The Queer Paradox of Autobiography
At some point in my graduate studies of autobiography, I realized that very few of my fellow scholars practiced what they theorized. It is rare to find someone who calls themselves a memoirist (as I do) at life writing conferences, and I’ve often wondered if that’s because we know too much about how the proverbial sausage is made.
Instead, we stand on the outside looking in, trying to make meaning of lives already lived and stories already told. I have long maintained that the power of autobiography comes from the collapse between a lived experience and a story but readers, sausage-makers few among them, can’t tell the difference.
Rather, readers don’t want to know the difference between what actually happened in my life and the story I tell about it. I have a few different theories about why this is, but at the end of the day, I hold fast to the idea that — much to literary critic Nancy K. Miller’s chagrin — we read autobiography as a how-to guide for living. And readers do that because we’re desperate for someone to tell us that everything is going to be okay.
Stories are beautiful instruments for reassuring us that everything is going to be okay. Here, I’m reminded of the very first lesson I learned in my very first dramatic literature class — catharsis is everything. The point of a story, especially a tragedy, is for the audiece to experience the emotional release that happens when you “arouse and purge pity and fear.”
I love the way my professor constructed this phrase, so I repeat it when explaining the origins of drama to my own students. To arouse AND purge pity AND fear. It’s not enough to just stir up emotions — you have to give people a chance to process them. And it’s both your own fear and your sympathy for the misfortune of others that brings those emotions to the surface in the first place. Autobiography gives humans a way to process the pain of living, removing the barrier between what happened to you and what might happen to me.
I write autobiography because I am in love with humanity and the raw power of catharsis. I’m not embarrassed by our collective desire to witness other people’s stories as a way to make meaning out of our own lives. The vast majority of our speech is metaphor for a reason — we can use what we know to understand the unknown.
For many years, my particular area of autobiographical interest has been stories about bodies. I’ve written about weight loss stories, about how people socialized as women learn how to compare body size from women’s magazines, and how fitness is marketed based on stories about exercise as violence. I even wrote about how metanarratives, or stories within stories, teach us how to feel about our bodies and what it means to belong to humanity.
This writing comes easily to me because I get to tell stories about my own body. No one can tell me how to feel about it or how to make sense of my own experiences. Even when I write about motherhood, I can maintain the illusion of separation between my son’s experience and my own.
But just like the day that I found out that most sausage casings are made from animal intestines, I can’t separate what I know about how autobiography is made from the meaty goodness inside. I might still read it, but always with a bit of hesitation.
We want our stories to be easily digestible, so they tend to fall into recognizable categories like “Happily Ever After” and “The Hero’s Journey.” Disney movies and superhero blockbusters are places where these patterns stick out the most, but every TV show you watch or book you read or video game you play carries some element of storytelling:
(Character + Obstacle) → Conflict
(Character — Status Quo) → Resolution
This is all well and good in a story like The Hobbit where our Character is presented with an Obstacle and goes out into the world to vanquish Conflict foes and learn a little something about home and friendship and second breakfasts along the way to Resolution. There’s no ethical dilemma vanquishing the foes because they are very clearly evil and have no redeeming qualities of their own. Easy peasy.
But the idea that memorists write about themselves is a weighty paradox of autobiography, a word derived from its Greek origins as “self life writing.” In some kinds of stories, like weight loss success stories, the author is both the hero and the villain of their own life.
“I was fat and unhappy. Then I lost weight. Now I’m beautiful and loved!”
When I realized that this story didn’t fit my own experience with my body, I started to write new ones. I made diet culture the villain. It’s easy to take the role of a hero fighting against the injustice of a story culture that makes you the underdog. How compelling and dramatic! And the best part for me is that anyone else in my story becomes an NPC, a non-player character that I interact with but someone who has no motivations or needs or stakes in the outcome besides the ones I ascribed to them. Easy peasy.
If hubris is my tragic flaw, I have been felled by the idea that I can keep telling stories about my life that are only about me. This is the autobiographer’s paradox. The story might be mine, but the experience is not. All of our lives have a dramatis personae.
I know the difference between the reality of an experience and the story an autobiographer tells about it, but I still crave stories to reassure me that everything will be okay. And the stories I consume that leave me feeling empty these days are written by those who take the authorial position of the cringe-worthy identifier “late in life lesbian.” My reasons for detesting this phrase are numerous and worthy of their own essay but for the sake of this autobiographical exercise, I must insist that my objection is entirely about how the scream-inducing complexity of coming out as a queer person over 30 deeply entangled in the trappings of compulsory heterosexuality is boiled down into a “Happily Ever After” story as bland and palatable as a Hallmark Christmas movie.
There are two sacred autobiographical texts in the late-in-life-lesbian circles in which I now chase my tail: Untamed by Glennon Doyle and The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg. These are books that are the first to be recommended to people (especially the AFAB ones and most especially the AFAB ones who have domestic and filial entanglements with cishet men). They are books most often quoted in the Facebook posts seeking advice on coming out.
I understand the appeal. I’ve read both of them. As readers seeking approval for the choices we make in our lives, we can’t handle a lot of complexity. We want to know if Glennon and Molly can live with themselves after breaking their husbands' hearts (they can). We need to know if their children hate them for blowing up their families (they don’t). We require reassurance that if we torture ourselves enough worrying about all these things, it will be worth it in the end (it will).
I’m left dissatisfied. The guide for life I’m looking for is the permission to reject my own hero’s journey outright. To tell you, clear and true, that renegotiating my relationship to marriage and family as a queer woman in my 30s has been an absolute nightmare. To tell you, in no uncertain terms, that some days I feel like the brightest shining light of unlimited potential and some days I am rendered speechless by my complete ineptitude at being a human. To tell you, once and for all, that I don’t actually know if everything will be okay.
But to do that, I’d have to decide that there are neither heroes nor villains in this story. There is no clear three-act structure with a central conflict and an expertly timed 11 o’clock number. That would make my story a lot more difficult to understand, dear reader, because it would look an awful lot like real life.
Writing autobiography is my therapy and, in that way, maybe Nancy K. Miller is correct in her assessment of its self-indulgence. But I have to trust that someone out there is looking for a story like mine to bolster their decision to cohabitate or get a preview of what happens when you tell your 7-year old that his parents probably won’t celebrate any more wedding anniversaries or find out what to do when you go to a lesbian speed dating event on a lark during a pandemic and meet your first girlfriend, who lives in Canada. And wouldn’t it be refreshing to know that blowing up your life could mean that nothing’s broken even if all the pieces will never come back to the way they were before? That’s the queer love story I want to read.
So, if somebody has to live through all that and tell the tale, it might as well be me.
Kate Browne is a queer writer and musician.