Meghan O'Rourke on Writing the Story She Hid From Herself
On intuition, acquiescence, and the "long tail" of #MeToo
When I talked to the poet, memoirist, and editor Meghan O’Rourke several weeks ago, she explained that she didn’t have many pre-formed talking points yet about her current book project, “thirty thousand words of something” that she just began writing with no clear objective or plan in place. She had initiated a daily practice of writing anything, but what came out was a tangle of associated stories and ideas about her father, the birth of her sons, and a traumatizing encounter she had with an old boyfriend many years ago. Rather than figure out too quickly whether these fragments cohered, she just kept going.
“Is this making sense?” she asked, as she was talking. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience of writing something that you’re very compelled to write without fully understanding it.”
I certainly have. I have a friend I’ve been comparing notes with about writing and process for almost fifteen years, and one of our shared jokes (that’s not really a joke) is that she sensibly figures out what she wants to write before she writes, and I sort of just follow my nose in a document until I figure out what I’m thinking and whether there’s anything really worthwhile about it. The downside of my friend’s method is that she can feel pressure to get everything sorted in her mind before she writes, which is hard. The downside of my method is that it’s chaotic, it takes forever, and half the time it amounts to nothing.
I would have figured Meghan O’Rourke for the first kind of writer, the organized pre-thinker. I first encountered Meghan’s writing through her first memoir, The Long Goodbye, which is a stunning account of her relationship with her mother, and her mother’s death from cancer. There’s this crystalline quality to her prose that I find so satisfying— it’s lovely and sharp at the same time, very precise, which allows her to write both lyric poetry and long-form, researched nonfiction with equal facility. In all forms, she has the ability to articulate complex information/ideas/emotions with enviable clarity.
“I think I experience writing as a kind of compulsion. There’s a compulsion involved in trying to do it and there is a certain intuitive feeling my way forward.”
Her last book, The Invisible Kingdom, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, is a nonfiction book about chronic illness with such enormous scope and dense research that (she confirms) she had to outline and structure it fairly aggressively in order to write it. But for this new project, she’s enjoying allowing what she calls “more subconscious to come forward, a different relationship to the psyche, to delusion, to hopefulness, all these other intangible, associative, silly, suppressed, elements.”
What’s emerging is a book, she says, about hiding— the ways we hide ourselves from others and the ways we hide difficult truths of our own pasts from ourselves. In other words, letting the subconscious (or intangible, associative, silly, suppressed) elements lead the writing process has led her to make work that a more rational, even guarded part of herself would have foreclosed against. It’s writing as a correction to old self-deceptions. We talked about the joys and pitfalls of that, the “long tail” of the #MeToo movement, and another major theme of the work she’s making now: acquiescence. (As in, when should we acquiesce to something —another person’s desires/needs, a political reality, an injustice— and when should we refuse?)
Also mentioned in the ep:
Wait, is Nirvana preppy now?
Anna Schechtman’s The Riddles of the Sphinx
Walking and Talking by Nicole Holofcener
Not mentioned but a fun read: Meghan’s interview with Vivian Gornick (The Yale Review).
That’s it for now! See you next Tuesday for part two of our conversation with Ocean Vuong.
-Jordan
