This blog was born to provide a platform for ideas I may pursue in real essays, but maybe not. I constructed it to 1) give myself a pretend (sometimes real: thank you, commenters) audience, 2) write more frequently, 3) write around my book, instead of inside it, which is still a dark and scary place. (Incidental aside: Lala, my main character and a real person, is in the hospital thus she says I must go to New Orleans immediately to save her lest she die. The first time spoke this sentence I was seven years old.)
Also because of this new platform I’ve learned to hyperlink things and use pictures with text, so I am really becoming a smarter person as a result.
Hopefully this blog will be interesting even if the reader is not a #1 Brooke fan, because, of course, personal essays are not just about the writer. This is a difficult concept for people to grasp. Take, for example, the previous blog in which I wrote about my dad crashing his car into a neighbor’s living room. That was true. What wasn’t true was the line I gave him to say after he crashed: “I zagged when I should’ve zigged!” I can’t know my dad said this as I wasn’t there: I wasn’t yet born. But my dad has slurred stuff like this before in precarious situations. I know him, and you don’t, but I want you to. Thus I give him things to say that reveal parts of him. And I don’t just want you, the reader, to know my dad, but maybe something bigger about loving people who are so strange and wonderful and flawed, and about the fear of becoming a person such as that. Or not becoming that person. Who am I if not my father’s daughter? We all ask ourselves these questions in one form or another in life. These ideas are implicit in any personal writing.
Non non-fictioners might balk at this stuff. They might Joe Wilson me: “You lie!” I don’t think I do. I’m not inventing people or situations—just teeny parts of them. I’d argue this makes them more real. If I had my dad read the line I gave him—“I zagged when I should’ve zigged!”—he’d likely say, “Man, I remember that like it was yesterday. I was funny then.” Glug, glug. He’ll know he said it, because he feels it’s true. That’s what’s most important, I think, about writing non-fiction: writing what you feel is true.
A friend recently mentioned it must be difficult to straddle the line of revelation and discretion—I mean, I’m writing about my life, sometimes about the gritty little parts of it, and posting it on the internet for the world to see. Isn’t that, oh I don’t know, like Lindsay Lohan climbing out of a car with no underwear on? I say no, mainly because I always try to imagine the person I’m writing about reading what I’ve written. I try to say nothing that, if they were being honest with themselves, they wouldn’t admit to being real. This is a form of loyalty to the craft and to the people I love. Ultimately I’m writing to discover something about them, about us. Of course I could lie about my part in all this, make Brooke always witty and charming and not stumbling over words and ideas and not eating another bag of cookies when I shouldn’t be. But then I’d have to Joe Wilson myself.
Oh! I forgot another reason I started this blog: I secretly hope I’m discovered just like the prize winner of Defiance, Ohio. Some Huff Po editor will stumble across Buggy Face and say, hey, we should pay this person for her thoughts! I suppose the University of Alabama already technically does that, but in the classroom I’m forced to speak ideas aloud. Unfortunately sometimes that means we wind up talking about poop and then I say something or other that makes the class think I’m communist. Maybe in two months they’ll think it’s funny to draw a swastika or turd on my evaluations. I’d really rather write.
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