THE WRITER, REBEKAH TAUSSIG, has a new book called Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary, Resilient, Disabled Body. It is just out from Harper One. The book is a memoir told in essays. Rebecca is a teacher and a writer whose work can be found in such places as Time, as well as in many mini-memoirs on her wildly popular Instagram site, sitting_pretty. Listen in and read along as we talk about how to write a memoir in essays.
MARION: I’m so glad to have you here, it’s a joy, and your new book is a wonder. So we’re going to get to that. I want to just say my audience is writers and we want to get them some help on how to do the work, but let’s get them a little background. And here’s a curious moment. I have to admit this, I’m nervous about the language I’m going to use here. And as the listeners are about to find out, this absolutely underscores the need for your work. In your words, you say you are a disabled person. If I had said that without the qualifier that you had said that, well, half of the people listening might have winced or sighed or had some response to my language. So you’ve been disabled since you were a toddler and you’ve been writing and publishing since when?
Rebekah: I’ve been writing since I was a very small person, but it was originally really angsty poems that I would write in my big fat notebook in the car and stare whimsically out the window and write these awful poems. I continued writing in one form or another all the way through undergrad and in to graduate school. But the kind of writing that you read in the book, personal writing, started later in graduate school.
I was into my PhD program already, and I discovered disability studies, which was this transformative lens that I could look through and look back on my life and understand it in new ways. And during that time, I found myself just overwhelmed with thoughts and needing to process them. So I went to Instagram, the account that you mentioned earlier, as just a space to work some of that out and to connect with people. And that snowballed into more writing and more things to explore, and that turned into the book. So I’ve been writing for a very long time, but it was, I think maybe 2015 when I started that Instagram account, which actually that’s longer ago than I realized when I look back. That’s over six years ago now. So yeah, it’s been a minute.
Marion: It has been a minute. And I’ve read you on various platforms, including in Time, Good Company, The Florida Review. But more and more I wonder about that time, that six years spent online. How has the presence of such an immediate audience who can respond, well immediately, shaped your work, do you think?
Rebekah: Yeah. I think that’s been a huge part of the process for me. In small ways that are actually enormous ways. So even just the fact that I have to fit my idea into that tiny space that they allot, it’s actually 2,200 characters. And I know that because I’ve had to edit and edit and edit down to get to just that one tiny nugget with all of the turns in it that I want. And that process of revision, I think, has been really important for my work.
But you mentioned the community part of it, and I think that has also been powerful in ways I’m sure I don’t even know how to calculate. But I do know that the immediacy of conversation and having someone to throw an idea back at me or to feel my idea immediately, I think that that has created that sense that I’m actually talking to someone in my writing, that I actually am having a conversation with you. We are experiencing something together, even as I am writing this, sitting at my computer in my study alone. I see you and I feel you as a reader because I think that that has to be a big part of how my voice developed as a writer.
But also I feel really lucky that it’s given me a sense of what parts of my work are provocative and confusing and push buttons for people, and what part seems to resonate with more people in ways I don’t even expect? And I feel like that has definitely moved me toward ideas, pulled me into conversations in ways I didn’t expect. But yeah, it’s been a part of this dance, it feels collaborative. So I imagine that that has shaped me at least in those ways, but I’m sure in ways I also don’t even know how to trace.
Marion: Yeah. I see something reading through your Instagram site that I’ve never noticed in anyone else’s and is it intimacy? It’s something about the small space that allows for such precision and you got at it, it’s literally the word count. Absolutely, you want to get it right in those first few pieces of language. But you get it right, but you get it provocative, but you get it intimate, and I love that. So from Instagram mini memoirs to a memoir told in essays. Let’s break this apart a bit, give us some background on how and why you decided to go from that Instagram and how you honed the voice, how you choose the topics you include, maybe we’ll stay on Instagram for a second and then we’ll move to the book. But you include such moments on Instagram as breastfeeding your newborn in photos and carrying the weight of the response that others have to that.
And you also, I just want to stay with it. Yeah, I guess I just want to stay with the Instagram thing for another moment. And we covered that, the people in their immediate responses to that, but you also have that subtly subversive handle of yours, Sitting Pretty. So just let’s before we leave the topic of Instagram, let’s talk about that, that moment when you were figuring out what to call it. That is so subversive and wonderful, but talk about the moment of deciding to call it that?
Rebekah: Yeah.
Marion: You’re sitting in a wheelchair since you’re a toddler, since you’re a small person.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Marion: So come on, when you found the phrase, “Sitting Pretty,” did you just go, “I got it.” Or what?
Rebekah: That’s so funny to listen to you describe that because I was sitting in a coffee shop with now my husband, not my husband at the time, Micah. And we really just had a literal napkin and I was just jotting down all of these words, like disabled or cripple punk was a hashtag, I was really into, the initial, starting the Instagram account. And so I was just like, chair, just writing down, like all of these clunky words and everything felt overdone and too on the nose and awkward and uncomfortable.
Marion: Yeah.
Rebekah: And yeah, and “Sitting Pretty,” I don’t even know how that phrase came. I don’t know if sitting was maybe a word that I was chewing on, but yeah. I wanted it to be exactly the way you’ve described it. I wanted it to be playful, and you think, you know what you’re looking at, but actually maybe you don’t and I’m really actually just fine right here. There’s no sob story going on. There’s no triumphant heroism going on. I’m just hanging out and fine. And I love that you see that in that, because that’s exactly what I want. That’s exactly what I would want it to be. I’ve actually had people bring up that, the word pretty is in it at all. And talking about feedback from people on the internet, just things that people are dissatisfied with. Like why do we have to fixate on pretty? And it’s like, well, that’s really not it, but.
Marion: No, it’s really not it.
Rebekah: No, you got it. You got it.
Marion: Well, I love it. And I even love the underscore. It feels like a seat, there’s just so much about it that works beautifully and I can really congratulate you. And then I just wished I had been in the coffee shop watching you scribble it on a napkin, and then I wanted to see your face when you bit into that. It’s just wonderful. So you teach, you write?
Rebekah: Well.
Marion: Yeah, go ahead?
Rebekah: The one thing I have to note though, is that I felt that like, “Oh wow, I’m the only one.” But actually there are other sitting pretties of other forms online I found much later. So I don’t think I was the first for, I don’t know, maybe I was, or maybe I wasn’t. But there are other sitting pretties out there with an arrangement of underscores and hyphens and what have you. So I thought that I was the most original and maybe I wasn’t, but it still works. It still serves its purposes.
Marion: It does. I ran into all of those in my initial search. And when I got to yours, I remembered the underscore and I’ll put a link in the transcript so people will get to the right one.
Rebekah: Perfect.
Marion: You write and you teach, we’re in COVID, you gave birth during the pandemic. You have a husband in this terrible time required some serious medical care. In other words, you are a working mother with some number of stressors. So how do you make time to write?
Rebekah: Oh, my gosh, what a question. It’s been really stretching, and I thought that writing a book while I was teaching high school was really stretching. And it was, it was a lot, but there’s something about this new time. I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t have any simple, here’s my key that I unlocked the door to all the writing. It feels like a lot of desperate flailing and staying up really late at night.
Marion: Yep, desperate flailing. Yeah.
Rebekah: Yes, yes. It feels like a lot of that. Especially like the way that you described my Instagram account and like the intimacy there, it’s interesting to me. I feel like one of the tests that I could perform on my life to see how much space I have for writing is what shows up on my Instagram? And it’s been very difficult to even put together a post. Just my brain is pulled in so many directions, this baby still does not sleep. He is going to be one this month and we are still waiting for that night when we will actually have eight hours of sleep in a row. I don’t know that it will ever happen.
Marion: It will.
Rebekah: But yeah, I’ve been told. I’ve been told that it’s possible. So yeah, I don’t have any simple answers, it’s just scrambling. It’s a lot of scrambling.
Marion: Yeah.
Rebekah: And a brain that feels rather fried. But I would also say that even with all of that, some of the writing that I am the most proud of, or that I cherish the most has come out of this time too. I wrote a piece for Time about just the tangle of joy and loss in this pandemic, just the way our family has experienced it.
Marion: Yes.
Rebekah: And it was one of the pieces of writing that I feel was more like a wrestling match than anything I’ve experienced. And then when it was done, it was like, “There you are. We got there.” So, it’s all of that at the same time.
Marion: It is.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Marion: It is. And I read that piece and it was beautiful.
Rebekah: Thank you.
Marion: And I think the pressure to create it, I think a lot of times that the weight pushes things out. If you’re writing with one hand while driving a car, giving birth and driving to see your mother in the nursing home, sometimes the sentences are pretty good. Just be careful about the other drivers. So let’s talk about judgment, who has told you that you have more than enough in your life going on and not to write? And what have you said back? Has that happened to you in this life?
Rebekah: I don’t know that people are saying that to me directly with those words. I think that as a woman, it’s just like this built-in, I’ve absorbed enough stories over my lifetime. I’ve known enough women that I admire and watching the ways that the expectations that there are on mothers, I’ve seen it from afar for a very long time. And now that I’m in it, all of the things I swore I would never feel, I’m watching myself feel them, and having to work through that gut instinct to say like, feeling guilty for having someone watch my son, what an absurd thing to feel guilty about. This makes every, right? He wants to get away from me. He is so ready to go out that front door and, and we have people close that can watch him. And there’s still this thing that rises in me that’s like, how are you having someone else care for this boy? And it’s just ridiculous to watch that bubble in me.
So I’m fighting a lot of that myself. And I feel like I’ve talked with other women who express similar things of saying, I’m not doing a good job at any of the things I’m supposed to be doing. And so every time I’m making a decision to write or to be a mother, I’m neglecting something.
Marion: Yes, you are.
Rebekah: And that is such a rotten feeling.
Marion: Yes it is.
Rebekah: So it’s a new kind of juggling, but I hope that I’m getting better at being aware of the thoughts that are just thoughts that should not carry any weight that just pass my brain and I want to let them continue to pass on. But it’s really hard.
Marion: Yes, it is.
Rebekah: It’s been harder than I thought it would be.
Marion: Well, that’s very honest. And I wanted just to get to that, because through this, you’ve created a book that I think is a marvel. It’s called Sitting Pretty, it’s just out from Harper One. And right from the introduction you turn to us and it is wow, startling. You look at us and you say to us things that need to be said, and you then bullet point your way through what the book is not. And then, and only then after that, you hook elbows with us and we go with you. And I read it three times to watch how you did it. So let’s talk about voice and how you discovered how to use that voice to get us into this place that you live in?
Rebekah: Well, I just want to say, I love hearing your description of your experience reading that intro. I want you to feel that way, I want you to feel like I’m talking to you. I think when I wrote it, I felt like I was talking to you. I felt like we were hooking elbows and going to experience something together. I imagine technically speaking, I think that a lot of that voice developed on Instagram with a community of people that were immediately there like we’ve already talked about. I also think as a disabled woman, a lot of that voice was cultivated in my experiences with people and watching how people respond to me as a disabled person and a lot of the fears that come up for people, or the anxiety, or the worry or concern. Or just all of the things that can make that conversation fraught, and having to develop a lot of tools for welcoming and inviting and doing something together.
Instead of just I don’t know, it never makes sense to me to just stand for my podium and point down at people and teach in that way, which is funny, the word teach. I am a teacher, so it’s funny to say that I don’t feel comfortable in the role of teacher, but I guess it’s the traditional lecturer at the front. Let me tell you all the things you need to know that you’re ignorant about, as opposed to let’s figure out something together, I want you to feel like we’re partners in this in some ways. And I think a lot of that has been developed over time just as a disabled woman and interacting with people in the world.
Marion: Well, it comes through beautifully.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Marion: It’s shot not from the pulpit, but it’s shot, you’re walking among the pews, we’re sitting, we’re getting up, we’re strolling with you, we are linking elbows, but I found it to be fascinating. And the comfort, but also those bullet points say, “Now, just before we go on this intimate experience, let me just tell you, what’s not going to happen here.” And then you’re choosing to write it in essays, your essay style allows us to watch you shape your narrative about yourself. And I think the essay format enables you to build that narrative brick by brick. The essays felt to me very much that there was a construction going on from that first learning about love, via episodes of the soap opera “As The World Turns,” which I just found hilarious, to becoming a world-class voice for accurate representation.
I work a lot with writers and almost to a person there seems to be this language ascribed to memoirs and essays that people say things like, “I don’t know, maybe I’ll just tell it in essays.” As though writing in an essays is easier, that you do not have to do the connective tissue work that one narrative book-length piece requires. So let’s talk about the essay format. What is your relationship? What was your choice process like there? And how comfortable, why the essay? Everybody wants to write in essays, but I honest to God think that they think it’s easier to do so. I don’t agree. What about you?
Rebekah: Well, I think it’s interesting to think about the differences between the two forms. I think both of them present unique puzzles, and I think they both move in both directions for me, I think for the essays. I think the reason that it made sense to, in talking with my agent, my agent was kind of talking through with me, what should we pitch? What kind of book should be a first book? And I think it felt like I was already doing essays on this Instagram platform, they were just so small. It almost felt like I was going to go through and pluck eight seeds that I wanted to plant and then turn them into trees in a way, something along those lines.
And I think that there’s a memoir to come. I think that there’s a memoir in me that I want to explore ideas in a different way. But for this book, it felt like I have some very specific set of ideas that I want to be able to look at closely and carefully. And I don’t want to have to worry about the overall narrative arc as much for this book. I want to be able to talk specifically about feminism and disability and being a woman and how all of those pieces fit together. I want to talk specifically about love and romance and sex, and to be able to study that carefully. Not to say you couldn’t do those things in a memoir, but I wanted some of that focus that I was able to start on the Instagram space to really just have my stone and turn it over 40 times and look at it from every possible angle to mix all the metaphors.
Marion: Yeah, I like that. And it also feels on brand after reading Instagram, it feels like it is the next step. And I, and I love that idea that you believe that you have a memoir in you, another a book yet to come and your agent referred to this as your first book. These are all very hopeful phrases for me because I’m a big fan now. So there’s the question about the arc. If you look up the phrase advocacy journalism, which a lot of people know, but it’s defined as a genre of journalism that adopts a non-objective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose.
And you’re great at advocacy journalism. And I love that you’ve brought it to Instagram and you’ve got it in this book. And you’re great at it, but are there limits to it? Is there only so much you can say, and then you have to find another topic? Can it be a career, do you think? As you think about going forward, are you thinking about being in advocacy journalism forever, or are you thinking about it else wise? So give us a sense of definition, because you’ve got a very clear brand right now.
Rebekah: I love that question. And I was unfamiliar with that term, so it’s interesting to think about it in that way. I think that in some ways I have become an advocate by accident. I don’t know that that’s what I set out to do, but that my writing has kind of done that work for me. My writing has pushed that forward. And I think that for me, when I think about writing so much of it is an attempt to understand something. I think that’s a huge part of what, what drives me is I need to understand and connect. I think those are the two driving forces that really fuel my writing. And it’s interesting, I have been thinking about your question with different terms. Since writing the book, I feel like so much of the things in that book I understand now. Not to say that those conversations are over by any means, but that huge fuel of the question of what role has representation played in how I imagine myself as an adult and into my future? Or what is the relationship between my disability and my womanhood.
I think I’ll continue to wrestle with those questions forever, really. But I think the initial just enormous tangle, like if I was thinking of it as just a giant spool of yarn that had gotten all tangled, I’ve done so much work to untangle that. And I think as a writer, part of my question has been well, what’s next to untangle? What am I struggling to understand? And for me it has just so happened that the day after I submitted my final manuscript for this book I found out I was pregnant. So I’ve been presented this giant house full of tangled yarn to work through with motherhood. And because I’m disabled, it’s all about being a disabled mother, that’s just a part of it. And so I suppose that what I imagine happening for me is as a disabled person, I continue to write about disability and as my life changes, that conversation changes. So in that way, I’d imagine that that’s a pool that continues to give, I don’t know if I’m answering exactly what you were looking for, but I think that that’s how I think about it.
Marion: That’s good. No, I think it’s helpful.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Marion: I think it’s very helpful. And I think-
Rebekah: More to explore.
Marion: Yeah, there is more to explore. And in that recent Time piece that we talked about earlier, you have this lovely paragraph, well you have many paragraphs that are lovely, but there’s this one that really stood out for me, that isn’t about disability. I kind of wanted to encourage you and say, “Wow, nobody should go into your work thinking it’s about disability. It’s very much about language. It’s very much about identity. It’s very much there.” And you have this lovely line where you say, “For now, I’m allowing myself to be in the middle of the story, to recognize that there isn’t one story here and not even one story per person per day.” And you go on to say, “But when we’re ready to sit in the full stories we’ve been living, when we are safe and have the space, all of the pieces are here.”
And you talk about how our stories are tangled and complicated, but they’re ours. Let them be messy, contradictory, true. So I’m hoping that you see what we see, which is that you have a guide, you have an eye, and I so celebrate it that through your work I said to myself, tangled and complicated, and the acceptance of that is so very important to the way we live now. And I hope that, you know, I hope we’ll get to see you everywhere in that tangled and complicated world. So that’s just my way of being encouraging there. But yeah, as we wrap this up, I have to ask you, cause you teach, I teach, and my students teach me at least as much as I teach them. And how do those worlds intersect for you? Can you give us something you might’ve learned recently from somebody else that you were teaching? Or maybe you would share with us what the teaching does for the writing? How do your worlds inform one another?
Rebekah: Yeah, I actually really do see them as being very twined, if that’s the right word for it. I see them sprouting from the same desire to understand. I feel like the thing that draws me to teaching, the part of that space that I long for and am drawn to, is that desire to understand and that collaborative, starting with a question, and then we will continue to pull at that thread until we land somewhere new together.
And I think you mentioned that I’m taking the year off teaching right now. And I miss that process together, of doing that collaboratively as especially the doing it in real time, in person together. I missed that space of the classroom where we’ll continue to pull at something and we’ll start with a question that will lead us to 10 more questions. And when you do that with other people, and especially when you do that with 14 year olds, I’ve found you end up landing in places you do not expect. They ask questions that throw you off your guard. You do not anticipate that question coming. And I really miss doing that with them, with freshmen. Freshmen in high school, I never thought I would say that. And yes, I think that’s very much a part of what I’m trying to do in my writing and what I long to do with people, what draws me to writing is pulling at those threads that I so love to do in the classroom too.
Marion: Well. We hope you pull at them forever, Rebekah. Thank you so much for your work and thank you for coming along today. It’s a joy to talk to you.
Rebekah: It has been such an honor to talk with you and to hear you talk about my writing and read it, it’s truly such an honor. As I mentioned to you before, I always teach The Memoir Project to my students. So this has been so special for me.
Marion: Oh, Thank you. Thank you so much. The author is Rebekah Taussig. The book is Sitting Pretty just out from Harper One. And if you go to Amazon to buy it, there’s a link to which to donate a copy to an underserved library. So go on and do that. See more on her Rebekah Taussig dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overt Studios in Albany. New York, Reach them at Overt Studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write a memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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