Hypocritical Self-Awareness

Random Thoughts on Life, Love, Editing, Objectivity, Memory

If you’re looking for a new novel to read, look no further than The Crew, my debut literary novel. Available on Amazon now: Paperback, Hardcover, Audible (audio-listen), eBook. You can even pay a small fee to read pages on KDP online.

CLICK HERE TO BUY.

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Here’s the brief synopsis of the book:

All freshman year Jack Donnigan wanted to ditch the nerds and become cool. When Jack—a protected 16-year-old sophomore at St. Andy’s Prep in Southern California in 2000—gets accepted into The Crew, a renegade punk clique on campus led by the nefarious and intelligent Cannonball (“Cannon”), he is thrilled. But he soon challenges Cannon’s leadership by starting a secret relationship with Sarah—a punk-feminist who Cannonball mysteriously says is off-limits—trying hard drugs, and jumping on stage at punk shows.

            Jack’s relationship with Mom becomes strained. He stays out late and rebels for the first time. The faculty at St. Andy’s—wanting to dismantle the cult hero status of The Crew—organize a coup. They plan to nail the perceived leader: Jack Donnigan, who’s been conned by Cannonball. Jack’s mentor is his unconventional English teacher, Mr. Bryce, who teaches Jack a more nuanced world view. When the faculty nail Jack, Mr. Bryce does his best to save the floundering student.

But when Jack is kicked out of his folks’ home, expelled from school, and Cannonball steals Sarah by spreading a web of lies: Who will save Jack from himself?

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I realized my own hypocrisy yesterday in a way I haven’t in a long time, or maybe ever. It had to do with relationships and my part in them, specifically, in this case, my wife and I. Self-awareness is a funny, distorted phenomenon, isn’t it? Even those of us—maybe especially those of us—who see ourselves (accurately or not) as being highly self-aware, as I myself do, eventually come to grips with the sordid reality that our own sense of self is…not quite reliable.

Vestigial: That is a word I’d use here. Where once self-awareness was perhaps wide, all-encompassing, it has become, now, in “older age” (41) somewhat more myopic and deranged. Or maybe that’s not quite fair and in truth my self-awareness has expanded, yet also become harder to fully and accurately grasp, like a fish knowing he’s in water and grasping the separation between self and water.

Sometimes we can’t get fully at the reality that we’re aware and yet not aware, especially when it comes to oneself.

Why do all good writers have an editor? And not just an editor but multiple kinds of editors? There’s big-picture developmental story editing, also known as substantive editing. Then when you move further on—once the story, foundation, structure is solid—you get to lined editing, looking at the sentence level, grammar, syntax, diction. Then we shift into copy-editing, at even more specificity. And finally there’s proofreading. All different types of editing performed at different periods in a manuscript’s life. *(I am myself a developmental editor looking at structure, plot, characters, dialogue, logic, salability, etc. Click here for more info on that.)

Anyway the whole purpose of hiring a [hopefully stellar] freelance book editor—or having an editor with a publishing house—is that they are not emotionally invested in your story. In other words, they can more or less see your story objectively, whereas you, 100% emotionally invested in the story, clearly cannot. Any author knows—as I do myself—that your book is your spiritual baby. You birth your book out into the world. It explodes out of your corporeal cavity, metaphysically speaking. Writing a novel is the closest a man will ever get to birthing a child.

Therefore, any novelist—or memoirist or general nonfiction author, etc—male or female, Black, white, brown or other—cannot, by definition, see their own work objectively. Why is this important? Because in order to create the strongest possible piece of Art, you must be able to correct obvious mistakes, either with the overall story, the sentences, the grammar, the syntax, the diction, the spelling, etc. And locating these issues, being honest with yourself about them, and doing the gritty, unfun work of editing, revising, rewriting—and writing is nothing if not rewriting, revising and editing, seemingly forever—is most of what writing a book is truly about.

The first draft is always a blast, at least for me, because it’s no-holds-bar, run-as-fast-as-you-can, devil-may-care work. If “work” is even the precise word. I find first drafts in general a whole hell of a lot of fun. I enjoy the anarchy of a first draft, the not knowing exactly where I’m going (Stephen King said, in his memoir of the craft, On Writing, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”), and the shocking, unbeknownst-even-to-me discovery of the characters, the full plot, the tension, the suspense, the denouement, etc. This, for me, is what makes writing fun, especially long form. The question, What the hell is this?, is always in the back of my mind.

But then you create the work and it’s “done” in its initial early draft stage. Then what? Put the thing aside for 6 months, and then relook at it. You’ll easily find flaws, plot-holes, characters that don’t need to be there, nonsensical dialogue, etc. But eventually, after many times going through this cycle of edit, revise, rewrite, set aside, go back in…you start to lose sensitivity; you become desensitized, habituated, unobjective. (Not that you were ever fully objective with your own work.)

It begins to feel a little like the slippery experience of working with memory. We like to tell ourselves that our memories are rock-solid: No, I’m telling you, A happened to me, and then B, when I was four years old. Exactly like this. Truth is you’re often likely quite wrong; it didn’t happen that way. Ask your family members or a friend who was there. Ask nine witnesses to a car crash what happened and you’ll get nine different—often contradictory—witness accounts.

Because the thing is: We’re all—regardless of race, gender, ethnicity—biased about ourselves, our own [unconscious] drives, our memories, our creative work, our behavior, our strengths and weaknesses.

It is the same with self-awareness, which is why I say that I have come to realize some of my denial and blind-spots. And this is me, someone who is generally very self-aware. Imagine all the people out there—most of us—who aren’t self-aware. Yeah. No wonder the world is so fucked-up.

Anyway, back to my lack of self-knowledge. My epistemological blind-spots. My wife, Britney. Here’s the thing: We had a really solid conversation while hiking in Lompoc the other day. We remained calm. (Look Mom, no hands.) We’d been fighting previously. Calm, rational, not hyper-defensive, we were able to finally hear one another.

We talked about how we’re both only-children. (I have a much older half sister and she has two much younger half siblings but we didn’t “grow up” with them.) We talked about how we’re both spoiled in our own ways, and were spoiled as kids. (Much more so on my end, silver spoon growing up in Ojai.) We talked about how we both have this contradictory, self-defeating, snake-eating-its-own-tail problem: We both want our own needs to be fulfilled first…and then we can give of ourselves to the other.

Britney mentioned a few things that I do which consistently frustrate her. One is that, sometimes, when she mentions something she’s already talked about several times before—often reiterating simply to build on it and make a point—and I get impatient and annoyed and say, Yeah yeah yeah, I know I know, you already told me that like fifteen times, it pisses her off, makes her angry, saddens her, and makes her feel disrespected and disregarded.

When she said this I thought: Ah-ha!

In other words, I understood, immediately: She was right. I was wrong. (Lord how long it has taken me to get to the point where I can own my wrongness.) I completely get why that would feel shitty. It makes perfect sense. Everyone wants to be listened to, feel seen and heard. I know I do. I listened, as we trudged back to the car on the wide dirt trail, the gorgeous panorama of Lompoc mountains layered in the distance, like some 19^th century oil painting.

I didn’t argue. I was quiet. I wasn’t even thinking. I was just accepting her words.

We have another problem—both of us—where we compete. It’s dumb. It’s childish. It’s silly. And it’s oh-so human. This has been a pattern in my relationships forever. I remember going to Manhattan with my ex in 2016 and all we did was compete, foolishly. She’d lived there once for six months; I’d been going there often since 2006. Ergo, Bay Area kids, we fought, stupidly, about who knew the train system more accurately, who knew how to get to the Village, who knew where the good bookstores were, who knew how to say “Houston Street” properly, who knew what the LIRR train stood for, etc.

Ridiculous.

But that’s how I am. I am not easy. Nor is Britney. We’re both intense, sensitive, self-aware, selfish and yet giving, loving and yet cold, rigid and yet fluid. We both hold multitudes and binaries galore. We’re this and we’re that, all at once. We both used to cycle through relationships like grass growing after heavy rain. We both have similar wounding in many ways. Father wounds, mother wounds; a deep need for attention. I’m the Artist; she’s the one steeped in Reality. I provide the intellect and rich imagination; she keeps our lives connected to The Real World. We both crave what the other has, but are both also assaulted by side effects of the other. We’re a strange combination. But the love is deep; the love is unshakeable; the love is true as a perfect white line stretching into eternity.

The things I think I know about myself are not exactly “false” so much as distorted, sometimes beyond recognition. Memories of my childhood have been reused, recycled and redone thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times over the decades. A memory of a memory of a memory. Family trauma is interesting but it’s also in many ways boring. Savage as it can sometimes be, it’s also just a lazy part of being human.

I write because I have to. Britney works a 9-5 because she has to. We’re married because we have to be, not because of realism or logistics, but because we do, in the end, understand each other, and because our love is deep as can be, deep as the Grand Canyon, and because she knows what she needs and I know what I need and we found each other and we’re chained to one another now, metaphysically, spiritually. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.