I’m okay with what I held back from the essay, but clearly this initial resistance returned, with a vengeance, during the interview, as Terry Gross seemed far more interested in discussing my emotional journey than, say, Todd Akin, or the disastrous state of maternity coverage for individual health insurance holders, and I was not prepared. In retrospect I wonder if I was doing myself a disservice by not going farther down that road in the first place. I remember in August, when I was writing the piece, you kept pushing me to go deeper, to reveal more about my “emotional journey.” And I didn’t want to, for a variety of reasons. Martha Bayne: Hey, Zoe! I guess I should start by saying thank you, for your help getting “Knocked Over” published, and for all your editorial suggestions along the way. I realized, after the Fresh Air fail, that I was far more articulate when sorting through all this stuff with Zoe than on my own-or with Terry Gross. (I turned to her for advice when I was pregnant, too.) Author of the great novel Currency, Zoe is now working on a memoir about childhood sexual abuse and has a lot more experience than me at turning complicated personal experience into something fit for public consumption. When I was writing “Knocked Over,” I turned for advice to my good friend Zoe Zolbrod. Why can personal writing be so gratifying, and yet also so terribly scary-or destructive? What’s the peculiar challenge for women in writing about painful/shameful subjects such as sex and power? How does the expectation that a writer should be brand-building, across platforms, 24/7, affect the separation of a work of art from its marketing? How much information is too much information? Can it ever be more powerful-or at least self-protective-to hold something back? That was months ago, but it got me thinking about the challenges of personal writing, something I’ve, for the most part, shied away from as a writer but that I’m lately finding resonant as a reader.
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I did not sleep all night and when, the next day, the producer e-mailed to say that, yeah, that didn’t go so well and we’re not going to be able to use it, I felt nothing but a pure wash of relief. After the fact I likened it to a really awkward, inappropriately intimate job interview. I realized, around minute five, that there was a vast chasm between writing about something so very personal and talking about it with someone who I did not know and was, no matter how gentle, totally intimidating. I was nervous, inarticulate, and defensive. I went down to WBEZ (Chicago’s public radio station) and sat in a studio with a local producer and a set of headphones and talked for just under an hour with Terry Gross, in her studio in Philadelphia, about what it was like to accidentally get pregnant, to freak out, to try and figure out what to do, and then to have a miscarriage. So, despite some reservations, I said yes. Fresh Air, with a daily audience of 4.5 million public radio listeners, is the platinum ring of publicity-the platform to end all platforms, at least in the NPR-friendly corner of the culture. Now, when you’re a writer-or any sort of creative artist-and you are struggling to find your audience, to be seen and heard through the static, to make even some bitty mark on the world, you do not say no when Terry Gross comes calling. And I was invited to be a guest on Fresh Air. I was asked to contribute the piece to an anthology of writing on women’s rights. I got lovely notes from writers I admired. Women (and some excellent men) wrote to me publicly and privately to say thank you, and to share their own hard experiences with reproductive choice. I was stunned, and overwhelmed by the feedback I received. The essay struck a nerve with readers, and for a few days in early September, it seemed to go viral, taking over my friends’ Facebook feeds and eventually winding up on MetaFilter.
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But in an election season that saw women’s bodies-and the babies that can come from them-recklessly smashed around as part of some misogynistic game of political handball, it felt urgent.Īpparently I was not alone.
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I’m not a personal essayist by temperament or track record, and writing something so intimate and raw was unusual. Last summer I wrote and The Rumpus subsequently published a piece called “ Knocked Over: On Biology, Magical Thinking, and Choice,” an essay on my then-recent experience of first finding myself accidentally pregnant and then miscarrying at seven weeks.