How to write memoir about identity

MELISSA FALIVENO HAS JUST published a debut essay collection, TOMBOYLAND (Topple Books, 2020), which was named by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Electric Literature, and Debutiful as a Best Book of 2020 and received a 2021 award for outstanding literary achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Literary Hub, Ms Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, the Millions, Prairie Schooner and more. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write memoir about identity.

Marion: Today, my guest is writer, editor, and teacher Melissa Faliveno. Her pronouns are she/her and her writing deeply explores identity. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, she is originally from a small town in Wisconsin and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut book is called Tomboyland. It is a collection of essays published by Topple that was named in NPR and New York Public Library Best Books of 2020, and in Oprah Magazine best LGBTQ book of 2020. Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa: Thank you so much for having me, Marion. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy for me. I first read your work in 2020 with the publication of an essay on the Paris Review site in which you limb for us the landscape that in no small part made you. And the second to last paragraph reads quote, “We were girls, we were boys. We were neither and both.” And it seems that in much of your work, you situate yourself there, in the neither and both, and stare to have a look around. But that’s my definition of your territory. What’s yours?

Melissa: Oh, that’s a great question. And I love that you pointed to that line because I think you’re kind of. . . You’re spot on. I really am fascinated by and kind of obsessed with in between spaces and those sort of murky areas of everything. Identity, but also landscape of family, of community, of geography. The things that are neither one thing nor the other or some combination of many things, the multitudeness. And I think for so much of this book, I was interested in exploring those various spaces.

Marion: I’m so glad you did. The in between is such a fascinating territory, such a great beat as I think in terms of newspaper reporting. A lot of us think we have the language for this now, at least in terms of identity, but I know that in terms. . . really in terms of the language of sexuality, identity, gender, we have a very long way to go. So I want to talk with you about how that gap between some of us and some percentage of the world constricts writing about that gap.

So I was thinking about this and I have a sort of zany. . . Well, I think that’s the best word I can use. Way of looking at things. And I was thinking about what other discipline of writers faces this kind of strange perplexing thing. And I thought of my friends who write about cosmology, science writers. They can’t get too far ahead of us. You throw around enough particle physics terms, muons, and you lose us. And so they kind of have to dumb it down for the rest of us. Despite the fact that in both gender and sexuality writing and writing about particle physics, we are talking about the very stuff that makes us right. Stardust and particles of the Big Bang in the case of my friends who write about science. And you’d think that more people would like to have this language on them, but they don’t. So faced with that sort of obstacle of the very language of self being. . . Oh, I don’t know, controversial, how do you keep up your enthusiasm for where you write from?

Melissa: Oh, great question. And I love that analogy. I’m actually reading a book right now called Virology by Joseph Osmundson. He’s a microbiologist, I believe, and he studies viruses. He wrote this essay collection about viruses and also queerness, which is not this necessarily intuitive intersection. Of course, I’m obsessed with it because it’s not intuitive, but it’s fascinating and I think it deals in a lot of ways with this question. For me, I’ve just always been obsessed with language. I keep using the word obsessed, but I promise I do it meaningfully because I am really obsessed by things and that’s what I end up writing about.

I have been obsessed with language for as long as I can remember. And as I kind of got older and pursued my own kind of career as a writer and a reader, I became more and more fascinated with linguistics. I’m not a linguist, but I’m fascinated by it, and morphology, and the way that language shifts, and changes, and grows. It’s really this fluid thing, not a static thing. It’s so exciting to me that this connection between language and gender, for instance, has been kind of analogous the way that both are fluid, that both can change, that both evolve, and that gender identity has sort of shifted and changed with the language that we have for it. And as it becomes, the language becomes more inclusive, we find we have more words for ourselves.

So on the one hand, there are certain populations with whom I won’t necessarily be like, “Hi. I’m Melissa, I’m gender queer.” Sometimes you have to protect yourself in certain circumstances, but for the most part, I’m still really excited by that. The nature of language, and that we don’t have a definitive answer to anything, and that we will continue to grow in change and our language will continue to grow in change. I’m just kind of excited to see. Hopefully I will get to where language is 20, 30 years from now. I teach students who are 20 years younger than me. And it’s fascinating to work with them and to just see the ways that they have access to different language certainly that I didn’t have when I was growing up when I was their age and people, generations before me definitely did not have. So it’s exciting.

Marion: Yeah. It is exciting. And you use language as plot points. And I want to talk about that for the writers who are listening in. As I said in the opener, this is a collection of essays and it’s beautifully constructed. I encourage everyone to study it so that we see how you lay out what you’re telling us. In one of the essays, Switch-Hitter, you are recounting your story and you were a softball player. And softball gets transplanted by Roller Derby and you find community in Roller Derby. It was the first place in which you heard the word queer used in a positive light. And we see space gets made for you in this world. And you go on to get into some terrific etymology with the use of the word, reclaim, taking on the idea that reclamation is a continuous process, not a one shot deal that’s usually characterized as.

And in the essay, Of a Moth, you definitely deploy the phrase, hard to tell. Speaking of yourself, who is part of a moth infestation. And you choose to use that phrase as a vehicle to discuss the in between. So let’s talk strategy. Literally choosing words. Taking on an essay, before you write, do you compile a list of words you want to deploy and use them as navigation markers, or do they come to you organically, or do have them on you all the time and leave spaces in the text? I recently interviewed the great Anna Quindlen and she told me she still continues to use the old newspaper device where you put TK, meaning to come. When you can’t figure out what you want to say right here, you just kind of say to yourself, “Fill this in later.”

So reading the essay, I couldn’t help kind of feel the power of the phrase like hard to tell and wondered if you said, “I’m going to get that in here.” And the word reclaim. Are you making a list of words you want to use or are you just saying, “I want to see what comes up”?

Melissa: Great question. I also am a big fan of the TK, not least because I worked as an editor for so long, but I love TK. I feel like sometimes at some point I’ll have TK tattooed on my body because it feels so metaphorically powerful. I definitely employ the TK when I don’t have quite the right word. I don’t really make lists. I do think that language tends to come pretty organically when I’m drafting an essay. And my process in essay writing is kind of a hot mess. I have so many ambitious students who are like, “I’m outlining this 500-page novel that I’m writing and I’m going to have every plot point outlined.” And I’m like, “Good for you.” That is not at all how I write. I write often without knowing where I’m going, without knowing what I’m saying.

I’m usually drawn, especially to essays, by a question that I have that I don’t have an answer to. So I find myself sort of digging into a question and then digging, digging, digging. And then I think of this hole that I’m digging as getting sort of deeper, but also wider, and wider, and wider and I keep sort of circling out. I get sometimes really far afield, I go off on tangents, and I love wordplay. So if some sort of turn of phrase or word comes up as I’m drafting, I’ll make a little note and return to it. And often what I’ll do is if that happens, I’m struck by a certain word choice, or a phrase, or something, I’ll go turn to the dictionary and start to read the definitions, the etymology. And nine times out of 10, that leads me to some interesting discovery in terms of the roots of the word or some other usage that I wasn’t familiar with, which is just thrilling. And then if it becomes something that has metaphorical power, then I’ll dig into that.

When I was writing Of a Moth, I was really kind of fascinated by this idea that I talk about in the essay about the way that we gender things that we have no sort of context for. We can’t tell what sex, what biological sex this insect is necessarily or a dark figure behind a tinted window. So often we just say, he, or give it some gendered language when we don’t know, when in fact we can’t tell. And I was thinking a lot back then, it’s all over this book about how I am read or perceived in the world. And often, people can’t tell what gender I am, particularly if I’m dressed a certain way or if my hair is extra short. In the time of COVID when I’m wearing a mask and I have really short hair and I’m wearing sort of androgynous clothes, people just are baffled. I don’t know. I think there’s something really fascinating about human nature, where we want to be able to name something and we want to be able to define it. And if we can’t, that makes us uncomfortable. So I think that was part of that investigation in that essay, for sure.

Marion: Well, I think the investigation is wonderfully done in no small part because of your voice. And in a recent discussion with the Los Angeles Times book review or review of books, I read that of yours. The interviewer refers to gender remaining quote, “A wonderfully incoherent experience for so many of us.” And I kind of love that. It’s kind of wildly affectionate about the issue, but that’s where you go reading your work. Even when you write about rage, which you do, I have to say that the tone did not feel like I was marching into battle with a wildly angry person who needed me to see things differently. And yet, while reading and after reading, I saw things differently on such topics as guns, identities. So let’s talk voice. How does a writer’s voice help to deliver the argument? And as a result, to the reader’s understanding, at least according to you? How does your voice and how would you define your voice? Maybe start there.

Melissa: Yeah.

Marion: Because you’re not angry. That’s not what I get.

Melissa: I’m not. It’s interesting. Back when I was doing the really kind of masochistic thing where I was reading Goodreads reviews, I read a really mean review about how angry of a person I am. And I was like, “What? I do not get that sense from myself.” Obviously I have a lot of rage, but anybody who looks at the world closely has to right now, but I don’t know. I was just baffled by that because I think an approach that I try to take, I sometimes encourage my students to do this too in writing an essay particularly on a controversial topic. This big question that comes up in creative non-fiction classes is always, how do I write something when I know I’m going to get blow back or someone is going to be angry with me? I don’t want to get hate mail. I’m afraid of the repercussions of putting this in the world. That’s very valid on a lot of levels, especially for certain people.

So one of the things that I tell my students and one of the things that I think holds in my own kind of toolbox as I’m writing an essay is to try to defend yourself with a voice that sounds as empathetic and as inclusive as possible. So for instance, I wrote this essay about Guns in America, which as every time there’s a mass shooting, I’m like, “I should have …” I feel like I should have gone harder in my argument about gun control, because the way that I really approached that essay was to try to find the humanity in people who have very different beliefs than I do. And a lot of that looked like interviewing family, and friends, and people who I knew were gun owners, for instance, and having these long conversations with them in trying to figure out why this is so important to their identity.

Even though I think that I still kind of come down on the side of. . . at least I tried to come down on the side of, I understand where you’re coming from. I still believe one thing, but I understand where this person is coming from. I felt it was really important to do that both to show the complexities of political beliefs, but also, in no small way, to defend myself against repercussions. So I wasn’t putting myself in a dangerous position by writing this piece. In fact, I was doing my best to write it from a place of love. In a lot of my essays, I try to do that. I try to be empathetic, I try to come from a place of love even when I feel the opposite. And that’s another thing I often tell my non-fiction students. If you’re writing from a place of anger, it’s often not going to be a great piece of work because it’s hard to find the beauty in language or the nuance or complexities of a feeling when you’re writing from a place of extreme emotion. That’s not to say that you can’t write a really powerful piece from a place of anger that happens. I just find in my practice I can find more complexities of a question if I come from a place of empathy.

Marion: It’s a wonderful point. Anger can be preachy, anger can be prescriptive. And what’s fascinating to me about Gun Country, the assay in this beautiful book, is that you go and report it out, as you just mentioned. And so let’s just stay there for a second because I think memoir writers in particular forget that reporting is absolutely part of the job. You might just call your sister and ask her the name of your second grade teacher. That’s reporting.

Melissa: Exactly.

Marion: But you might when you want to write from a place of just asking the question and not coming with that sort of Shakespearean couplet at the end where you tell us what you’ve just told us and tell us how to feel. If you want to just open the question, one of the best ways is to go home to your home people and ask them, and that’s what you do. And you said it right there. You go home, you get a gun in your hand, you walk around with it, you talk to your uncle, you talk to your friends, you talk to the people that raised you in some way and you report it. So just, if you would, for another minute on reporting, I think for memoir writers, it’s something people avoid. I constantly am reminding them to go do some reporting.

Melissa: Yeah. For me, that’s where kind of some of my essays come alive, I think, in the process of reporting. So my kind of background is in sort of new journalism reportage. I wrote for an alt-weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. That’s where I first kind of cut my teeth as a writer. And so I was writing these first person, deeply personal first person essays, but that were also deeply reported. And as an essayist, I feel like my own questions and experiences can only go so far. And what interests me is trying to ask as many people about an issue, or a question, or an idea that I can in the hopes that what I’m bringing to the page is not just this very specific individual story, but a kind of chorus of voices on any particular question.

So I go ask as many people as possible that I know, that I don’t know, family, friends, strangers, people that I get put in touch with. And I usually ask them a very open ended question. “Why are guns important to you? With no follow up really at hand. I’ve got other questions I might ask, but that’s really what I want them to sort of respond to and just let them talk. And usually, people want to share their ideas and they want to tell their stories. I write a lot about class. And the people I came from, who aren’t always engaging in these kinds of discussions or talking about their ideas. So posed with a question, so many of them really opened up and told me a lot about their lives and how they feel. And that is super enlightening and you learn a lot. And then for me, usually where these kinds of personal and reported pieces come together is the intersections and the divergences that I find in someone else’s story versus my own.

To me, the most valuable part of this process is the transcription process. I know a lot of people who have other folks transcribe interviews for them, but I do it all myself because in that process, that’s where I … when I’m reliving a conversation, that’s both where I discover those intersections or divergences and I remember these details about where we were sitting, or what we were eating, or what was happening around us. So I get these sort of narrative details that come up in the transcription process.

So reportage is just hugely important to my process. And I do think that even if an essay that you’re writing doesn’t necessarily end up having that kind of reported material in it, even just doing the work of interviewing people can help you figure out what you’re trying to say. And it might change your own understandings of a certain question or idea.

Marion: Yeah. I love the idea. I’ve transcribed all my own notes since I was in college and would write down everything that the professor would say and then I would go back to my room and type up all of my notes. It’s a process I’ve continued to do all my life. And you’re right. You hear things. That notebook in my hand captures the sort of the environment, but the recording captures something else entirely, it captures the literal moments. But I still have a notebook in my hand when I interview people to kind of get the landscape.

Melissa: Yeah.

Marion: Let’s talk a little bit about vulnerability and transparency, because I would argue that both of these raise consciousness. There’s a whole lot of consciousness raising reading your work and I’m thrilled by it. You reveal a lot from BDSM experiences, bondage, domination, S and M experiences to self harm to alcohol, two alcohol. First, I want to talk about the moments when an idea drops into your head to write about something and you think. . . Maybe you do. I sometimes think, “Really? Can I do that?” So let me talk about one that made me laugh out loud and then we’ll talk about some of the ones that made me weep openly.

In your title essay, you discussed two things that might seem, oh, I don’t know, unrelated. They are kink and the cultural inheritance of food. I can’t recall a single previous time in my own reading when I’ve read about Midwestern food combined with S and M, but I might just not be reading the right things. And it all ends up being the perfect grade and I adored it. But when writers have these moments, oh, I think I’ll write about my kink days and braid it together with a theme of food ending up that I used the word asparagus as the safe word in my BDSM experiences. Some writers would talk themselves out of that, Melissa. So talk to us about holding your course and taking it all the way home when you have an idea like that.

Melissa: Yeah. I’m so glad you liked that essay. It’s still one of my favorites. I think just shock value alone. I have a long history of some might call it risky behavior. Others might call it an adventurous spirit, depending on how generous you’re feeling that day. I don’t know. I kind of feel like if I’m not somewhat uncomfortable when I’m writing an essay, it’s not really worth writing. The things that really drive me are these questions and these ideas that I am somewhat uncomfortable with. I’m uncomfortable writing about my sexuality, I’m uncomfortable writing about guns and violence, I’m uncomfortable writing about gender identity.

So that makes me want to write about it. Not least because that’s the process of writing, it’s how I make sense of things. And so I think sometimes when it gets scary … It’s not that I haven’t abandoned ideas before. I certainly have if I just don’t feel ready yet. If there hasn’t been enough distance between an experience or something I’m currently dealing with, I just don’t have that artistic distance. I’ll put it away. And it’s not that I am not ever going to return to it, but I just have this sort of instinctual feeling like, “Not now. Maybe later.” But usually there’s a level of discomfort that I want to dig into. It’s sort of pressing your finger into an open wound, which is a gross and visceral analogy, but it does kind of feel like that. And then I find that these sort of incongruous connections a great way to do that. I don’t necessarily have to write an entire essay about my experience in BDSM.

There are other sort of metaphorical ways that I can write into and around it. And for me, it became food. And so often when I’m writing an essay, the idea, the kernel, or the central question that I’m writing into or around comes from an anecdote. So I’ll start with an anecdote.

For that essay, for instance, the anecdote was this roommate that I had in grad school who would do this handshake trick. And she shook my hand and called me meat and potatoes. And there was all of this sort of subtext around that phrase, meat and potatoes, that was about my sexuality and I was horribly offended. But then I started thinking about how interesting it is that there are all these weird turns of phrase and words that are kind of food words that mean other things. Like vanilla similarly. If you’re vanilla sexually you’re not adventurous or whatever. So I just started digging into that intersection in those spaces and was like, “Oh, there’s this whole, I don’t know, this weird connection that is coming up for me between the visceralness of eating meat and the visceralness of sex, and in particular BDSM, and the relationship between violence and pleasure.” So it’s usually something that seems kind of potentially incongruous that I am trying to make sort of braid until I find the connection. There’s a connection in my head and I don’t know yet what it is, so I write toward it and hopefully I find it.

Marion: That’s a great answer and I love that.

Melissa: Great.

Marion: So you talked about phrases. And Switch-Hitter, which is a title of an essay, is a wonderful use of surprising ways of looking through as you walk through that essay. And you also move about in point of view. Beginning in the first person reporting on the history of softball and the third person. And then after a lovely interstitial paragraph on memory, you take us into the second person and have a look at yourself. Switching back and forth. And you take us through a sexual assault and then back into first person. The second person serves to establish distance, and detachment, and the dissociation in the assault, but this is tricky and hard to do in a piece of writing. So just talk to us for a minute about the craft of building this piece and the decisions to dolly around in that 360 degrees to construct that essay.

Melissa: Yeah. Great. This is my favorite question. I’m so glad that stuck out to you and in particular that you saw the. . . The whole point for me in pulling it out of the first person was to create that sensation of dissociation. So I’m really glad that that came through.

Marion: Good.

Melissa: I spent a lot of time trying to write that assault and nothing felt right. I hated it. I didn’t want to write it. Not just because of the emotions it was sort of bringing up, if anything. I’m so far removed from it that I wasn’t feeling a ton of emotion as I wrote it. I was still feeling this detachment. And so at a certain point, it kind of struck me that that’s interesting. That after all this time, I still feel this remove and I still feel this detachment from this traumatic thing that happened.

So I think, if I’m remembering my process correctly, I first wrote the third person section of that narrative. And I was like, “Okay. This is maybe feeling right craft-wise that there is this kind of sudden point of view shift.” But then I sort of started playing around with the, you, and was interested in this idea of doing that kind of progression from the, I, to the, you, to the third person to sort of show this removal of self, but also to kind of try to invite the reader into that space in an intimate way because I think you run the risk sometimes of creating too much distance or having that transition be too much of a shock. So I was hoping that I was both kind of creating this narrative distance and inviting the reader into this space where the ultimate takeaway was, this could be anyone. This could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. It probably has. And so to kind of create this sense of both distance removal and universality of experience.

Marion: Yeah. Good.

Melissa: It was tough because actually that was a point of contention with my editor. At first, she was like, “We have to keep this in the first person. You can’t move it.” At first, I was like, “Well, I got to listen.” And the more, I kind of tried to keep it in the first person, the less true it felt I think in part because I can’t actually put myself in that place, I can’t think of it as me. I think of it as this other person who experienced this thing. I don’t see myself when I think of it. I see this sort of shadow self or this version of me and I really wanted to capture that. So I’m glad that came through.

Marion: Yeah. We feel it all the way through the piece. It’s fascinating. And I ask every memoir writer. I interview the same question and you’ve mostly answered it, but I just want to make sure I ask the question specifically, what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back and write about a trauma? Are we asking her to reanimate it, are we asking her to merely illustrate it, are we asking her to go back and hurt like hell and really put herself in that place or stand there coolly and report on it from the here and now?

Melissa: Oh, great question. It’s probably different for every writer who writes about an assault. I think that some people might try to approach it from this place of reinhabiting that moment. And I think for other people it might be kind of the experience I had, which was sort of this desire to show this experience from the standpoint of removal. So I don’t know what we’re asking. The thing about writing personal essays or memoir is so often that we take these stories of our lives. And as soon as we put them down on paper and we publish them, they become someone else’s. And it’s like this story is no longer mine. And you, as a reader, make sense of it how you will. You bring your own experiences and biases and understandings to the page and it becomes yours.

So I think just like it’s probably different for every writer, the way those scenes and stories are read are probably very different for each reader. And what was interesting about writing that section for me was that I did feel all that distance when I was writing it and wanted, like I said, to kind of inhabit that distance. But then curiously, when I was recording the audio book, when I got to that section and started reading it aloud, I just lost it. And I had had no real emotional response to it at all up until that point. And then I found myself literally in a closet because this was height of pandemic in New York City. I was recording my audio book from inside a closet in my Brooklyn apartment. I was reading that aloud and I had the director in my ear and I just totally lost it. We had to take a break and I had to return to it. And so it was almost like I was engaging with it as a reader might or looking at it from a new angle. I don’t know. It was a really powerful and interesting experience.

Marion: That’s fascinating and very kind of you to share that with us. I so appreciate that. As we wrap this up, I can’t not ask you about the time you spent at the Millay Colony for the Arts. It’s one of my favorite places and I don’t think people know nearly enough about it. I’ve been a non-fiction judge for them. I’ve been on the site many times. So let’s talk about the time, the value of the time spent there. You credit the very space there for being where these essays became a book and your path to finishing. It became clear. So what about being in that private space, in an art colony? What about that allowed you to have this work come together?

Melissa: Oh, man. Everything. That place was everything to me. I had never had the opportunity to just be alone in the natural world with my writing before. I’d never done it. And I basically cobbled together two winter residencies. So it wasn’t like the juried residency. I just went I think for two weeks, each winter when I could take. . . Maybe 10 days when I could take time off work. At the time I was working as an editor, so I didn’t have much time off. So that’s kind of all I could take, but even so in the stretch of those 10 days to two weeks or whatever it was, I just disconnected from my phone and from the internet. I could just be alone with my words and my stories. And honestly, the really transcendent experience was just walking around in that space and thinking.

I would write in the morning and then I would go for a walk. And it was winter, it was February. I would put my boots on and then just trudge through the mountain, hills and my boots in the snow and follow Vincent’s path, her poetry walk and it was spiritual. It was like I just had this space. This mental, and emotional, and physical space to think about what I was saying and what I wanted to say and what I was trying to do in a way that I was never able to find before. I still maybe have not found.

I finished this book in the woods of Wisconsin and I kind of found it there again. It’s such a gift to be in that kind of space. And if anyone has the opportunity to go for however long, I highly recommend it. It’s just a beautiful spot. It’s full of magic. The people who run it are just lovely humans. You meet other artists who are doing amazing stuff and that’s super inspirational. Yeah. I love it there. I owe them so much.

Marion: I’m so glad. It’s just wonderful to hear of it. And I agree with you on all of those points. And the book that came together is a wonder. Thank you so much for coming along today. I’m just deeply grateful to know you and deeply grateful for the work that you’re doing. That’s helping us all find our language for our identities. Thank you, Melissa. Thank you so much.

Melissa: Thank you so much for having me. It has been an absolute pleasure. And thank you for reading.

Marion: You’re welcome. The writer is Melissa Faliveno. Find more on her at melissafaliveno.com. The book is Tomboyland, available wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by overit studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts 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.