Waterboarding and Writing

I spent part of this weekend working on my novel, Happy. It's based on my experiences in Porn Valley. Writing this novel has been a most unusual experience. Previously, I would say that I was at the helm of everything I'd ever written. This time, it feels like my main character is a tiny man driving a little car, and I am following. As a control freak, I wouldn't have liked the sound of that going into it had I known what was coming. But when it works for a writer, you don't ask too many questions. You just shut up and go along for the ride.

Yesterday, I came across a great review, "Speaking the Unspeakable," of Kathryn Harrison's new nonfiction book, While They Slept, written by Robert Pinsky for the New York Times Book Review. Harrison is best known for The Kiss, a memoir in which she recounted her adult incestuous relationship with her father. In While They Slept, Harrison focuses on the true story of Jody Gilley. When Gilley was 16, her 18-year-old brother Billy murdered their parents and 11-year-old sister.

Harrison writes about writing the unwritable: "People who cross the threshold between the known world and that place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey their experience. Some of us don’t talk about murders or intergenerational sex within our families. We find words inadequate, or we lose them entirely. Those of us who insist on speaking what’s often called unspeakable discover there’s no tone reserved for unnatural disasters, and so we don’t use any. We’re flat-affect; we report just the facts; this alienates our audience."

Writing about porn--or, really, sex, for that matter--is near impossible. Whatever one says in the act is more often than not secondary to the act itself, and if we write of sex, what can we say of it? The danger is falling into the gap between words and that which they seek to represent, never to return. Pinsky, whose many works include a translation of the The Inferno, ends with the hope writing will save us: "the daylight gaze of narrative itself as a form of empathy." Sometimes writing is like walking an imaginary tightrope between two invisible skyscrapers. It's hard to know if you're flying or falling, saying something or speaking in tongues, drowning or surfacing.