Inspiration from "In the Margins"

I’ve been reading a book that Kyle got me for Christmas—In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Italian writer Elena Ferrante—and while some of it is admittedly over my head, some is so incredibly striking to me as a writer.

For me, writing is often close to an out-of-body experience. I am out of myself, and yet, as Ferrante discusses in depth, I am another self. Or perhaps, many selves at once. She explains that “what writing captures doesn’t pass through the seive of a singular I, solidly planted in everyday life, but is twenty people, that is, a number thrown out there to say: when I write, not even I know who I am.”

As I have been writing a memoir of essays about my grandmother and family history, I have often found myself writing as someone else. When writing about sacred, tender memories surrounding family stories and experiences, feeling slightly removed from it all helps me get through it. Naturally, I find that I am somehow outside of myself or even someone else. If I look at these memories and histories as an outsider, I am better able to see the truth in them. Reading this book made me think about this in terms of self-protection. As Ferrante writes, I am waiting for my brain to take over and pull me in:

“But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I’s—many—outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I’m afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won’t necessarily know how to get back.”

I often have to go where it hurts me to go in my writing. And as someone who writes real stories about real lives, it is often scary for those included in these stories. But truthfully, I believe that in doing so, I am spreading truth. I am giving a voice to the incredibly, inspiring stories that would have otherwise remained secrets, and if I can do that in a way that allows me to see more clearly, then that is what I will do.

Writing is not actually glamourous. In my upcoming writing journal (set for release in September), I write about this very thing. I write about the fact that writing is often seen as this romantic vocation, and “while it would be nice to sit at a worn wooden desk near a bright window in a cottage to write, that is simply not possible for most people.” Even more than that, writing is not at all easy. Sure, sometimes ideas and thoughts flow out like a fever dream, but most of the time, it is grueling. Not only does writing not have to be romantic or easy, it is rarely even fun. It is rigorous and heartbreaking and miserable and taxing and painful and exhausting and suffocating and every other horrible word you can think of to describe something difficult. It requires us to break ourselves into pieces and break the rules we were taught to follow. Ferrante writes, “For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.”

Same, Elena. Same.

Writing is a convulsive act. It is something that when I am in a flow state, I don’t even know it’s me doing it. It’s like a part of my brain goes to sleep and the other part takes over, and when I wake up, there are several thousand words on a page.

Truth be told, writing in that state—when I am writing an essay or poem or chapter in a book—is much different than writing a blog post. I am sitting on my couch watching The Olympics and drinking a beer. I would not say my brain is split in two or that I am in a flow state. I am simply participating in a skill that has become second-nature to me. That is not to say writing is easy (it is not, as we have discussed), but that is to say writing is a part of who I am, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

And the older I get, the more I realize the importance of holding on to these pieces of who I am.