Honouring the Unknowable Self // Julie Christine Johnson

Julie Christine Johnson writes about privacy, power, and more as part of Lauren Davis’ guest month, “Writing About the Living.”

In 2015 I pitched a guest post to a popular online journal which features the sort of soul-baring, heart-flaying emotional narratives that fueled the personal essay boom—what Slate’s Laura Bennett referred to as the First-Person Industrial Complex. In the mid-late ’00s, as we became more comfortable exposing our private selves in personal blogs and on our social media news feeds, self-confessional writing proliferated. Heartbreaking loss, episodes of abuse, or moments of deep regret publicly aired in online publications such as Jezebel, xoJane, and Salon brought about a culture of catharsis. These memoirs-in-miniature—deemed the “literary equivalent of the selfie” by author Richard Flanagan—satisfied a deep longing to connect. My pitched post, a 1500-word exploration of my difficult relationship with my mother, her descent into madness, and our eventual estrangement, was accepted, and the journal’s editor and I began a series of email exchanges regarding copy edits and the inevitable tightening up of the narrative. Then I freaked. 

Dear A-It breaks my heart to write this, but I need to pull “Searching for Laurel.” I realized, while editing, that there is a good chance my mother would come across the piece and retaliate in some way—legally, emotionally, perhaps physically. I am so sorry. I wrote this piece during a poetry residency in Ireland this past summer, feeling so safe and removed from my life, lost in the experimentation of form and voice. But now, in the light of everyday life, I must face the hurt these words could exact and how trapped that makes me feel. I think, for now at any rate, I need to keep this close and release the piece in the future, when it's safe to do so.My enormous apologies for the inconvenience. I am so grateful for the beauty and truth <your journal> provides. Warmest regards, Julie

I launched a blog in 2010, a year or so before I began writing and publishing fiction. I was 40 and had experienced my first miscarriage the year before. As I wandered through my grief, wondering what possible use the Universe had for me, I pulled out my long-held but never acted on dream of writing. I reasoned that a blog would force me to be accountable to an audience, and as my readership grew beyond friends and family into dozens, then hundreds of strangers, I found release in sharing my personal stories. Positive feedback from readers gave me courage to try writing classes, and soon I was writing and submitting short fiction. The first published piece was a story about a woman facing the grief of miscarriage. Through the medium of personal essay, I have shared deeply personal grief, choosing to make public that which has altered my world as an adult. But with the exception of revealing the shared pain with my ex-husband of child loss, my words have rarely extended to other identifiable people in my real life. Yet my fiction is no less intimate. Perhaps, because I am not confined by porous walls of memory and truth, I am freer to explore the implications of my choices and of those whose lives have touched mine. Fiction offers me another door, a Janus Gate from the stark past to a more nuanced perspective. Friends and loved ones struggling with alcoholism become the foundation of characters in my second novel, The Crows of Beara. A forthcoming short story tells of the time two friends asked my husband to be their sperm donor and then tossed us out of their home when the answer was no, a story which took years to find a publishing home—the most common reason for rejection being, “this just isn’t believable.” My task was to fictionalize the absurdity of truth to make it universal and relatable, to create a satisfying and illuminating story. The very act of publishing is to relinquish privacy. Readers who know you will look for clues in your stories that you are writing about yourself or your intimates. Strangers will praise or tear apart your work with little regard for the human behind the typeface. You can eschew social media and interviews, but your work will be regarded as a representation of your person, regardless of genre. And indeed, writing is the way that I give voice to my world. It is as Jerome Bruner states in his 1986 book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds:

Insofar as we account for our own actions and for the human events that occur around us principally in terms of narrative, story, drama, it is conceivable that our sensitivity to narrative provides the major link between our own sense of self and our sense of others in the social world around us. The common coin may be provided by the forms of narrative that the culture offers us. Again, life could be said to imitate art.

Nearly ten years ago, the same year I started my blog, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, declared that privacy is no longer a social norm. But the new normal does not excuse us, the writers, from honouring the private lives and unknowable selves of our real-life characters. "Modern Love” column editor Daniel Jones reminds us that as writers, we are in positions of great power. “You can make people look good or bad,” he writes, in an occasional series about submitting to the ne plus ultra of personal essay columns. “And if the reader senses you’re abusing this power, they’ll think the person who looks worst is you.” I pulled my piece out of fear of my mother’s retaliation, yet it is still my story to tell. As I read the essay now, untouched after three years, I also recognize the power my words have to wound and crush. Until I find a way to share these deeply personal experiences that transcends misery and offers grace, this story will remain on my hard drive and in my heart.

Julie Christine Johnson is the award-winning author of the novels In Another Life (Sourcebooks, 2016) and The Crows of Beara (Ashland Creek Press, 2017). Her short stories and essays have appeared in several journals, including Emerge Literary Journal; Mud Season Review; Cirque: A Literary Journal of the North Pacific Rim; Cobalt; and River Poets Journal;  in the print anthologies Stories for Sendai; Up, Do: Flash Fiction by Women Writers; and Three Minus One: Stories of Love and Loss; and have been featured on the flash fiction podcast No Extra Words. Johnson leads writing workshops and seminars and offers story/developmental editing and writer coaching services. A hiker, yogini, and wine geek, Johnson makes her home on the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington.