exposure
creative ambition and shame
So much of me lives inside of my writing that I’m not really sure how I show up in real life. I have a concept of who I am, but if I were to encounter this person in a different body out in the world, would I recognize her? Maybe there wouldn’t be enough of her on the outside to know what she’s like up in there. That’s a fear I used to have: not being legible enough to be interesting.
A few months ago, someone I met on a hike asked me what my top three favorite books were. A simple question, but I was stumped. Having to pick favorites forces my brain to work in a way that it’s no longer used to: comparing and ranking, forcibly discarding. The exercise felt superficial. It rankled. What can it really tell you about a person, anyway? Maybe nothing. Maybe—too much.
When I first read Sally Rooney, I instantly recognized my 21-year-old ego, fragile and wanting, her guard all the way up, in the voice of Frances:
I knew Melissa liked Bobbi more than she liked me, and I didn’t know how to join in their new friendship without debasing myself for their attention. I had wanted Melissa to take an interest in me, because we were both writers, but instead she didn’t seem to like me and I wasn’t even sure I liked her. I didn’t have the option not to take her seriously, because she had published a book, which proved that lots of other people took her seriously even if I didn’t.
Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
Like, how relatable is that? To want to be liked by an accomplished author, yet not wanting to be perceived as attention-seeking and lower status. In his excellent Bookforum review of Intermezzo, Brandon Taylor points out, “Rooney has always been interested in the delusions of self-effacement. In Conversations with Friends, Frances tells us again and again that she can’t see her own face and doesn’t really understand how others view her, a condition on which she is ambivalent.” This tension between the desire to be seen and the fear of overexposure runs throughout Rooney’s work.
Although her characters have fascinating and messy inner lives, I find the world they inhabit extremely uncomplicated. It’s a world in which love and creative success are very attainable: you can write about your life as a 21-year-old and get published basically without trying; you can have an affair with a married man and not ruin your life; you can fall in love with the popular guy in your high school, and he’ll love you back even if he has to snub you first; you don’t have to choose between the two women you’re dating, in fact, they’re begging you not to. No one who gets rejected in a Rooney novel stays rejected. Rooney herself was discovered by an agent and just happened to have a manuscript on her. She admits, “I am an extraordinarily privileged creature.”
In our culture, we resent the kind of success that looks easy, but at the same time, we don’t want to be seen to be striving. Ambition has a dirty ring. To admit that you aspire to literary greatness—how laughable is that? We’d rather look like we rolled out of bed the way we are. The “indie sleaze” aesthetic is not just a fashion statement, it’s in the way we perform our lives. Our presentation is meant to look effortless, and therefore, authentic, but is it really?
Years ago, I had a rare moment of indiscretion where I spilled the beans about my fantasy novel to a coworker, and she kind of laughed and said, “Maybe you’ll become the next George R. R. Martin.” I felt called out because of course I wanted to be successful. It was meant as a joke, and that’s precisely the problem: sure, it’s highly unlikely to achieve stratospheric success, but why are we so quick to ridicule and dismiss improbable ambitions?
When I was in SF last week, R said sex and money are taboo topics because they’re tied to our sense of self-worth, and therefore, bring up a lot of shame. To openly desire sex or money is to signal that we are deserving, but our shame whispers otherwise, and it feels safer to hide behind our shame than to be fully seen and risk rejection.
More so than love, what Rooney writes really well is shame. The desire for intimacy and belonging and the fear that we’re not worthy. The desire for money (even Marxists have to pay rent) and the aversion to it. One of the pleasures of reading her novels is finding our unspeakable yearnings reflected back at us in the inner lives of characters who aren’t afraid to admit, if only to themselves, that they want to be liked and desired, and yet, can’t “debase” themselves for attention.
Rooney is notoriously private, and her rare interviews have a combative undertone, like she knows what we want to hear from her, and she’s not going to give it to us. She avoids the public eye, understandably: “I sometimes feel people want to read me as something closer to a kind of celebrity figure, because that’s the way in which we’re used to reading the image of a young woman,” she says in The New York Times interview with David Marchese. I absolutely love that she refuses to give a straightforward answer to even the most basic question of “What do you like to do when you’re not writing?”
Rooney: What do I like to do? I feel like I’m so uninteresting.
Marchese: But do you think I’m expecting you to say that you heli-ski?
Rooney: Even that coming from me would be like, Why is it interesting that she does it? I’m just a random person, and I do all the things you would expect a writer would do: read, watch films, watch TV. There’s something in me that resists being humanized. At least when I talk about my work, I feel like I’m holding onto something.
Marchese: I see what you’re saying.
Rooney: It’s like, I’m the one who can talk about it, because I wrote it.
Marchese: It’s justified.
Rooney: Yeah, I need this constant self-justification to feel like I can sit here and talk to you. Otherwise I’d be running away.
Her prickliness is delightful and actually kind of relatable. It’s so revealing that she admits to avoiding “being humanized,” and I couldn’t help doing the thing she hates, which is comparing her to her characters: the self-effacement, the resistance to being known. Given how good her characters are at masking their ambitions, it’s hard not to regard her insistence that she doesn’t care about her career with a smidge of suspicion. Then again, it’s only from the privileged position of having already been taken seriously as a writer that one can credibly make such a claim.
Having a private life is so grounding, so necessary to producing art—I completely understand the need for self-preservation—but I do wish successful authors would talk more openly about their desire for recognition, about the sweat and labor they poured into their work, their hopes for what it might become. Give us earnest, unbridled, grotesque ambition. Give us Frankenstein’s monster.
Such an interesting one!
Love this!