men, without using birth control, would be interesting in a fictional character, where we could be shown-not-told the various reasons she may have come to that behavior. Readers could judge more and sympathize more if this were a fictional character's fictional uterus at stake.

UPDATE

I now see, via the Facebook page of the person who had linked to this initially (and who, incidentally, works for the same publication, and who makes a good case for the piece) that the author of this essay-and-retort has been subject to all manner of hate online. That, I want to make clear, is never excusable. Criticizing the article - and yes, that can include, as MSI says, the "prose" - is fair game. Sending obscenity-filled emails to the author about her life choices, no.

"The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice, I warn my classes. If you want to be popular with your parents and siblings, try cookbooks."

While Literature used to mean subtly alluding to anything racy, we're now in the age of Real Housewives on toilets, of Lifetime Movie fiction, but most of all, of the overshare. Rather than channeling our observations of humanity into novels or short stories, we're now expected to tell the truth, the whole truth, with bonus courage points for any loved ones we take down along the way. (See also Susan Shapiro's interventions in the comments to her essay. The personal is the personal.)

And I think that's a shame. There are so many advantages to telling "your" story - the one, or ones, only you could tell - through a genre that doesn't promise truth. Fiction of course varies tremendously in terms of how closely it mirrors lived experience. But once you've labeled a document "fiction," the premise changes. Maybe these are the author's experiences and grievances, or maybe the author heard/read about something like this, or maybe it's pure invention (as much as such a thing is possible). I have trouble articulating exactly why fiction is the way to go, but my impression is that it's the route to bigger truths than the ones you can arrive at trying to adhere to your own precise experiences.

This is an issue I've been thinking about for some time. Even in high school, when "creative-writing" class brings about what are clearly individual's own life situations verbatim, whatever the characters are called, I was never able to write "fiction" about myself. Part of it was that doing so led to the obvious writing trap of, there are all these details I would know, and would assume a reader would as well, but how on earth could anyone other than me know what I was talking about? (To give a theoretical example not from my own life: say your protagonist's parents had a bitter divorce, which you take for granted because you are the protagonist, but which could well be information the reader needs but lacks.) Inventing characters forces you to paint the full picture, to tell as much as is necessary. It also just didn't seem interesting - I know that my own life interests me insofar as I'm experiencing it, a likely universal human experience, one that makes all of us biased when telling our own stories. Point being, even apart from whichever ethical qualms keep me from going the dirty-laundry route, I'd also find it more difficult to write about my own personal life, in a way that could possibly be of interest to anyone other than myself.

And yet, this blog. Sometimes I worry that all this blogging - first-person, but not confessional - has damaged my capacity to write fiction. Blogging, but also Facebook, an online presence in general. I know, a huge loss for world literature, but bear with me. Like every other literature grad student since forever, I'm always starting a novel, conceiving of pieces of one. But I fear that I've become so accustomed to writing only from my own perspective, to presenting myself, to adhering to the truth, to keeping everything safe for an audience I can only assume includes the full gamut of family, social, and professional connections, that I'd be incapable of shutting the self-censoring impulse. Even when talking about made-up situations and characters. Because fiction or not, it still comes from my brain, my keyboard. Because I'm so used to thinking of my writing-voice as me, it seems scandalous to write about a character thinking/doing something that isn't something I would admit to thinking/doing (whether or not I have!) on-blog. And I don't even necessarily mean scandalous topics. I mean anything that would cross the line.

"'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people'"

Sometimes a story fits so perfectly with a WWPD tag that it simply demands a post, even if it's a difficult one to write, and one that leaves me with more questions than answers. 

Roni Abramson writes in Haaretz (behind a quasi-paywall) about the difficulties of getting an abortion in Israel. Not because Jewish law is especially strict in this regard, but because More Jewish Babies. The Holocaust, Jewish men marrying out... if you're a Jewish woman with Jewish-woman-parts, what you do with those parts is of great interest to a great many people who aren't you or your family. Abramson describes her own ordeal, as well as a sign she saw at a rally that read, “'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people.'” Gosh. As an owner of one of said wombs, I'm going to have to say no, it does not. (Ross Douthat already claimed all American wombs for the American people. Dibs and all that.) 

Despite a professed interest in Jewish natalism, I hadn't known the details of Israeli abortion law - all I'd known was that Israel places a high priority on fertility. Impossible to link to, but also in my head as I write this post: heaps and heaps and heaps of anecdotal evidence. 

While I personally didn't need convincing, I fear that the specifics of Abramson's story, though, may not win over the unconvinced:

Of all the examinations and personal questions I had to endure about the status of my relationship and the quality of the condoms I bought, the meeting that stands out the most is the one with a social worker. The pleasant woman who chose the most giving profession on earth tossed questions at me from an official form. She could not understand why a healthy, educated young woman of 24 would not want to continue her pregnancy. 

“Why do you want to have an abortion?” she asked in astonishment. “Because even though I want to keep on living with my partner and have children with him eventually, I’m still studying for my bachelor’s degree and working part-time, so I don’t see any way I can raise this baby.” Surprised at my honesty, she asked what my partner thought. “He feels the same way I do,” I answered. “We want to live together without children at this stage in our lives.”

Maybe it's that I've been reading about the perils of thinking one can always have a baby "eventually," but as much as I agree with Abramson that she was treated terribly, and that nothing good can come of society outlawing abortion in these circumstances, this is a case where I see the right but - and here, the perils of overshare, the temptation it brings to judge individual cases as opposed to societal trends - find myself wondering if this is really the case that best gets the point across. If you do want kids, and with your current partner, and so does said partner, but at 27 (say) rather than 24... I suppose where I'm going with this is, there are reasons other than More Jewish Babies, other than an abortion-is-murder stance, that someone might question the wisdom of this particular woman's decision. Especially given that (as is my understanding? has this changed in recent years?) Israel has more of a social-safety net.

But maybe that's precisely what makes this the right story to use to make this point. If we learned of a woman carrying a fetus with major, life-threatening deformities, or one that resulted from rape or incest, or if the "woman" was a 16-year-old girl, or a grown woman without a partner/support system, we might conclude, individual circumstances trump More Jewish Babies, assuming we were on the MJB bandwagon, which, of course, we are not. But here, it's a clear-cut case of choice. Abramson knew what was right for her, and as much as the reader might find this not the best reason to get an abortion, it's not about the reader, but the woman who would or would not be carrying this pregnancy to term. Only Abramson could know what was right for her, and it shouldn't have had to fall on her to articulate why she wanted an abortion in a way that some panel (or Haaretz reader!) found sympathetic. It comes down to something every woman at a given time knows - if she's prepared to give birth to (and likely raise) a child at that point or not, something that quite possibly can't be explained sufficiently to others whose uterus it is not.

In other words, even if some will find Abramson's reasons "decadent," the deciding vote, womb-wise, goes not to the party with the best argument, but to the one whose womb it is.