The brutal, honest truth

What actors and writers have in common & craft observations from Lidia Yuknavitch

Do you love cheesy movies? Sappy pop songs? Me neither. To me, they feel insincere. Dishonest.

Readers are smart. They can smell B.S. like a hound. When I’m watching a movie or show that lacks the tiniest bit of credibility, I’m out---unless it’s Barbie.

Hemingway once said, “Write the truest sentence that you know.” David Sedaris echoed that, saying, “Connecting to a reader hinges on your ability to be honest.”

Writers must be honest. Since I started writing earnestly, I've metaphorically posted TELL THE TRUTH on the part of my brain that forms language. As a result, I can never speak a lie or half-truth. You can imagine how well that's going with my familial relationships.

(Actual photo of me and my husband after deciding I was only going to tell the truth)

My tendency to “tell only the brutal truth,” as my daughter puts it, means that sometimes I’m a downright shitty parent. And wife. I’ve had to apologize to my students for saying things I shouldn't, like that one time I told them the Economist published a story about how libs had higher IQs. (Yes, I said that to my high school students in conservative Orange County during the Bush-Kerry election.)

Two days ago, my husband asked me what my “financial plan” was. I should have said, Don’t worry, honey, I’ll return to full-time teaching when the kids are out of school.

But no. Like Hemingway suggested, I spoke “the truest sentence that [I] know.” I said, “I don’t have a plan. I want to be a writer, and writers don’t make any money.”

And then my nine-year-old daughter told me I should "white lie" more. True story.

The thing is, I feel like every time I hear/speak/feel an untruth, a book angel fairy loses her wings. It’s the same thing with actors. Actors are some of the realest people I’ve ever met. Why? Because actors perform on stage, not in real life.

Actually, scratch that. Actors don’t act. They feel. If they’re any good, they feel that shit like it was the real, honest, messy truth. Before I became a writer, I was an actor. Once, I played Jim Croce’s wife. In the play, I lost a baby and a husband. I did not act sad. I cried real tears. It was horrible. It sucked. I digress.

Actors should not pretend and writers should not lie. (Even fiction writers, even the storyline for Avatar, must sound plausible.) This is why writers can make for bad spouses, parents, and babysitters, and probably shouldn’t be allowed around children. Similarly, performers are super non-performative IRL and probably shouldn’t be politicians. Unless they’re comedians, in which case, they’re geniuses and probably should be.

And this is what brings me to today's writing craft lesson.

How to be a better writer, as observed by reading Lidia Yuknavitch: 

Yesterday I stumbled upon Lidia Yukanovich’s Chronology of Water. This memoir is one of the most brutal and honest and brutally honest pieces of literature I’ve ever had the fortune to keep me up at night. I got the digital download through my local library, then immediately bought a hard copy because I needed to scribble notes in the margins and underline the sentences cobbled together with witchcraft.

Chronology of Water is HONEST. Yuknavitch writes like the words just sprang out of her head after taking a couple of shots of whiskey and a hit of MDMA. She’ll write something, and then she’ll say, “Actually, no, that’s not true, it was this way,” and then she’ll say, “Wait. No. That’s not true, it was actually this way.”  The way she doubts herself, lacks any self-censorship, and writes as if she never altered a single word from its original form, is how I knew I could trust her. (She’s also hysterical and a genius.)

I wonder if Lidia Yuknavitch has learned how to tell a white lie to her son. I wonder if she’s learned to bear less of the “brutal truth” to her husband.

And that’s all for my first ever Substack post! Thanks for reading!