Writing Boundaries—When Do I Cross Them?

As a writer, wondering whether I should cross certain boundaries that involve my personal life is not a rhetorical question for me. The reason I'm asking it now is that yesterday I almost published a post that might have hurt somebody else.

Not terribly. Not inexcusably. Maybe not at all. But I realized it could have repercussions, and much as I felt attached to the piece and wanted to share it, I knew I shouldn't publish it.

At least not yet.

Once I realized this, it began to affect the way I told the story.

I had already changed certain names—well, that's acceptable in memoir writing—but in this case, I knew the ruse wouldn't provide much anonymity among networks of mutual friends. I added explanations; then cut them again. As a result, some parts of the back story were untold—that's all right and, perhaps, the ethical thing to do—yet in leaving the motivations of everyone elliptical, it could have seemed like I was protecting myself.

So I've slammed up against some big questions, the first of which has to do with the twitchy fingers of bloggers, the breathless sense that it has to get out there, now. Do we have to publish everything in real time? When is this valuable and when not? You move the mouse, click on "Publish Post," and instantly your work is out there for readers to see.

Even the most sensitive writer is usually making a case for himself or herself. We may admit to our foibles; we may write about crisis situations that change our points of view or reveal personal weaknesses. Yet we get to be the star of the story, rather than our family or friends or co-workers. In fact, if we're doing our job as professional writers, we're always making a case for how fascinating our observations are, how worthy of report or discussion, how much they matter.

Often we're writing about shared human experiences, of course. This can be cathartic for writer and reader. The continuing life stories told by many professional bloggers also turn the writing dynamic in new ways. We see writers change their perspectives and understandings of events in real time. This is exciting; it feels like real life.

Yet it isn't real life, even if somebody is reporting on themselves every hour. No memoir writing can be, because, as writers, we always make choices about what to observe and what to include. The best memoirs are distillations of lived experience. They have the intensity of novels or first-person short stories. They get at bigger truths than the passing flow of quotidian thoughts and events.

It's here that I wrestle as a blogger: anything can be turned into an interesting story, if one has a strong, funny, appealing voice. I like the quotidian; I believe some of the best stories happen in the everyday margins; they don't have to be Oprah tell-alls or about "big" news topics.

But if the passing flow is constantly reported on and then disappears into the cyber-ether, how do we as readers—or writers—know what truly matters? And how do we gain the distance on events to figure out what should be included in a story for public consumption and what not?

With the post I almost published, I'm still not sure. It took a form that was distilled and literary and probably too telegraphic. I think my desire to keep some of the details private dictated the form, without my conscious choosing. But as soon as I started feeling anxious about what I'd created, I didn't think I had permission to commit it to the public space of a blog. Perhaps I could show it to my trusted writing group first; perhaps it shouldn't see the virtual light of day at all.

This is frustrating, because the whole point of blogging is to get the work out there. Within the space of a few hours, I'd shifted into my normal print mode: reflection, tightening, editing, possibly de-vivifying. How much lag time does a writer need? Doesn't that impose a form of self-censorship?

Ugh. I'm wrestling. I'm learning.

I've been blogging actively for about half a year now, and the feedback I've received from readers has been tremendously helpful in shaping ideas for essays. I've posted a few informal riffs, but my posts tend to be essays and think pieces because of my magazine background. This has allowed me to include personal anecdotes in a format that feels very comfortable to me. I understand the ethical boundaries in print, even when telling stories about my seven-year-old son.

But I know I sometimes need to feel uncomfortable, too. It's possible that the post I haven't published is heading in an exciting new direction, revealing me in ways that aren't entirely flattering, adding vulnerability to my writing. Blogging has helped me as a writer, but I have yet to figure out all the parameters or my own personal boundaries.

One of my goals for this year is to post more often on this blog, perhaps daily. I soon hope to have a new website in place and a better format for my blog, which I call Athena's Head. I want to build a readership, certainly. As a professional writer, I'm creating my "platform."

Yet I believe that one of the ironies of blogging is that, regardless of how much it's become a professional add-on to being a writer—and how ephemeral posts are—or how easy it is to fake personal stories or fool people about who you are online—the most successful bloggers communicate an honest, trustworthy person behind the words. You want to hang out with them.

It may be a work in progress, figuring out what to include, but I know that it demands a different voice than that of my literary writing, print features, or a number of the essays I've published here.

As always, I'm curious about what readers think. So what do you want to hear me writing about—and how far should I go?

Am I Crazy to Study Vietnamese?

Đi học về—home from school—and the pros and cons of multi-tasking



This past weekend, my family attended a concert at a local Catholic church with a Vietnamese congregation. It was a fund-raiser featuring the legendary Khánh Ly, who, up until the Fall of Saigon, was akin to the Joan Baez of Vietnam. Her collaboration with the protest-songwriter Trịnh Công Sơn is still beloved by that generation of Vietnamese.

So there I was in a church basement with my family and 200-plus Vietnamese Americans. There was Khánh Ly, looking amazingly good for a woman in her mid-sixties, belting out those beautiful songs. She joked with the audience, accepting roses from her fans. She stood before multicolored tinsel streamers, a mirror ball flashing rainbow light.

I'd been nervous about attending this concert. After months of studying the language, I had performance anxiety about speaking Vietnamese. This turned out to be silly; we were in a suburb outside Boston. Yet I'd hoped to follow what was spoken on stage, if not sung.

Instead the words swirled over my head, out of reach. I felt like a frustrated cat, batting at flecks of light—or a little girl, trying hard to be an adult.

The revolving mirror ball, the language I don't quite understand, are emblematic of so much of my multi-tasking life. My attention divides and divides again. I'm not ADD in any clinical sense, but one book that's become a touchstone for me in the last few years has been Edward Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!

Hallowell, a psychiatrist who lives in the Boston area, popularized ADD and ADHD as diagnoses, and has written a number of well-known books about coping with these disorders. But in CrazyBusy, he goes a step farther, arguing that our multi-tasking, post-millennial, "CrackBerry" era fosters a form of cultural ADD. In that sense, we're all suffering.

I agree. And yet a funny thing has happened this fall, as I juggle more balls than ever, and I live with the consequences of an absurd decision to study Vietnamese for a second year in a row. I've started wondering if divided attention is a bad thing.

Most of us middle-aged geezers complain about memory problems. It's as if you hit forty and BAM! You can't remember your friends' names or how to spell words like gizzard geezer.

Most parents of young children, regardless of age, also complain about memory lapses. You're sleep-deprived, you're required to track dervishes in diapers, your vocabulary gets reduced to Elmo levels of comprehension. If you're working, you're subject to all manner of interruptions at home and the office.

As I sat down to write this, for example, my son Nick barged in and said, "Can I show you my armor?" He proceeded to put on a purple-felt apron from his dress-up box, securing it in back with a set of numchucks (string-connected sticks usually whirled around in a deadly fashion).

He placed a napkin over his head, crowning that with a robin-hood-style hat—the complete medieval samurai warrior. It was impressive.

Where was I?

I've been hit with a double-whammy, it seems: I'm way over forty with a seven-year-old child. (My own parents are also quite ill, but that's another story.) I'm back to writing full-time.

Then there's my Continuing Vietnamese class. I started studying Vietnamese because my son was born in Vietnam. (I've told some of this saga before in print: Click here for the long version. Also see my post "For Shame.") But my original reasoning, with its whiff of selflessness—I'll help Nick get in touch with his birth culture—no longer makes sense. I'm proceeding because of my own arcane interests and a stubborn need to prove myself.

Still, I almost dropped out at the beginning of this semester. It's a very small class of four students, two of whom are fluent speakers, and a dedicated teacher. There's absolutely no place for me to hide.

I have good days, especially when I've done the homework. But more often, they're bad. Very bad. Last week, I missed half of one class because my son was home sick; I arrived at another class with the tail-end of a migraine. I couldn't remember simple grammatical constructions. My stumblings were mixed with long, awkward silences in which I'm sure you could hear the gears grinding. I kept mumbling, "Em chưa hiểu." ("I don't understand yet.")

The week before, I found myself confusing the use of "open" and "closed" in English when distracted by my son. Now all my confusion of verbs of motion and prepositions in Vietnamese seems to be transferring to my native language.

Most of each class is conducted in Vietnamese; I understand about 50 percent. My worst moments are when I'm asked direct questions in which my comprehension is zero. The words seem to bounce off me like a handful of pennies thrown at a mailbox.

At the last class, the name for the Red River—sông Hồng—near Hanoi, a name I know well, kept tripping me up.

There's no doubt that some of my struggles are physiologically caused. Many researchers now believe that what we geezers really experience is failing attention. In "The Midlife Memory Meltdown," an article for O magazine adapted from her book on the topic, journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin says of our aging brains:

"When the frontal lobes are in top form, they're adept at figuring out what's important for the job at hand and what's irrelevant blather; a sort of neural “bouncer” automatically keeps out unnecessary information. In middle age, that bouncer takes a lot of coffee breaks. Instead of focusing on the report that's due, you find yourself wondering what's for dinner. Even background noise—the phone chatter of the coworker in the next cubicle—can impair your ability to concentrate on the task before you."

The thing is, I've always been like this. I'm great at synthesizing ideas, but I've never been good at memorizing facts. Historical dates elude me; foreign vocabulary evaporates as soon as I'm not immersed in it.

I'm also a life-long insomniac—an Olympic champion of sleeplessness—so much so that my husband thinks Barenaked Ladies wrote "Who Needs Sleep?" for me. Lack of sleep is a major cause of memory problems.

But the ideas! My many proliferating story ideas! Here's where I shine, and sleeplessness doesn't seem to slow me down. It's no accident that I'm running four blogs now—one in an editorial capacity for the Women's Review of Books with multiple authors on various deadlines—and writing print articles and prepping for teaching my magazine class in the spring.

A few years back—say, 2006, when CrazyBusy first came out—this would have seemed even crazier to me than it does now. Yet despite the fact that my brain isn't getting any younger, I feel more alive. I've gotten better at mental juggling. I won't claim I'm more organized, but my constantly dividing and skipping attention seems to be sparking me as a writer. I find myself excited by ideas all the time.

In part, that's because I have more control over my own writing and its distribution—a definite silver lining in these cathartic days in the publishing industry. Blogging encourages creativity on the fly.

But the study of Vietnamese also seems to be feeding my passion for words. Just the poetry of Trịnh Công Sơn's songs, the longing for peace and a lost Saigon, testify to so much rich complexity. "Xin cho tôi" ("Please give me" or "May I") ends with "May I ask for just one day."



There's another benefit, too: Experiencing bouts of incomprehension in class takes me back viscerally to what it's like to be a child. It's rare at my age to be humbled in quite this way. In Vietnamese class, I'm always being corrected and looking for approval; I feel by turns resentful, defiant, ashamed, and excited. I'm distracted by big booming life outside the window.

More than Vietnamese culture, then, I'm re-learning the culture of childhood. I'm that little girl listening to Khánh Ly, grasping for flecks of light. For a writer-parent, that may be the best training of all.

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell himself distinguishes between the "stress" that gets your juices flowing and the anxiety-producing mess of having too many commitments:

"If you’re busy doing what matters to you, then being busy is bliss. You’ve found a rhythm for your life that works for you. This world is bursting with possibilities; its energy can be contagious. If you catch the bug, you want to jump out of bed each day and get busy, not because you are run ragged by details or because you are keeping the wolf from your door, but because you are in love with this fast life."

I'm often grumpy about familial distractions; I long for the kinds of writer's retreats I used to take at colonies or in cabins by myself. The real world can get me down, no question, but I know my own work has taken off since I became a mother, despite the additional juggling.

Even the wisest of us doesn't know everything. And perhaps there's a real benefit to failing and stumbling and smacking up against our limitations. For writers, being in control is not necessarily a good thing.

This makes the whole concept of attention "deficit" wrong in metaphysical terms. Maybe we're all dumb mailboxes, pennies bouncing off us in this dervish of a universe. Instead of simply coping, maybe we need to accept the pennies, the flecks of rainbow light, our disorganized version of manna from heaven.

What about you? Do you struggle with divided attention? Do you ever find it a blessing?

Where was I?

"I've Got the Most Scathingly Brilliant Idea": When Do Writers Need to Let Go—or Not?

This past week, I've been thinking a lot about the old movie The Trouble with Angels. In a short story of mine, the main character—Miriam—dreams of Hayley Mills. In Miriam's dream, Hayley is sorting laundry, folding railroad handkerchiefs:

"They were the kind Miriam’s father blew his nose into, then looked up from, embarrassed. It had been Hayley from The Trouble with Angels—blonde, boyish, mischievous, a girl caught smoking in a convent school, saved by Mother Superior—oh, how Miriam had longed for this as a child."

I've been editing this story, wondering whether I should cut the dream. I keep polishing that paragraph, trying to convey enough information without bogging it down. Feedback from several writer friends has been mixed—what does this mean? will today's readers even know who Hayley Mills is?—but I'm irrationally attached to Miriam's dream.

When a writer loves something too much, endlessly fiddling with it, that often means it needs to go. At least that's my editor self talking; I've certainly given such advice to students. Yet, for the moment, Miriam's dream remains.

Why? As Kate Gabrielle of Silents & Talkies writes in an April 2009 birthday ode to 63-year-old Mills:

"If you are a girl, and you were born anytime from about 1950 to the present, you probably loved Hayley Mills films when you were little...and if you're like me, you never grew out of it."

The Trouble with Angels is one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures. It's like candy canes and macaroni and cheese. It's dumb and dated and still mildly subversive.

Most of all it's got Mills playing against her "frilly-knickers" Disney roles—her curls are still golden, but she's a rebel. It's got Rosalind Russell, a toughie actress I'll always love for not playing pretty wimps, as the sternly righteous Mother Superior. And it's got Ida Lupino directing it, a rare feat for a woman in the early 1960s. Set in that tumble-down convent school, it's really about the intense friendship of girls and girl culture when boys aren't around.




Ah-ha! Like the Nancy Drew series, The Trouble with Angels might be considered a spark for young feminists. Mary Clancy, the character Mills plays, is always saying, "I've got the most scathingly brilliant idea!" The movie is about loss and change and growing up.

I have other reasons, too, for loving Mills and the movie, some no doubt tangled beyond my conscious understanding. (Spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph, if it still matters after all these years.) I know that Mary's decision to become a nun at the end of the movie felt deeply satisfying to me in the 1970s, when the convent-school setting already seemed absurdly anachronistic.

I've never been Catholic, but the romance of the church got to me, not to mention a girl's commitment to faith and anything but a conventional life. A budding young writer, I felt a need for my own solitude.

That may be why the movie's pleasures are so enduring for a certain kind of dreamy girl—just like my character Miriam the poet—who not coincidentally resembles Rachel, Mary's goofy best friend, played by June Harding in the movie.

So here I am, back to special pleading for Miriam's dream, wondering about how easy we fiction writers need to make our references for readers. Real life is so mysterious. How can good fiction ever be completely transparent?

The same might be asked about the destiny of a woman who was once a huge star. Her career took off with her Disney films Pollyanna and The Parent Trap—she was at her peak in 1966 with The Trouble with Angels, a non-Disney effort—and then zoomed downward with episodes of the Love Boat and three made-for-TV Parent Trap sequels in the '80s.

For some, this plummet from worldwide fame is a cautionary tale. But perhaps it's a more complicated script for what really happens to girls when they enter adulthood. The fact that Mills was considered for the part of Lolita in Stanley Kubrick's film—an idea that essentially got nixed by Disney when she was under contract—seems especially symbolic.

She recently appeared in Wild at Heart, a British drama about an African wild-animal park on ITV that also starred her sister Juliet. ITV's site describes the Hayley Mills character as the "mother of Sarah and something of a battleaxe."

In a 1997 interview, Mills told then-editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy of Interview magazine:

"Joan Plowright once said that you don't need to go to a psychiatrist if you're an actor, because you can express so many of your problems and your emotions through your work. And you really can. The theater in particular is a great discipline. You can't stop in the middle of a play and burst into tears because the person you love has walked out on you and your life is collapsing around you, or because you've had bad notices. You have to get on with it. You have to draw from your deep inner resources, those strengths that keep us all alive."

Hayley the pretty tomboy remains indelible, just as my own version of that tomboy survives in me. I first watched The Trouble with Angels on "Dialing for Dollars," a Bay Area TV station's old afternoon movie show. Decades later, I watched it on a big screen at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during an Ida Lupino retrospective.

I now own the DVD. I'll always call the movie's vision of girlhood scathingly brilliant. And by the way: We don't grow up to be battleaxes.